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Re: Life imitating art imitating life » Tom Grimes

Posted by DSCH on March 21, 2004, at 23:10:09

In reply to Re: Life imitating art imitating life, posted by Tom Grimes on March 21, 2004, at 21:24:21

> Granted. Hence, information sickness. Like chaos theory. A butterfly flaps its wings in Buenos Aires, there's a tsunami three days later in Tokyo.

Not really. That's an exaggeration.

Classical "chaos" breaks down into a simple concept: sensitivity to initial conditions.

If you can specifiy the phase space of a system at a time, t=0, with infinite precision, then you can both predict *and* retrodict the trajectory the system takes through phase space indefinately, and also with infinite precision.

Naturally, nobody - even with a classical system - is able to play the role of Laplace's daemon and accomplish this in practice. When nonlinear behavior is present, this means eventually the prediction and retrodiction from t=0 into the future and the past will diverge from behavior of the system as it gets/got measured.

However, the cool and interesting thing is that this doesn't mean the *prediction* for the system will always go berserk all over phase space, like the name "chaos" would suggest to the layman. Rather it can often be confined to a geometric figure of limited extension. This is called the attractor.

The system does what is going to do. Our predictions can be way off the mark as far as what the state is at a given time, but we can capture an overall picture of system's behavioral bounds through the mapping of the attractor.

Let's leave Werner Heisenberg out of this for the moment. ;-)

> Our psychological complexity may be our undoing. And, at the speculative/philosophical level, the loss of the Cartesian and Englightenment sense of self -- that it's a single, coherent, personalized structure -- may simply be the beginning of our cultural undoing. Maybe we're the pioneers!

Weren't the exisentialists already there in the 19th century? And Hume and Kant certainly demolished notions of having everything come together all hunky-dory via just a priori reasoning.

> Philosophy, of course, is no consolation on the down days of the BP cycle.

Yes.

> But doesn't vitalism -- the ability of any living thing to "act on its own behalf" mean that a living thing can act destructively, to the point of destroying itself.

That's not vitalism. That's the idea of living systems as autonomous agents. Perhaps someone would have a problem over whether that notion is really compatible with pure materialism or not. I won't go there now.

This idea of autonomous agents crops up in simulations of market behavior and other such things. The thing about these agents is that they always go for min-max behaviors on the assumption of rationality, minimize (risk, pain, etc.), maximize (profit, pleasure, etc.).

Needless to say this doesn't quite square with the human world yet.

>Why does the mind attack the mind? Of course, an answer may be that the mind is made up of discrete, competitive parts, one attacking the other w/o any sense of unity.

If the source codes (parental DNA) are bug-free (no predispositions to psychiatric disorders) and come through the duplication and publication process (sexual procreation) alright, and the system running the new code isn't subjected to treatment not covered by the warranty (illness, injury, extreme stress) we can expect it to not crash (engage in extreme self-damaging behavior).

>Our minds may be subject to Darwin's law just as everything around it is.

That's the whole idea behind evolutionary psychology (what Wilson would rather call sociobiology). A pretty self-evident one if you ask me, but it's politically radioactive.

> As for this exchange:
>
> > So, the book came out of my thinking about the self. Am I more me before the pill, or after the pill? More me without it, or with it?
>
> You are you. Just different than before. ;-)
>
> This could be rephrased: you are no longer you.

Yeah, you got me there. But I don't see this as necessitating an identity crisis.

You can never step into the same river twice as they say. Does this then mean the concept of a river is thrown into crisis?

> Difference itself implies a prior state or stability.

Yes, the systems view again. A new attractor? Some EEG work shown in later editions of Sacks' "Awakenings" raises this possibility.

> Notice that our political/military language is about stability. We want to stabilize a region. Same with BP. We want stability.

Heh.

> We don't treat the degree of cycling, say, just the nature of it. A little or a lot. Doesn't matter. Let's stabilize it. Which, of course, is another attempt at coherence, unity.

Static systems are dead systems. So are random systems. Chaos is the knife edge where interesting things happen.

Look what happens when you become over-vigilant in preventing forest fires. The fuel load builds up and eventually a fire breaks out that cannot be maintained and you have a monster fire.

When you put a political situation into a pressure cooker and weld the safety valve shut things will eventually blow up. French revolution. WW1. Collapse of the Soviet Union.

This is another notion like "sensitity to initial conditions", it's called "self-organized criticality". Look up Per Bak on the Edge page for more on that.

Systems that survive for the long haul do so by adapting to changes rather than trying to prevent them.

> But, if I'm different than who I was before, then I'm different. Not a different me. Just different.

You have long-term memory. As long as that keeps functioning you have a certain amount of continuity as a human being, I would think. And there are other qualities too that are quite ineffable (more Sacks case studies I'm thinking of here).

> Right, we're mostly gaps. I don't believe there's a little Cartesian homunculus in our heads, like a driver behind the wheel of a car. More like, our head is the interstate. It's all those zillions of cars, each one a neuron. 90% function OK. 10% crash. Each goes its own way, if and when possible.

I am amazed it is as robust as it is though. It takes quite a lot to knock it off the knife edge altogether.

Anyway, macroeconomic activity does take place through such decentralized systems. Indeed decentralized ones work much, much better!

> I think it's the idea of treating gaps that comes back to the phrase "exact mechanism unknown." If there's no unity, then the chances for predicting how adressing one gap, or one car crash, will effect the overall "system" becomes exponentially more difficult.

Heh. Prediction. But the prediction is not the reality, is it? Anyway, we can get places by knowing how the global patterns can change.

> We all like CNS depressant meds for a simple reason -- they do something very simple, they depress the CNS in a pretty simple way. .75 mg of Xanax and, as Tom Wolfe said, "Life is good."

I'm not sure if I would feel that way about Xanax at all. Me being one of those people who function better on *stimulants*. ;-)

> But it may be that the number of gaps in our psychological make up are breaking up the clarity of our "illusory seamless screen." As the world around us disintegrates -- the Englightenment saw its integration, in cultural/philosophical terms; we see terrorism, chaos theory, qubits of ontological information -- our notion of the human mind may as well.

Certainly, we didn't evolve to be information-age city dwellers, and for many individuals this can lead to misery. On the scale of societies, it is clear that things will keep evolving and we can't predict where it will go exactly. That's the uncertainty that bears worrying about.


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