Mike, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-modern
(Don't take this badly this is not a personal attack, only observation.) I see a lot of this in the middle classes. It's a kind of trendy fashionable complacency that comes of being a cultural elite and not having to strive or work fro a living. Post-modernism is what you'll hear the chattering Islington classes around a dinner table party going on about, that feeling that it has all been done before or anything of value is done by hugely funded government co-operations. It's all anti-individual, anti-heroic, small-minded and petty that which comes of being educated beyond one's ability. Needless to say these people want the cushy, well-paid administrative type jobs but get in the way of progress. If you want to see post-modernism take a trip down an art-house cinema, or look at modern architecture or music. I don't subscribe to philosophies that say give up and that our lot in life is to suffer in ignorance. Yes there is a limit to the amount of information a brain can comprehend but like statistical mechanics we can with our limited powers find a rationale. I get annoyed when I see the elite in the society giving up. This can only set a bad example for the young or the less intelligent. Ultimately the intellectual police force of the universities must police itself. Regards, Remi. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mike Carrell Sent: 21 December 2005 16:28 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: NKS 2006 Wolfram Science Conference ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: RE: NKS 2006 Wolfram Science Conference > The bottom line is that the overwhelming complexity of the manifest > universe > > is arguably the result of the operation of something as simple as cellular > automata, and that we have no hope of discovering the nature of that seed. > > Mike Carrell > > How's that? Prove it. Do we all give up and go home? Sounds like > post-modern > science. ------------------ As I said, there is no substitiute for tackling Wolfram's book. There just isn't. The argument is advanced by the hundreds of illustarions of the operation of the cellular automata. This does not fit into any existing tidy boxes except deterministic chaos theory, which is not tidy. As for not being able to discover the seed, consider the Mandelbrot Set. The operation of the generating equation produces a mathematical "object" of extreme complexity. However, examining the object will not disclose the equation which generated it. The Mandelbrot Set and Wolfram's cellular automata have the common feature that the generating operations are non-linear and recursive. A seminal book on the consequences of this is "Godel Escher Bach". A remarkable feature of Wolfram's thesis is that the product of the the cellular automata can be some order as found in our scientific exploration of natural phenomena. I'm not sure what the term "post modern" means, especially when applied to science. Certainly Wolfram's work is a new bemchmark among many other current studies of deterministic chaos and cellular automata. Mike Carrell
