I find it odd that we're arguing about the value of creating a theory
for emergence. Follow me back just a few years.
<irony>
Lets see: why would we want a theory about Chaos. Its just when
things are messy, right? Poor Lorenz and his weather equations .. if
only he had be better with error calculations he would have certainly
gotten good results. Tisk tisk.
And the poor iterated logistics equation. Why on earth didn't they
try harder, clearly the series would eventually repeat. Sloppy,
sloppy methodology. And so what if it is weird, just forget it and
approximate.
I mean, what the heck does the sill word chaos mean anyway? .. its
just when things go wrong and the silly scientist or engineer is not
doing their calculations correctly, right?
No use in any of this. What good would it be for silly old Lyapunov
to succeed in defining chaos. His exponent certainly doesn't help my
work! And Feigenbaum! A brilliant guy, but moody over bifurcation
and whether or not it has hidden structure. What a waste!
You silly folks trying to formalize chaos and find good techniques for
non-linear dynamics are just wasting my time. It'll never work. Just
stick with the old proven ways and just perturb them a bit or be happy
with the first order approximation.
</irony>
I'm ashamed of you! Surely you are not against developing new
theories, right?
Maybe this makes it clearer:
Divergence is to Chaos as Emergence is to Complexity
.. thus studying emergence may do for Complexity what hard work done
by the Heros of Chaos did for their "silly science". What the heck is
Chaos anyway? Right.
Bad Friam! Bad Friam!
-- Owen
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
