On Feb 13, 12:47 pm, "Morvak" gmail.com> wrote:

We can start a snowball rolling down a slope in a particular direction
and the forces and potentials along the way pile things up for us, at
the desired location. Mills thought that is the essense of free will,
it is extended across time, we pull little levers which change things
down the line, we adjust for the goal along the way, and it is
originating from our subjective experience and influencing much larger
events down the line.

In physics there is the idea called
"Sensitive Dependence Upon Initial Conditions"

The simplest systems are now seen to create extraordinarily difficult
problems of predictability. Yet order arises spontaneously in those
systems—chaos and order together. Only a new kind of science could
begin to cross the great gulf between knowledge of what one thing does—
one water molecule, one cell of heart tissue, one neuron—and what
millions of them do.

Watch two bits of foam flowing side by side at the bottom of a
waterfall. What can you guess about how close they were at the top?
Nothing. As far as standard physics was concerned, God might just as
well have taken all those water molecules under the table and shuffled
them personally. Traditionally, when physicists saw complex results,
they looked for complex causes. When they saw a random relationship
between what goes into a system and what comes out, they assumed that
they would have to build randomness into any realistic theory, by
artificially adding noise or error.

The modern study of chaos began with the creeping realization in the
1960s that quite simple mathematical equations could model systems
every bit as violent as a waterfall.

Tiny differences in input could
quickly become overwhelming differences
in output—a phenomenon given the name:

"sensitive dependence on initial conditions."

In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-
jokingly known as the Butterfly Effect—the notion that a butterfly
stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next
month in New York.

When the explorers of chaos began to think back on the genealogy of
their new science, they found many intellectual trails from the past.
But one stood out clearly. For the young physicists and mathematicians
leading the revolution, a starting point was the Butterfly Effect.

...For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;
For want of a horse, the rider was lost;
For want of a rider, the battle was lost;
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost.

In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can
have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes. But chaos
meant that such points were everywhere. They were pervasive. In
systems like the weather, sensitive dependence on initial conditions
was an inescapable consequence of the way small scales intertwined
with large.

Chaos - Making A New Science - James Gleick
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0140092501

--------------------------------------

[Many influences to subjectivity which influences many influences.]

In the early 1900s historians and economists emphasized that there
were at least not simple laws for various aspects of human behavior.
But it was nevertheless typically assumed that methods based on
physics would eventually yield deterministic laws for human behavior -
and this was for example part of the inspiration for the behaviorist
movement in psychology in the mid-1900s. The advent of quantum
mechanics in the 1920s, however, showed that even physics might not be
entirely deterministic - and by the 1940s the possibility that this
might lead to human free will was being discussed by physicists,
philosophers and historians.

Around this time Karl Popper used both quantum mechanics and sensitive
dependence on initial conditions (see also page 973) to argue for
fundamental indeterminism. And also around this time Friedrich Hayek
(following ideas of Ludwig Mises in the early 1900s) suggested -
presumably influenced by work in mathematical logic - that human
behavior might be fundamentally unpredictable because in effect brains
can explain only systems simpler than themselves, and can thus never
explain their own operation.

http://www.wolframscience.com/reference/notes/1135b
http://www.wolframscience.com/reference/notes/972d

At the heart of chaos is the idea of sensitive dependence on initial
conditions. This is something that is familiar to everybody in their
daily lives; if only you had caught the earlier no. 15 bus last week,
you might have sat next to a powerful Hollywood agent, who noticing
your star qualities would have started you on a career to
international fame and fabulous riches. Traditionally, science has
ignored such subtle 'chance' effects, and looked for underlying laws
which would allow the future to be predicted irrespective of small
changes in the present. Indeed, many scientists would argue that the
best test of any scientific theory is how well it predicts things. The
classical example of this predictive success came when Isaac Newton
explained how the planets moved in the solar system, and laid the
foundations of the physics which allows NASA to land spacecraft on
Mars.

