sethoflagos

The cat's clear overreaction could well suggest some flight response to a predator. Perhaps the sound of the engine stirs some ancient memory of a leopard's roar. I'll have to investigate their response to a car being started.

I was outside having a smoke recently and whiled away the time watching a cat cautiously cross the pavement a couple of metres ahead of me seemingly intent on crossing the road. The view down the road was obstructed by a parked van but from my vantage point I could see a pedestrian approaching on the far side pavement. The cat froze in its tracks. At first I thought that this was due to seeing the pedestrian. However, a car suddenly came into view and the cat bolted to hide underneath another vehicle parked off the road beside me. After it had passed, the cat emerged once more and approached the road only to see a vehicle coming from the opposite direction whereupon it bolted yet again to its place of safe refuge. Its third attempt at crossing the road passed uneventfully. The cat clearly was a little cautious of nearby humans. It seemed to have no fear at all of stationary vehicles, indeed seeing them as places of safety, Yet it fled in absolute terror at the sight of a moving vehicle. In my experience, cats tend not to survive any degree of impact with the latter, so I was left wondering what the learning process might be.

I read this and thought that you have just outlined the book definition of weak emergence. This reference - SUPERVENIENCE, PHYSICALISM AND EMERGENCE - is a little longer than yours but for me, it pulls together many loose strands currently floating around the site. The fireworks start when we get on to strong emergence. Fasten your metaphysical safety belts.

My wife is of an evangelical persuasion. But her politics are social democrat so we get on fine providing we avoid talking about evolution. Coexistence at the individual level need not be problematic. It's at the institutional level where the real damage is done. And the 28th vote was the first 'don't know'. That's interesting in itself.

Okay, but I'm going to have to unpick your post in reverse order since it's the baggage trailing in the wake that I take issues with. Can I assume here that your 'libertarian' is the selfish and impulsive spoilt brat of right-libertarianism as understood in American circles? It's an important point since I'm drawn to a form of libertarianism based on the utilitarian principles of William Godwin. Here, while acknowledging both the validity and value of the base impulses, they are exercised within the framework of a good, solid code of ethics. For me, Aristotle's Golden Mean plus a measure of stoicism works (eg 'make a friend of hunger' counts as sound medical advice). I try not to take offence when you condemn libertarian values as 'absurd', but I do speak English rather than American. Your point gets lost in translation. You oblige me to read The Libet experiment and its implications for conscious will, to understand some guy's work that no-one else can reduplicate. My impression is that our potential responses arrive in waves starting with the base impulses, with more nuanced influences following on and consciousness emerging somewhere during the process to play a supervisory role in making the choice. Sometimes just to say 'Oops! Sorry' when the action came prematurely. Does this script not fit the style of the movie? Perhaps. Or perhaps it's the lack of consistency in the degree of determinism necessary in defining 'will'. One sentence linking at least five distinct concepts all subject to diverse interpretation. Easy as pie! We differ only on the role of determinism, I think. That's our main outstanding issue.

I fully take on your point of not throwing out the baby with the bathwater and agree wholeheartedly. However, while monolithic organisations are able to claim ownership and flag wave these beneficial ethics as symbols of their fitness to hold sway, rather than see much in way of benefit we tend to get lumbered with all the detestable baggage following on in the wake.

Bogus positions of undeserved influence and authority will always attract the walking dog turds of our communities.

The goal may indeed be very distant; possibly unattainable for many generations to come. But is that any reasonable excuse to stay clinging on to the old shackles of the distant past that have clearly denied so many the opportunity to realise their full potential for so long?

Thank you for this. I believe that there is a general consensus that entropy is Lorentz invariant and much of what you say seems to follow on from this sensibly enough. Minor-ish exceptions: For 1) I'd say that it may operate equally in both the abstract and concrete realms as one might expect if it were one of the most fundamental of laws (ie holds for all physically possible universes) as some suspect. 5) For similar reasons, I'd be tempted to consider substituting 'non-physical' for 'teleological'. If I understand you correctly, the time reversed transitions appear to be goal-driven (teleological) towards simply restoring the initial state in the absence of any convincing causal mechanism to drive it. A bit off-topic perhaps but appreciated here anyway.

He gained his Nobel prize for his work in irreversible thermodynamic processes during my first year chemical engineering course so a few of us dipped into his work out of interest (long before the pop-sci chaos carnival kicked off): Rather than his self-organisation stuff(which I found hard to grasp) my main take away at the time can be summarised in this little snippet from his Wikipedia page: Maybe that helps frame some of my earlier posts here and elsewhere. I'm averse to hard determinism and not just for religious reasons. If we loosen the thrall of determinism a little, then I can nod my head in agreement. Catalytic Synthesis of Polyribonucleic Acid on Prebiotic Rock Glasses has already got us up to sequences of several hundred nucleotides with no resort to 'quantum woo'. It isn't so much a question of increasing the number of physical interactions as such. More maybe assembling some virtual low probability microstate within a superposition to which a phenomenon like tunnelling can help bypass the sometimes significant energy barriers to gain access. (Woo alert!) To get around ergodicity issues etc. A classical, determinist model may be overly pessimistic by orders of magnitude if this isn't merely a pipedream. Precisely. So happy you butted in there 😁

