5 ms·

Chaotic systems are deterministic, but so sensitive to initial conditions that even slight perturbations will lead to wildly different, seemingly random outcome

Chaotic systems are deterministic, but so sensitive to initial conditions that even slight perturbations will lead to wildly different, seemingly random outcomes. But if you could prepare two chaotic systems with exactly the same initial conditions, they would both follow the same trajectory. In practice, this is often impossible to do, since it requires drawing two real numbers within some absurdly small epsilon of each other (for the trajectories to be equivalent within some delta of each other, on some finite timescale Delta t. epsilon -> 0 as delta -> 0, Delta t -> infinity). We think of quantum randomness as truly random because the states are quantized, so it’s easy to initialize a system with the exact same starting conditions and watch it follow unpredictable trajectories. Is this basically arguing that if we treat the entire universe as some macroscopic quantum state, comprising all the individual states of each discrete quantum, it would evolve deterministically? However, since we are only powered to observe a few quanta at a time, they appear to evolve completely randomly, but only because we are not privy to the states of every other quantum state in the universe?

thrown_22 4y ago
>since it requires drawing two real numbers within some absurdly small epsilon of each other. Not small, zero.
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  Definitely, if we care about the outcome of the trajectories as t\to\infty. For certain systems, at smaller timescales, merely an absurd amount of precision will suffice [0,1]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_exponent https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_exponent [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_time https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_time
zmgsabst 4y ago
I think that last paragraph is right. If everything shares some weak correlation with the stuff around it, then it might experience 10^-6 or whatever perturbation experiment to experiment, and accordingly the runs deviate according to some statistics about the system. Or the state of the early universe. Or something we don’t understand.
- aeternum 4y ago
  A correlation with only the stuff around it however does not solve the problem. Bell's inequality shows that the choice of the experimenter must be be able to affect particles separated by lightyears. Either the experimenter's choice is an illusion (super-determinism), or somehow partial quantum states can be propagated at fast than light speed.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    Can you give an example of what you mean?
    - aeternum 4y ago
      If you take two entangled photons, send each a light year away in opposite directions. Now an satellite (which are 2ly from one another at each endpoint measures the polarization). Each satellite measures the spin along a specific axis. The correlation in spin measured by the two satellites is dependent upon the difference in angle of the two measurements. Correlation with the local stuff around each satellite isn't enough. Somehow, the choice of measurement angle seems to be non-local (transmitted at large distances and at greater than light speed).
nobodyandproud 4y ago
> We think of quantum randomness as truly random because the states are quantized, so it’s easy to initialize a system with the exact same starting conditions and watch it follow unpredictable trajectories. With hidden variables—which by all accounts haven’t been ruled out—it means we cannot do this. That is to say, there’s no way you can tell you’ve set the same initial conditions.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  > With hidden variables—which by all accounts haven’t been ruled out—it means we cannot do this. Local hidden variables have been ruled out. So it's not really like chaotic systems at all, whose development is internal.
  - nobodyandproud 4y ago
    Non-local hidden variables have not.
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      So it's not really like chaotic systems at all, whose development is internal.
      - nobodyandproud 4y ago
        Can you explain why non-locality means non internal?
      - phkahler 4y ago
        If the entire universe is one system, nonlocality seems inherent. Why physicists are happy to embrace weird interpretations and not nonlocality is beyond me. It seems like an arbitrary choice to me, or even a poor choice.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    The development of a fractal isn't internal. Its shape is completely predetermined by its mathematical description. I think what the author is trying to say is that we could imagine the universe is a massively hyper-dimensional fractal that we are utterly hopeless to determine the initial starting point on. I can't immediately see a reason that model wouldn't work, but its descriptive power (relative to QM) is basically nil... To be consistent with the observations that demanded a quantum mechanical understanding of the universe, we have to introduce the idea that we can't know where we are on the fractal, so this is more a philosophical pondering than a physical one.
texaslonghorn5 4y ago
For the last part, I think so. You could imagine the universe as being operated on by some giant Hamiltonian operator with a basis of eigenstates, and then the amplitudes will just deterministically evolve according to the Schrödinger equation.
defrost 4y ago