If scientists could predict the behaviour of planets so accurately,
then why not that of the weather in two months time, or stock markets,
or fish populations, or human beings themselves? The traditional
answer was that we did not know enough about the laws governing these
systems - if we could gather more information and understanding about
them, then prediction would be possible. Chaos theory raises an
alternative possibility - that some systems are inherently
unpredictable, because they display sensitive dependence on initial
conditions. Think of our insect population again. When R gets much
above 2.50 we cannot say what the population size will be at
generation 50, based on what it is at generation 9, unless we know
this last figure exactly.

Measuring something exactly is often impossible - even a very simple
measurement, like that of air temperature, involves some error - one
thermometer might say 18°C, a better one 18.12°C, an even better one
18.1183°C and so on. How many decimal places must we go to before we
have the 'real' temperature? For most purposes, like keeping warm,
18°C is a good enough approximation. But in a chaotic system where
small initial differences will be magnified, the difference between
18.12 and 18.1183 might be enough to make prediction of temperatures
more than a few days ahead impossible. The problem is even more
serious than simply the limited accuracy that any instrument will
suffer. Suppose that the actual, real temperature was 18.5°C, and that
we had a thermometer in which we had total confidence - we could be
certain that there was no error in our measurement. In such a (as yet
impossible) case, there would be no problem, because 18.5 (or 18 and a
half) is a number that can be specified exactly - it is called a
rational number. However, there are an infinite number of values which
are known as irrational numbers; they can never be expressed as
fractions of integers (like a half), but only in decimal form, and as
such they go on for ever. The most famous of such irrational numbers
is pi (3.141...). It's impossible ever to give pi completely, instead
it must be expressed to a certain, finite number of decimal points. So
if our temperature happens to lie on an irrational number, we can
never give it fully, even if we can measure it with perfect accuracy.

So chaos theory suggests that exact prediction might be a false dream
for many natural phenomena. This has important implications for the
ways in which we might relate to and manage the natural world. For
example, if a fish population is behaving chaotically, management
techniques which rely on predicting the future size of the population
and allowing only a certain percentage of it to be harvested will
fail, because the prediction is likely to be wrong. In such cases,
completely different approaches to management (such as closing some
areas to fishing) may be necessary. Paradoxically, however, strange
attractors mean that some phenomena might be more predictable than
previously thought. The fluctuations of gold prices on the
international market, the location and scale of outbreaks of measles
in children and the movement of asteroids are examples of systems
which appear to be random. However, research suggests that they may,
in fact, be chaotic. If a system, such as our population, follows a
strange attractor, then although we cannot say exactly where on that
attractor it will be, we can predict that it will move within the
boundaries set by the attractor i.e. that it will not go outside
certain limits. So chaos improves our chances of making approximate
predictions in systems we thought were random.

Finally, where does chaos leave free-will? Chaotic systems are still
deterministic, so in a chaotic universe our lives might still be
entirely dictated by what has gone before (I had no choice in writing
this sentence). But in such a universe it would be impossible for
anybody to predict the outcome - even God can't fully specify an
irrational number (unless he totally breaks the rules). So although we
might have no free-will, it would always look as if we did, because
our lives would remain unpredictable.

Chaos without Confusion
http://www.gre.ac.uk/~bj61/talessi/tlr15b.html

-----------------------------------------

In this century, Karl Popper defined determinism in terms of
predictability also.

Laplace probably had God in mind as the powerful intelligence to whose
gaze the whole future is open. If not, he should have: 19th and 20th
century mathematical studies have shown convincingly that neither a
finite, nor an infinite but embedded-in-the-world intelligence can
have the computing power necessary to predict the actual future, in
any world remotely like ours. “Predictability” is therefore a façon de
parler that at best makes vivid what is at stake in determinism; in
rigorous discussions it should be eschewed. The world could be highly
predictable, in some senses, and yet not deterministic; and it could
be deterministic yet highly unpredictable, as many studies of chaos
(sensitive dependence on initial conditions) show.

