[MD] Speed of Lighting, Roar of thunder...

[Krimel]

> [Krimel]
> reality is fundamentally chaotic.

Craig:
Or perhaps we just don't understand it well enough yet.

[Krimel]
Actually no, that was the position people like Laplace took. In the wake of
Newton such a dream seemed possible. But not so any more. Determinism seems
to be doing fine but not so prediction. Pirsig points to this but as is too
often the case doesn't see what he is pointing at.

"Biological evolution can be seen as a process by which weak Dynamic forces
at a subatomic level discover stratagems for overcoming huge static
inorganic forces at a superatomic level. They do this by selecting
superatomic mechanisms in which a number of options are so evenly balanced
that a weak Dynamic force can tip the balance one way or another"

If you take out the dreadful anthropomorphisms that plague this chapter you
can see that he almost gets it. This isn't just the case in biology either.
It is everywhere, spread across the entire universe. Those subatomic dynamic
effects are, at their root, only probabilistic. If at the beginning of a
time a single particle in a distance unformed galaxy had not been there and
then, the effect of its displacement might ripple and magnify across time
and space and the whole dynamic of life on earth would be different. That is
the nature of the butterfly effect. Small differences amply and have huge
effects down the road.

Poincare's three body problem is another example. You can determine the
position of either of a pair of orbiting objects like the moon orbiting the
earth with a high degree of precision but add a third body to the system and
prediction breaks down. You can see this effect in all manner of pop art
work at Spencer's gifts. Even though those swinging whirling doodads are
deterministic systems it is impossible to predict their exact position at
any given moment.

It isn't a matter of not understanding; it is a matter of incomplete
information and impossibility of acquiring complete information.