The Lorenz Attractor pictured is a trajectory through pase space for a single initial condition; the key result from Lorenz (and from Smale with his Horseshoe maps) is that for ANY absurdly small epsilon you can find two initial positions within that epsilon that end up seperated down the track in time ... ergo, your: > since it requires drawing two real numbers within some absurdly small epsilon of each other. just won't do.
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  Yup, I was sloppy with my writing. I just clarified it.
  - defrost 4y ago
    no worries - I see I typed "pase space" so <shrug> :-)
deng 4y ago
> Is this basically arguing that if we treat the entire universe as some macroscopic quantum state, comprising all the individual states of each discrete quantum, it would evolve deterministically? Yes, I think in the end he is arguing for Superdeterminism, although for some reason he does not mention that concept in his article.
- lupire 4y ago
  Because he's trying to snow the layperson in his new pop science book, not call attention to old debunked ideas by naming them.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wodenokoto 4y ago
Sixty symbols did a video on spooky actions at a distance coinciding with the Nobel prize this year for the same thing. It explains why we can show that it cannot be hidden variable / immeasurable initial state that causes the randomness. Basically we can change the probabilities of experiment B, made on particle B, by changing the experiment we do on particle A. I suppose that entanglement could still live in a deterministic world. E.g, given initial state/variable and interaction with entangled particle A, B will behave so and so. I’m sure you could work out a number of initial states for A and B and how each set of states react to each other, that could give the same proportions as the probabilities mentioned in the video. But given that initial states cannot be measured, is it really a better explanation? https://youtu.be/0RiAxvb_qI4 https://youtu.be/0RiAxvb_qI4
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  I’m curious why non-local hidden variables aren’t a bigger topic, given that we know there’s non-local quantum numbers, eg those carried by anyons. If we believe reality is non-local, then why would we also believe it’s non-determinate?
  - phkahler 4y ago
    >> f we believe reality is non-local, then why would we also believe it’s non-determinate? I wonder if physicists are so impressed (rightly so) with their precision measurement capabilities that they can't accept nonlocality because it throws a monkey wrench into their whole way of observing things. To any physicists reading, what's wrong with accepting nonlocality?
    - raattgift 4y ago
      That's a hard question to answer without importing a lot of bias or metaphysics. I'll try. tl;dr: Non-locality tends to break causality. Merely relaxing locality is hard (as in nobody who has tried has done it successfully) to reconcile with astrophysical observations (e.g. radiation from periastron advances of binary pulsars, radiation from astrophysical megamasers, JEM-EUSO/Fermi-GLAST observations of gamma and cosmic rays). A local (relativistic field) theory means that the solution to the field equations is locally Lorentz-invariant and generally covariant. I'll explain these briefly. Local Lorentz-invariance essentially means evolving systems of matter must obey a fundamental speed limit that applies to all observers and observables. No-one will see matter suddenly appear out of thin vacuum, nor vanish into it without a trace. Everyone can relate certain quantities they observe (e.g. angular momentum), and understand (maybe with some effort) why the observed quantities differ for different observers. We can be rigorous about the immediate "before" and "after" of the arrival of matter at any given choice of here-and-now. This constraint on the fluxes of energy and momentum leads to conservation laws that are for all practical purposes completely accurate in any "small enough" patch of the whole spacetime. (And for particle physicists local Lorentz invariance gives a time-dependent spatial location of a centre of momentum.) General covariance means that the theory does not require any particular choice of description of "here-and-now". We can solve the field equations if "here-and-now" is at a coordinate origin, and also if one or more of the dimensions is nonzero in some arbitrary system of coordinates. More importantly, the coordinate-dependent quantities in such a solution transform in a precise way as one switches from one system of coordinates to another. It also gives us a clue about what aspects of a system are coordinate-dependent and what are coordinate-independent, and that only the latter are reliably physical. Locality in this sense gives us the strongest form of causality, which lets us move from solving the field equations for the entire "block universe" spacetime (and then examining pieces of it) to preparing an initial value problem on a single slice of that spacetime, and then extend from there to recovering the entire "block universe". The technical term for this is global hyperbolicity. In general it is safe to conjecture that as one weakens the causality on a spacetime (i.e., from global hyperbolicity to one of the other choices at <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality_conditions#The_hierarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality_conditions#The_hiera...