Predictability does however make vivid what is at stake in
determinism: our fears about our own status as free agents in the
world. In Laplace's story, a sufficiently bright demon who knew how
things stood in the world 100 years before my birth could predict
every action, every emotion, every belief in the course of my life.
Were she then to watch me live through it, she might smile
condescendingly, as one who watches a marionette dance to the tugs of
strings that it knows nothing about. We can't stand the thought that
we are (in some sense) marionettes. Nor does it matter whether any
demon (or even God) can, or cares to, actually predict what we will
do: the existence of the strings of physical necessity, linked to far-
past states of the world and determining our current every move, is
what alarms us. Whether such alarm is actually warranted is a question
well outside the scope of this article (see the entries on free will
and incompatibilist theories of freedom). But a clear understanding of
what determinism is, and how we might be able to decide its truth or
falsity, is surely a useful starting point for any attempt to grapple
with this issue.

[Find: 2.2 The way things are at a time t]

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/

Lorenz's studies of weather forecasting gave rise to a concept in
chaos research that is popularly known as the "Butterfly effect." The
rather remarkable idea expressed in this term is that a very small
change in the initial conditions of some physical system‹e.g., the
fluttering of a butterfly's wing in Peking, as it cascades
unpredictably through a complicated system‹can have very large effects
later in time, e.g., producing a thunderstorm in New York. The
"Butterfly effect" is a striking metaphorical expression of a general
characteristic of chaotic systems that is more abstractly
characterized as "sensitive dependence on initial conditions." If one
were able to balance a pencil on its point, it is obvious that the
slightest touch in any direction would produce a much larger
effect‹the fall of the pencil to the surface. This is a very simple
and crude illustration of a feature‹sensitive dependence on initial
conditions‹that applies to a great variety of complex systems in the
physical world: the flow of gases and liquids through the atmosphere
or through pipes, the behavior of certain chemical solutions;
electronic circuits, human heartbeats; the spread of diseases through
a population, the dripping of water droplets from a faucet, the
formation of patterns and fractures in metallic and crystalline
surfaces, the formation of snowflakes, the behavior of the stock
market, and so on. In each of these cases, and many more like them,
very small changes in the system at the beginning can be multiplied so
as to produce erratic and unpredictable behavior at some later point
in time. Even the swinging of a pendulum‹long thought to be the
paradigm of Newtonian predictability‹is now known to exhibit "chaotic"
and irregular motion under certain conditions...

...Some writers have suggested that chaos theory provides a way of
resolving the vexing problem of determinism and free will. If the
behavior of matter is determined by physical laws, and human beings
(including their brains) are at least in part material beings, how can
the exercise of free will be consistent with these physical laws?
James Crutchfield has suggested that inasmuch as underlying chaotic
processes selectively magnify small fluctuations, "... chaos provides
a mechanism that allows for free will within a world governed by
deterministic laws." In a similar vein, Doyne Farmer, a scientist then
working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, observed that chaos
theory might provide "an operational way to define free will," a way
to reconcile free will and determinism. "The system is deterministic,
but you can't say [exactly] what it is going to do next."

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1997/PSCF6-97Davis.html

[the world pushes back when you push back it pushing back while you
pushed]

By World War II, the German airplanes which the big guns boomed at
were flying as fast as the missiles themselves. Speedier on-the spot
calculations were needed, ideally ones that could be triggered from
measurements of planes in flight made by the newly invented radar
scanner. Besides, Navy gunmen had a weighty problem: how to move and
aim these monsters with the accuracy the new tables gave them. The
solution was as close at hand as the stern of the ship: a large ship
controlled its rudder by a special type of automatic feedback loop
known as a servomechanism.

Servomechanisms were independently and simultaneously invented a
continent apart by an American and a Frenchman around 1860. It was the
Frenchman, engineer Leon Farcot, who tagged the device with a name
that stuck: moteur asservi, or servo-motor. As boats had increased in
size and speed over time, human power at the tiller was no longer
sufficient to move the rudder against the force of water surging
beneath. Marine technicians came up with various oil-hydraulic systems
that amplified the power of the tiller so that gently swinging the
miniature tiller at the captain's helm would move the mighty rudder,
kind of. A repeated swing of the minitiller would translate into
different amounts of steerage of the rudder depending on the speed of
the boat, waterline, and other similar factors. Farcot invented a
linkage system that connected the position of the heavy rudder
underwater back to the position of the easy-to-swing tiller-the
automatic feedback loop! The tiller then indicated the actual location
of the rudder, and by means of the loop, moving the indicator moved
the reality. In the jingo of current computerese, What you see is what
you get!

