re: Mike Mc Masters comments about chaos not existing in living things, at
least not within the realm of intellectual beings.
I hope that I am not too late with commenting on this ( I think that this
about 2 weeks ago, but life here at school has been crazy)
I think that chaos certainly does exist in living things and within
intellectual beings. If I recall correctly, the normal heart rhythms are
chaotic and problems crop up when they become more regular and
predictable. Certainly, nature has chaotic patterns: leaf and fern growth
can be modeled chaotically as well as soil perculation.
Additionally, I submit that we wouldn't know if we were within a chaotic
system. Chaotic systems have global patterns that we can see and predit
behavior in general terms but are pointwise unpredictable ( by this I mean
what happens next and where exactly will it happen). Mathematical chaos
uses relatively simple, nonlinear functions where the outputs of one
iteration become the inputs for the next iteration. So the equations and
process is determined but what happens at the thousandth iteration is not
so trivial --- we may be inside of a chaotic system and not know it only
fumbling around in a small chunk of a larger picture ---- things may look
familiar but may be very complex and unpredictable. Conways Game of Life
and Cellular Automatia (Stanislav Ulam, von Neumann and Stephen Wolphram )
offer examples of simple rules resulting in chaotic outcomes. How can a
single cell see the whole system ? Maybe life is chaotic.
Paul Kosuth
prkosuth@prairienet.org
--"Paul R. Kosuth" <prkosuth@prairienet.org>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>