>), the less likely the spacetime is to model any part of our universe with useful accuracy. I'd sloganize it as "anything not forbidden by causality conditions is mandatory in a large enough patch of spacetime". Local Lorentz invariance turns out to forbid a surprisingly large number of possibilities (including lots of weird stuff that we have never seen). The Standard Model of Particle Physics is a local theory, and it is updated as new experimental and observational evidence piles up. Despite many searches for LIV (Lorentz-invariance violation), it remains fully locally Lorentz-invariant. See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-Model_Extension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-Model_Extension> for some details. I think one should be careful not to confuse locality with local realism. That imports the idea of "scientific realism" in the sense that at a point p there are definite properties which exist -- whether measured or not -- and that those properties can only transform locally as above. One can get to a non-realistic theory which is still local by (for example) pursuing a (I think pretty metaphysical) claim that "what you don't measure isn't there", or perhaps more weakly, "if you don't measure it, you can't assume the value". Such a theory can still be local without having to philosophize much: "if you do measure a value at spacetime point p, then measure a value at timelike-separated spacetime point p', the values will turn out to be related by a representation of the Lorentz group; but you may not be able to predict p' only from the measurement of p". (The realistic position is that you don't have to measure p' -- by measuring p you already know what p' is. [1]) (The local constraint is interesting in the paragraph above in that it implies that quantities must be combinations of only four-tensors (and four-vectors and scalars) and spinors; c.f. my paragraph beginning with "General covariance"). - -- [1] Einstein is frequently alleged to have sloganized this as "I like to think that the moon is there even if I’m not looking at it." This comes from a broken-telephone-effect upon A. Pais, Rev. Mod. Phys. 51, 863 (1979), near bottom of first column p.907, <https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.51.863 https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.51.863>, which you can feed into sci hub): 'We often discussed his notions on objective reality. I recall that during one walk Einstein suddenly stopped, turned to me and asked whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I look at it. The rest of this walk was devoted to a discussion of what a physicist should mean by the term "to exist."' I think that's an excellent topic for discussion and that it is not yet resolved.
layer8 4y ago
> the states are quantized, so it’s easy to initialize a system with the exact same starting conditions That doesn’t seem right. Position, velocity and momentum etc. are not discrete values in quantum mechanics. It is not practically possible to repeatedly put particles into the same exact state.
- raattgift 4y ago
  We're OK (in the theoretical sense) if the relevant QM theory is special-relativistic. The items are prepared in the same state in their individual centre of momentum (COM) frames, and in those the (frame-dependent) quantities you are worried about vanish. The COM frames are related by a Lorentz transformation. The COM frame is available thanks to the Lorentz group's boosts. The <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_group> at every point defines flat spacetime (General Relativity guarantees a small patch of flat spacetime around every point in a general curved spacetime), and relativistic quantum theories (of which the Standard Model is an example) have the Lorentz group fundamentally "baked in". Further detail: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center-of-momentum_frame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center-of-momentum_frame> and in a somewhat scattered usenet thread <https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/boosts.html https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/boosts.html>. Experimentally one could set up a careful filtering mechanism (polarizers, traps, and so on). Each such particle will be in the measurement basis with 100% probability. We can attach a COM frame to each, and relate the COM frame and the laboratory frame to one another through a transform.
mistermann 4y ago
> Chaotic systems are deterministic By definition, chaotic systems "are" deterministic, but it does not necessarily follow that all systems that have had a label of "chaotic" attached to them are necessarily deterministic. It can certainly cause them to take on that appearance from certain frames of reference though.
- nyokodo 4y ago
  > it does not necessarily follow that all systems that have had a label of "chaotic" attached to them are necessarily deterministic. Testing this is also impossible, correct? Either way we couldn’t set up the experiment precisely enough to rule out determinism. So, is this science or philosophy?
  - mistermann 4y ago
    > Testing this is also impossible, correct? Possibly, I do not know, but the burden of proof lies with the one making the assertion, or writing the definitions that describe reality as it is (as opposed to reality as it is hypothesized). > Either way we couldn’t set up the experiment precisely enough to rule out determinism. Guessing when one reaches the limits of our epistemological limits and stating the guesses as facts (if(!) that is what has happened) does not seem very scientific. > So, is this science or philosophy? If science is not resilient to valid epistemic challenges, it should perhaps adjust its marketing message accordingly...although the genie seems to be well out of the bottle on that front, and I sense little intention or desire to put it back in (quite the opposite, if anything).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