The heavy gun barrels of World War II were animated the same way. A
hydraulic hose of compressed oil connected a small pivoting lever (the
tiller) to the pistons steering the barrel. As the shipmate's hand
moved the lever to the desired location, that tiny turn compressed a
small piston which would open a valve releasing pressurized oil, which
would nudge a large piston moving the heavy gun barrel. But as the
barrel swung it would push a small piston that, in return, moved the
hand lever. As he tried to turn the tiller, the sailor would feel a
mild resistance, a force created by the feedback from the rudder he
wanted to move.

Bill Powers was a teenage Electronic Technician's Mate who worked with
the Navy's automated guns, and who later pursued control systems as
explanation for living things. He describes the false impression one
gets by reading about servomechanism loops:

The sheer mechanics of speaking or writing stretches out the action so
it seems that there is a sequence of well-separated events, one
following the other. If you were trying to describe how a gun-pointing
servomechanism works, you might start out by saying, "Suppose I push
down on the gun-barrel to create a position error. The error will
cause the servo motors to exert a force against the push, the force
getting larger as the push gets larger." That seems clear enough, but
it is a lie. If you really did this demonstration, you would say
"Suppose I push down on the gun-barrel to create an error...wait a
minute. It's stuck."

No, it isn't stuck. It's simply a good control system. As you begin to
push down, the little deviation in sensed position of the gun-barrel
causes the motor to twist the barrel up against your push. The amount
of deviation needed to make the counteractive force equal to the push
is so small that you can neither see nor feel it. As a result, the gun-
barrel feels as rigid as if it were cast in concrete. It creates the
appearance of one of those old-fashioned machines that is immovable
simply because it weighs 200 tons, but if someone turned off the power
the gun-barrel would fall immediately to the deck.

Servomechanisms have such an uncanny ability to aid steering that they
are still used (in updated technology) to pilot boats, to control the
flaps in airplanes, and to wiggle the fingers in remotely operated
arms handling toxic and nuclear waste.

More than the purely mechanical self-hood of the other regulators like
Heron's valve, Watt's governor, and Drebbel's thermostat, the
servomechanism of Farcot suggested the possibility of a man-machine
symbiosis-a joining of two worlds. The pilot merges into the
servomechanism. He gets power, it gets existence. Together they steer.
These two aspects of the servomechanisms-steering and symbiosis-
inspired one of the more colorful figures of modern science to
recognize the pattern that connected these control loops.

http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch7-b.html

-------------------------

Artificial life acknowledges new lifes and a new definition of life.
"New" life is an old force that organizes matter and energy in new
ways. Our ancient ancestors were often generous in deeming things
alive. But in the age of science, we make a careful distinction. We
call creatures and green plants alive, but when we call an institution
such as the post office an "organism," we say it is lifelike or "as if
it were alive."

We (and by this I mean scientists first) are beginning to see that
those organizations once called metaphorically alive are truly alive,
but animated by a life of a larger scope and wider definition. I call
this greater life "hyperlife." Hyperlife is a particular type of
vivisystem endowed with integrity, robustness, and cohesiveness-a
strong vivisystem rather than a lax one. A rain forest and a
periwinkle, an electronic network and a servomechanism, SimCity and
New York City, all possess degrees of hyperlife. Hyperlife is my word
for that class of life that includes both the AIDS virus and the
Michelangelo computer virus.

Biological life is only one species of hyperlife. A telephone network
is another species. A bullfrog is chock-full of hyperlife. The
Biosphere 2 project in Arizona swarms with hyperlife, as do Tierra,
and Terminator 2. Someday hyperlife will blossom in automobiles,
buildings, TVs, and test tubes.

http://www.kk.org/outofcontrol/ch17-h.html

A small ruder controls a large ship and the toungue is like a small
spark that leads to a raging forest fire...KJB