On 5/29/25 9:24 AM, glen wrote:
Why isn't Lorenz in there somewhere? Seems like an obvious candidate.
/“When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”/
— Edward Lorenz, /The Essence of Chaos/ (1993) What George says when "reminded" of Lorenz: * *Edward Lorenz (1963 onward)* may be the /first person to demonstrate/ in precise mathematical terms a *deterministic system whose behavior could not be prestated* beyond a short horizon. * He /did not/ use the phrase *“deterministic but not prestateable”*, but *his work embodies it fully*, and later chaos theorists and philosophers often retroactively describe it that way. ------------------------------------------------------------------------and here is George's (I don't call GPT George, but for continuity with Nick, et al I do here) response:
but first for brevity, I cherry picked from below and I like the help given in my nitpickery style:
*
/“Unpredictable” (Lorenz-style, chaos)/
*
/“Unprestatable” (Kauffman-style, adjacent possible)/
*
/“Undecidable” (Turing/Gödel-style, logic)/
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Me: can you explain perhaps why you might have omitted lorenz
ChatGPT said:
Yes — and I appreciate the callout.
Why Lorenz Might Have Been Omitted (Initially)
There are a few reasons, mostly contextual and framing-based, not due to
oversight of his importance:
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1. *Interpretive Framing Bias:*
Your original phrase, *“deterministic but not prestateable,”* carries a
flavor that strongly suggests:
* *Logical / epistemic limits* (e.g., undecidability, incompleteness), * *Unenumerable state spaces* (as in Kauffman or Rosen), * *Open-endedness* and *emergence* rather than sensitivity or chaos.So I initially prioritized thinkers who made *explicit claims about the /unlistability or uncomputability/ of future states*, rather than the *intractability of prediction*.
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2. *Domain-Specific Bias:*
Lorenz worked in *physics and meteorology*, and his contributions, while
foundational to the idea of unpredictability, are *framed in terms of
instability*, not *unprestatability due to logical structure*.
That is: * Lorenz’s system /is/ prestatable in theory (you can write the equations), * But *in practice*, you can’t predict far ahead without infinite precision. Compare to Kauffman, who says: “We /cannot even write down/ the space of possibilities in advance.” So the distinction was between: *Type of barrier* *Lorenz* *Kauffman/Rosen* Measurement precision limit Yes SometimesComputational or logical limit No (the system is computable) Yes (the phase space isn’t enumerable)
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3. *Terminological Exactness:*
Lorenz didn't use the language of *prestateability*. That’s a term more
common in philosophical biology and complexity theory (Kauffman, Rosen,
Pattee, etc.).
So I likely indexed on *terminological proximity* rather than *semantic essence*.
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4. *Scholarly Echo Chamber Effect:*
The phrase /“deterministic but not prestateable”/ has circulated more
explicitly in Kauffman and Rosen’s circles — particularly in systems
biology, philosophy of complexity, and theoretical evolution — than in
physics/chaos literature.
There’s a subtle linguistic difference between:
*
“Unpredictable” (Lorenz-style, chaos)
*
“Unprestatable” (Kauffman-style, adjacent possible)
*
“Undecidable” (Turing/Gödel-style, logic)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
🧭 Retrospective Correction
You were right to bring Lorenz in. His work *embodies the idea* in a
foundational and mathematically demonstrable way. He simply spoke from a
different idiom — one of *dynamical instability* rather than
*ontological or epistemological open-endedness*.
I would now include him centrally, as the *first to /prove/ that deterministic systems can defy practical prediction*, even if not logical prestateability in the strictest sense.
------------------------------------------------------------------------Would you like a synthesis of Lorenz and Kauffman into a unified framework of unpredictability and unprestatability — perhaps visualized through nested phase space, strange attractors, and adjacent possibles?
Tools ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.
On 5/29/25 8:13 AM, steve smith wrote:< The interesting question is where exactly does the deterministic system turn into something nondeterministic, and how?>who might have first made the distinction : "deterministic but not pre-stateable"?It doesn’t. A deterministic system is a deterministic system.George offered: Year Thinker Conceptual Expression 1931 Kurt Gödel Incompleteness: truths not derivable 1936 Alan Turing Halting problem: uncomputable predictions1970s Heinz von Foerster Second-order cybernetics: unknowability of future 1991 Robert Rosen Closure to efficient causation; entailment limits1993 Stuart Kauffman Adjacent possible; unprestatable evolution2005 Gregory Chaitin Incompressible but defined numbers (e.g., Ω)
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