thrown_22 4y ago

>since it requires drawing two real numbers within some absurdly small epsilon of each other. Not small, zero.

MontyCarloHall 4y ago
Definitely, if we care about the outcome of the trajectories as t\to\infty. For certain systems, at smaller timescales, merely an absurd amount of precision will suffice [0,1]. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_exponent https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_exponent [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_time https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_time

zmgsabst 4y ago

I think that last paragraph is right. If everything shares some weak correlation with the stuff around it, then it might experience 10^-6 or whatever perturbation experiment to experiment, and accordingly the runs deviate according to some statistics about the system. Or the state of the early universe. Or something we don’t understand.

aeternum 4y ago
A correlation with only the stuff around it however does not solve the problem. Bell's inequality shows that the choice of the experimenter must be be able to affect particles separated by lightyears. Either the experimenter's choice is an illusion (super-determinism), or somehow partial quantum states can be propagated at fast than light speed.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  Can you give an example of what you mean?
  - aeternum 4y ago
    If you take two entangled photons, send each a light year away in opposite directions. Now an satellite (which are 2ly from one another at each endpoint measures the polarization). Each satellite measures the spin along a specific axis. The correlation in spin measured by the two satellites is dependent upon the difference in angle of the two measurements. Correlation with the local stuff around each satellite isn't enough. Somehow, the choice of measurement angle seems to be non-local (transmitted at large distances and at greater than light speed).

nobodyandproud 4y ago

> We think of quantum randomness as truly random because the states are quantized, so it’s easy to initialize a system with the exact same starting conditions and watch it follow unpredictable trajectories. With hidden variables—which by all accounts haven’t been ruled out—it means we cannot do this. That is to say, there’s no way you can tell you’ve set the same initial conditions.

guerrilla 4y ago
> With hidden variables—which by all accounts haven’t been ruled out—it means we cannot do this. Local hidden variables have been ruled out. So it's not really like chaotic systems at all, whose development is internal.
- nobodyandproud 4y ago
  Non-local hidden variables have not.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    So it's not really like chaotic systems at all, whose development is internal.
    - nobodyandproud 4y ago
      Can you explain why non-locality means non internal?
    - phkahler 4y ago
      If the entire universe is one system, nonlocality seems inherent. Why physicists are happy to embrace weird interpretations and not nonlocality is beyond me. It seems like an arbitrary choice to me, or even a poor choice.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  The development of a fractal isn't internal. Its shape is completely predetermined by its mathematical description. I think what the author is trying to say is that we could imagine the universe is a massively hyper-dimensional fractal that we are utterly hopeless to determine the initial starting point on. I can't immediately see a reason that model wouldn't work, but its descriptive power (relative to QM) is basically nil... To be consistent with the observations that demanded a quantum mechanical understanding of the universe, we have to introduce the idea that we can't know where we are on the fractal, so this is more a philosophical pondering than a physical one.

texaslonghorn5 4y ago

For the last part, I think so. You could imagine the universe as being operated on by some giant Hamiltonian operator with a basis of eigenstates, and then the amplitudes will just deterministically evolve according to the Schrödinger equation.

defrost 4y ago

The Lorenz Attractor pictured is a trajectory through pase space for a single initial condition; the key result from Lorenz (and from Smale with his Horseshoe maps) is that for ANY absurdly small epsilon you can find two initial positions within that epsilon that end up seperated down the track in time ... ergo, your: > since it requires drawing two real numbers within some absurdly small epsilon of each other. just won't do.

