> [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. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
