4 ms·

This is an interesting read, and is pretty intuitive stuff - I mean, how can cognition be anything but the froth on the edge of a critical chaotic process? Were

This is an interesting read, and is pretty intuitive stuff - I mean, how can cognition be anything but the froth on the edge of a critical chaotic process? Were it not, we would be simple automata, readily replicable with deterministic code. We even reflect our nature in the societies and systems we build, which are all ultimately chaotic, myriad variables interplaying to produce complex and often unpredictable outcomes.

euler_ 9y ago
Maybe. I tend to agree with you. With that being said, the code/automata ideaa of consciousness always remind me of the deists, etc. I'm always a little weary of to literally interpreting the mind this way.
pygy_ 9y ago
Isn't chaos (in the mathematical sense) purely deterministic? Those processes are very sensitive to the initial condition, but given the same seed, they'll evolve identically.
- sigstoat 9y ago
  > Isn't chaos (in the mathematical sense) purely deterministic? yes. things like the logistic map or lorenz system demonstrate mathematical chaos, while being utterly deterministic. "chaos is random" is a popsci dilution / mangling.
  - dr1337 9y ago
    Chaos is indeed deterministic but only in the first few iterations. The limitation we have is computational power. The further into the future we go, the hard it is to determine the outcome. The best example of this would be weather forecasting. A lot of weather bureaus can perfectly forecast the next 24 hours but become increasingly difficult to get it right the more into the future you get them to forecast.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > Chaos is indeed deterministic but only in the first few iterations More precisely, chaos is fully deterministic but that can't practically be usefully applied beyond a few iterations, because small measurement error on inputs blow up into giant uncertainty in outputs.
    - pygy_ 9y ago
      The limitation for weather forecast is floating point precision, which lead predictions to diverge with reality because the small losses of precision add up to large discrepancies as time passes, in chaotic systems. If we could compute with Real numbers, we would get much better predictions.
      - chaoticmass 9y ago
        Even then, measurements can never be 100% accurate, and we can never have enough measurements.
      - posterboy 9y ago
        > If we could compute with Real numbers, we would get much better predictions. This is a paradox. The real numbers are in some technical sense not computable. I get what you mean though, analog computers. However, there are still limits to the precision.
        chaoticmass 9y ago
        Good point. Relevant article: http://lampx.tugraz.at/~hadley/uncomputable_numbers.html http://lampx.tugraz.at/~hadley/uncomputable_numbers.html "almost every number is uncomputable" "This means that predicting the weather arbitrarily far into the future is impossible without knowing the current conditions (temperature, air pressure, humidity, wind speed, etc.) to arbitrary precision. Since the quantities that describe the weather are real numbers, they are uncomputable. No finite computer program can calculate the weather arbitrarily far into the future."
        9y ago

euler_ 9y ago

Maybe. I tend to agree with you. With that being said, the code/automata ideaa of consciousness always remind me of the deists, etc. I'm always a little weary of to literally interpreting the mind this way.

pygy_ 9y ago

Isn't chaos (in the mathematical sense) purely deterministic? Those processes are very sensitive to the initial condition, but given the same seed, they'll evolve identically.

sigstoat 9y ago
> Isn't chaos (in the mathematical sense) purely deterministic? yes. things like the logistic map or lorenz system demonstrate mathematical chaos, while being utterly deterministic. "chaos is random" is a popsci dilution / mangling.
- dr1337 9y ago
  Chaos is indeed deterministic but only in the first few iterations. The limitation we have is computational power. The further into the future we go, the hard it is to determine the outcome. The best example of this would be weather forecasting. A lot of weather bureaus can perfectly forecast the next 24 hours but become increasingly difficult to get it right the more into the future you get them to forecast.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Chaos is indeed deterministic but only in the first few iterations More precisely, chaos is fully deterministic but that can't practically be usefully applied beyond a few iterations, because small measurement error on inputs blow up into giant uncertainty in outputs.
  - pygy_ 9y ago
    The limitation for weather forecast is floating point precision, which lead predictions to diverge with reality because the small losses of precision add up to large discrepancies as time passes, in chaotic systems. If we could compute with Real numbers, we would get much better predictions.
    - chaoticmass 9y ago
      Even then, measurements can never be 100% accurate, and we can never have enough measurements.
    - posterboy 9y ago
      > If we could compute with Real numbers, we would get much better predictions. This is a paradox. The real numbers are in some technical sense not computable. I get what you mean though, analog computers. However, there are still limits to the precision.
      - chaoticmass 9y ago
        Good point. Relevant article: http://lampx.tugraz.at/~hadley/uncomputable_numbers.html http://lampx.tugraz.at/~hadley/uncomputable_numbers.html "almost every number is uncomputable" "This means that predicting the weather arbitrarily far into the future is impossible without knowing the current conditions (temperature, air pressure, humidity, wind speed, etc.) to arbitrary precision. Since the quantities that describe the weather are real numbers, they are uncomputable. No finite computer program can calculate the weather arbitrarily far into the future."
        9y ago