MontyCarloHall 4y ago
Yup, I was sloppy with my writing. I just clarified it.
- defrost 4y ago
  no worries - I see I typed "pase space" so <shrug> :-)

deng 4y ago

> Is this basically arguing that if we treat the entire universe as some macroscopic quantum state, comprising all the individual states of each discrete quantum, it would evolve deterministically? Yes, I think in the end he is arguing for Superdeterminism, although for some reason he does not mention that concept in his article.

lupire 4y ago
Because he's trying to snow the layperson in his new pop science book, not call attention to old debunked ideas by naming them.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

wodenokoto 4y ago

Sixty symbols did a video on spooky actions at a distance coinciding with the Nobel prize this year for the same thing. It explains why we can show that it cannot be hidden variable / immeasurable initial state that causes the randomness. Basically we can change the probabilities of experiment B, made on particle B, by changing the experiment we do on particle A. I suppose that entanglement could still live in a deterministic world. E.g, given initial state/variable and interaction with entangled particle A, B will behave so and so. I’m sure you could work out a number of initial states for A and B and how each set of states react to each other, that could give the same proportions as the probabilities mentioned in the video. But given that initial states cannot be measured, is it really a better explanation? https://youtu.be/0RiAxvb_qI4 https://youtu.be/0RiAxvb_qI4

zmgsabst 4y ago
I’m curious why non-local hidden variables aren’t a bigger topic, given that we know there’s non-local quantum numbers, eg those carried by anyons. If we believe reality is non-local, then why would we also believe it’s non-determinate?
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> f we believe reality is non-local, then why would we also believe it’s non-determinate? I wonder if physicists are so impressed (rightly so) with their precision measurement capabilities that they can't accept nonlocality because it throws a monkey wrench into their whole way of observing things. To any physicists reading, what's wrong with accepting nonlocality?
  - raattgift 4y ago
    That's a hard question to answer without importing a lot of bias or metaphysics. I'll try. tl;dr: Non-locality tends to break causality. Merely relaxing locality is hard (as in nobody who has tried has done it successfully) to reconcile with astrophysical observations (e.g. radiation from periastron advances of binary pulsars, radiation from astrophysical megamasers, JEM-EUSO/Fermi-GLAST observations of gamma and cosmic rays). A local (relativistic field) theory means that the solution to the field equations is locally Lorentz-invariant and generally covariant. I'll explain these briefly. Local Lorentz-invariance essentially means evolving systems of matter must obey a fundamental speed limit that applies to all observers and observables. No-one will see matter suddenly appear out of thin vacuum, nor vanish into it without a trace. Everyone can relate certain quantities they observe (e.g. angular momentum), and understand (maybe with some effort) why the observed quantities differ for different observers. We can be rigorous about the immediate "before" and "after" of the arrival of matter at any given choice of here-and-now. This constraint on the fluxes of energy and momentum leads to conservation laws that are for all practical purposes completely accurate in any "small enough" patch of the whole spacetime. (And for particle physicists local Lorentz invariance gives a time-dependent spatial location of a centre of momentum.) General covariance means that the theory does not require any particular choice of description of "here-and-now". We can solve the field equations if "here-and-now" is at a coordinate origin, and also if one or more of the dimensions is nonzero in some arbitrary system of coordinates. More importantly, the coordinate-dependent quantities in such a solution transform in a precise way as one switches from one system of coordinates to another. It also gives us a clue about what aspects of a system are coordinate-dependent and what are coordinate-independent, and that only the latter are reliably physical. Locality in this sense gives us the strongest form of causality, which lets us move from solving the field equations for the entire "block universe" spacetime (and then examining pieces of it) to preparing an initial value problem on a single slice of that spacetime, and then extend from there to recovering the entire "block universe". The technical term for this is global hyperbolicity. In general it is safe to conjecture that as one weakens the causality on a spacetime (i.e., from global hyperbolicity to one of the other choices at <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality_conditions#The_hierarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality_conditions#The_hiera...>), the less likely the spacetime is to model any part of our universe with useful accuracy. I'd sloganize it as "anything not forbidden by causality conditions is mandatory in a large enough patch of spacetime". Local Lorentz invariance turns out to forbid a surprisingly large number of possibilities (including lots of weird stuff that we have never seen). The Standard Model of Particle Physics is a local theory, and it is updated as new experimental and observational evidence piles up. Despite many searches for LIV (Lorentz-invariance violation), it remains fully locally Lorentz-invariant. See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-Model_Extension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-Model_Extension> for some details. I think one should be careful not to confuse locality with local realism. That imports the idea of "scientific realism" in the sense that at a point p there are definite properties which exist -- whether measured or not -- and that those properties can only transform locally as above. One can get to a non-realistic theory which is still local by (for example) pursuing a (I think pretty metaphysical) claim that "what you don't measure isn't there", or perhaps more weakly, "if you don't measure it, you can't assume the value". Such a theory can still be local without having to philosophize much: "if you do measure a value at spacetime point p, then measure a value at timelike-separated spacetime point p', the values will turn out to be related by a representation of the Lorentz group; but you may not be able to predict p' only from the measurement of p". (The realistic position is that you don't have to measure p' -- by measuring p you already know what p' is. [1]) (The local constraint is interesting in the paragraph above in that it implies that quantities must be combinations of only four-tensors (and four-vectors and scalars) and spinors; c.f. my paragraph beginning with "General covariance"). - -- [1] Einstein is frequently alleged to have sloganized this as "I like to think that the moon is there even if I’m not looking at it." This comes from a broken-telephone-effect upon A. Pais, Rev. Mod. Phys. 51, 863 (1979), near bottom of first column p.907, <https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.51.863 https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.51.863>, which you can feed into sci hub): 'We often discussed his notions on objective reality. I recall that during one walk Einstein suddenly stopped, turned to me and asked whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I look at it. The rest of this walk was devoted to a discussion of what a physicist should mean by the term "to exist."' I think that's an excellent topic for discussion and that it is not yet resolved.