Please feel free to butt in! I was hoping someone would raise the topic of ergodicity as it is relevant, Thermodynamic equilibrium is often presented as a dull, featureless system state, but it seems quite the opposite to me. If it is interpreted as the condition of maximum quantum entanglement of its constituent parts, each of those linkages existing as superpositions all of their possible outcome states, then in at least some limited sense, thermodynamic equilibrium can be seen as a superposition of all possible arrangements of its constituent parts consistent with its geometry, chemical makeup and total energy content. That is, that all structures that can possibly exist within that state do so simultaneously at least within the non-material abstractions of the mathematical space wherein the superpositions reside prior to 'being looked at' (ahem). Ergodicity (the limitation that in the concrete, individual microstates can only be accessed by stepwise progression from a neighbour) places limits on this picture, but I hope there is some truth in it as it helps me get my head around quite a few practical situations that are otherwise difficult to comprehend. For instance, abiogenesis becomes considerably less problematic if all necessary component building blocks continuously coexist at least to some degree when conditions render it a non-zero possibility, even if that space is temporarily abstract rather than concrete.

From the Lorentz interpretion of chaos I mentioned above, it is possible for some number of associated parameters to evolve under the action of linear operations in entirely deterministic fashion and yet produce significantly unpredictable futures such as the weather phenomena you describe. The (local) universe is not big enough to define general numbers with suffient absolute precision to prevent this from being the case. However, it is not the full story. For example, it seems implausible for the above mechanism to produce all emergent properties not explicitly existing in the fundamental low level interactions. Yet, everyday experience tells us that we are likely to hear dull music in supermarkets.

The beauty of 'diversity' is that it emcompasses elemental domains of both order and disorder within a heterogenous whole, which corresponds with everyday macroscospic experience.

Yes. However, I find the word 'chaos' more misleading than helpful. Lorentz (or deterministic) chaos has the particular sense of ...which may appeal to mathematicians but not to me. I much prefer to think in terms of systems that spontaneously trend towards high diversity. This correlates in simple proportion to both maximal entropy and quantum entanglement. As an engineer, this helps give an inituitive feel for how, for example, the system's thermodynamic and chemical equilibria are likely to evolve.

Bien sur. Voila: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Équations_de_Navier-Stokes https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexité

'Rover' was a wolf in sheep's clothing and quite lethal. The main theme of the series is the conflict between individualist vs collectivist principles which quite coincidently has been explicitly referenced earlier today by @Phi for All. Also coincidently, I've just been musing on the difference in moral responsibility for their actions between say, a Macbeth and an actor playing Macbeth obliged to perform his part to the letter.

Only the radionucleides. In principle, hydrocarbon reserves can be restored from water and carbon dioxide via photosynthesis which is how they were created in the first place. Strategic metals can be recovered from wherever their used form was disposed of. Don't confuse 'financially viable exploitable deposits' with total disappearance. It's a myth perpetuated by those who demand maximum profit from minimum investment.

Not in the general case. Navier-Stokes for example are parabolic I think a key point to understand is that while Newton's Laws of Motion and Newton's Law of Viscosity (and the underlying quantum laws that give rise to them) are both linear in themselves, when they are employed in combination (as in Navier-Stokes), the nett result is non-linear. In general, the more interactions you add (linear or otherwise) to the analysis, the more non-linear the end product. This is can be understood as the basis of complexity in the macroscopic world.

We already have them! They are explicitly represented in the systems of partial differential equations that describe most macroscopic physical processes eg Navier-Stokes equations, macroscopic form of Maxwell's equations, Heat equation, Fokker-Planck eqn etc. etc.

Like deciding not to simply ignore the advance wave in the wave equation? No probs so long as there's no informative content?

Is it my imagination or has Fatalism suddenly gone on the rampage on this site? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbL9Vsobx8I

I could order you to have a medical examination...

Google says that charge and current have been described as 'epiphenomena' of events in the 'more fundamental' underlying electromagnetic field. I could imagine someone describing them as 'weakly emergent' also, but there are problems with both usages, However, if those field events were of appropriate frequency to effect a mental response of 'red', then in philosophy of mind the colour would be epiphenomenal to the field. In this sense, the causal relationship differs significantly from those implied in Maxwell's equations. Distinguishing physical events from mental events in this way have indeed lead some to a new form of dualism so I guess this is the extreme interpretation understandably condemned by @Eise.- "any perceived impact of free will on the physical world is illusory". 'Epiphenomenon' again means something entirely different in medicine (symptoms that just happen to correlate) And all three differ from the original sense employed in metaphysics. Bad word! A better framing of the question may be to determine initially whether 'volition' as a concept is abstract or concrete.

Yes, it did rather, and thank you. It was a bit bloggy, I know, but these days I find it difficult to get a complex train of thought in order without actually writing it out longhand. Otherwise I get halfway through and forget both the point I'm responding to and the response I intended to make. Apologies to those who find that sort of thing too me-me-me.