7 ms·

I'm not sure if human perception is a chaotic system. Chaos is defined as "small change in input -> large change in output". Perception is actually the opposi

• jessriedel 9y ago
  First, sensitivity to initial conditions is a necessary but not sufficient property for chaos. Some sort of folding/mixing is also necessary, which can be gauranteed by a bounded state space. Second, it's definitely true that information processing systems, if they are to be reliable enough to be useful, are not going to be chaotic throughout their state space. They need to return the same output given a certain input. But I'd imagine there are also at least a few noisy regions.
• perl4ever 9y ago
  I always thought that a perception like "it's a tree" that remains stable could possibly be an attractor in a chaotic system. If you look at the trajectory of a particle around an attractor, its position is very unpredictable after a while, but which attractor it is orbiting is not so random or unstable. Thinking of the visual of the Lorenz attractor.
• selimthegrim 9y ago
  You need also ergodicity and mixing, as jessriedel states, meaning respectively that you explore every area of your phase space with equal probability, and that two trajectories that begin arbtrarily close together do in fact diverge instead of sticking together, at infinite time