layer8 4y ago

> the states are quantized, so it’s easy to initialize a system with the exact same starting conditions That doesn’t seem right. Position, velocity and momentum etc. are not discrete values in quantum mechanics. It is not practically possible to repeatedly put particles into the same exact state.

raattgift 4y ago
We're OK (in the theoretical sense) if the relevant QM theory is special-relativistic. The items are prepared in the same state in their individual centre of momentum (COM) frames, and in those the (frame-dependent) quantities you are worried about vanish. The COM frames are related by a Lorentz transformation. The COM frame is available thanks to the Lorentz group's boosts. The <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_group> at every point defines flat spacetime (General Relativity guarantees a small patch of flat spacetime around every point in a general curved spacetime), and relativistic quantum theories (of which the Standard Model is an example) have the Lorentz group fundamentally "baked in". Further detail: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center-of-momentum_frame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center-of-momentum_frame> and in a somewhat scattered usenet thread <https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/boosts.html https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/boosts.html>. Experimentally one could set up a careful filtering mechanism (polarizers, traps, and so on). Each such particle will be in the measurement basis with 100% probability. We can attach a COM frame to each, and relate the COM frame and the laboratory frame to one another through a transform.

mistermann 4y ago

> Chaotic systems are deterministic By definition, chaotic systems "are" deterministic, but it does not necessarily follow that all systems that have had a label of "chaotic" attached to them are necessarily deterministic. It can certainly cause them to take on that appearance from certain frames of reference though.

nyokodo 4y ago
> it does not necessarily follow that all systems that have had a label of "chaotic" attached to them are necessarily deterministic. Testing this is also impossible, correct? Either way we couldn’t set up the experiment precisely enough to rule out determinism. So, is this science or philosophy?
- mistermann 4y ago
  > Testing this is also impossible, correct? Possibly, I do not know, but the burden of proof lies with the one making the assertion, or writing the definitions that describe reality as it is (as opposed to reality as it is hypothesized). > Either way we couldn’t set up the experiment precisely enough to rule out determinism. Guessing when one reaches the limits of our epistemological limits and stating the guesses as facts (if(!) that is what has happened) does not seem very scientific. > So, is this science or philosophy? If science is not resilient to valid epistemic challenges, it should perhaps adjust its marketing message accordingly...although the genie seems to be well out of the bottle on that front, and I sense little intention or desire to put it back in (quite the opposite, if anything).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]