Immortalist
yahoo.com> wrote:
> ...Science had been founded on the belief that the proper
> route to understanding a complex system, such as the
> movement of the heavens, the mixing of chemicals, or the
> emergence of life, was to break it down into a collection
> of parts linked by simple mathematical formulae.
Wrong, most obviously with biological and medical science.
> You wanted a list of bits and the rules that put them back together again.
Wrong, most obviously with biological and medical science.
> And if the essence of a system could be reduced to an equation
> that fitted comfortably on the front of a T-shirt - something like
> Einstein's famous e = mc^2 - then that was perfect.
Just a tiny part of real science.
> But reductionism depends on the assumption that the
> world is discontinuous, that it is made of discrete bits.
Wrong again.
> However, real life does not have sharp boundaries.
And real science handles that fine.
> For instance, even our own bodies are not cleanly separated
> from their surroundings. The surface of our skin may appear
> to be a perimeter marking 'us' from 'not us' with digital clarity.
> It seems a binary distinction. Yet when viewed on a microscopic
> scale, when does an oxygen or water molecule stop belonging
> to the surrounding air and become part of ourselves? Or when
> does a skin flake or spot of grease become sufficiently detached
> from our body to count as just a passing speck of dust? From
> a distance, things can seem to have sharp boundaries, but get
> in close and those boundaries turn soft.
And real science handles that fine.
> The idea of the bounded object is really just a convenient fiction.
Nope, just a simplification thats useful in some situations.
> Of course, reductionism has served science well. The reason is
> that for most of the time scientists stick to situations, or scales
> of magnification, where the simplification does no real harm.
And real science handles other fields like evolution fine without
any need for any simplication. In spades with nuclear physics etc.
> When we talk about having a body, the fuzziness of its actual physical
> boundaries is normally quite irrelevant at our level of discussion. The
> odd skin flake or water molecule the wrong side makes little difference
> when our use of the concept captures at least 99.99 per cent of what
> we mean to say. In the same way, the normal laws of physics are
> as accurate as we need for most of the problems we face in life.
And Newton's laws continue to be very useful when the speed is nowhere near the speed of light etc.
> When calculating the load forces on a new bridge design, the odd
> quantum blip affecting an atom in a steel girder will be lost among
> the statistical regularity of zillions of other atomic interactions.
> There is a lot of science that can be done by concentrating on
> situations so close to being digital as not to make a difference.
And you dont even need to go that far the vast bulk of the time either.
> Yet there are clearly also a great many areas in life where the blurring
> of boundaries and the fluid nature of relationships cannot be ignored.
And real science does not ignore them.
> The classic examples are the weather, economics, social
> systems, condensed matter physics, quantum mechanics,
> fluid dynamics, and anything to do with biology. Such systems
> are not just accumulations of components, bits of clockwork in
> which every gear is locked into a fixed relationship with its fellows.
Some of them are, even with those systems.
> Instead, they are restless and evolving, driven
> by the pressures of their own internal competition.
Meaningless waffle.
> If such systems seem to have any stability, it is only because
> they have reached a momentary accommodation of tensions.
More meaningless waffle.
> Like soap bubbles, they have been stretched to
> some delicately trembling pitch of organisation.
Just another of your silly little fantasys.
> It should not be surprising, then, that attempts to
> break them into collections of labelled parts will
> destroy what seems most important about them.
Pity it doesnt.
> Reductionism is much too clumsy-fingered to perform such a task....
Wrong again. Its what worked out what evolution was about.
DNA in spades.
Infectious disease in spades.
Etc etc etc.
> ...While the path of any particular system could not be
> predicted, outcomes had a tendency to group. Certain
> kinds of outcome would be far more likely than others....
And real science handles that fine too.
> ...Three Types of Attractors [1] The simplest type of attractor is a
> point attractor - a system within which no matter where you begin the
> calculation you will always end up at the same spot; water funnelling
> down a plughole or a pendulum swinging to rest. [2] A slightly more
> interesting class of attractor is the limit cycle in which the set of
> allowed outcomes forms a line rather than a point; a marble rattling
> around inside the brim of a bowler hat. The marble might roll about
> from side to side a bit, but eventually it will have to settle
> somewhere along a two-dimensional path.
More irrelevant waffle.
> [3] The butterfly effect, the gentle fluttering of a butterfly's wings
> could be enough to tip the balance of a developing weather
> system and make the difference as to whether or not a hurricane
> eventually swept across a country on the far side of the planet...
Just another of your pathetic little complete wanks.
> ...So the concept of the attractor went some way to
> salvaging the loss of certainty that came with chaos theory.
More meaningless waffle.
> Even more encouragingly, there was the promise that science
> might discover that many quite different systems actually shared
> the same kinds of attractors. There could be a family resemblance
> linking natural phenomena as diverse as weather systems, the
> turbulence of a river, and the firing of a neuron.
Pigs might fly, too.
> A study of attractor mechanics might end up uniting many areas of science...
Pigs arse it did.
> ...Once their eyes had been opened, scientists began to
> see the hand of chaos in all kinds of natural phenomena.
Only the wankers who then proceeded to wank themselves completely blind.
Nothing useful ever came out of that desperate wanking.
> Biologists used chaos theory to explain everything from the growth of
> patterns on snail shells to the branching of the body's blood vessels.
Didnt need explaining.
> Physicists saw chaotic patterning in the shape of clouds
Didnt need explaining.
> or the melting of ice.
Nope.
> Earth scientists found chaos in the frequency of earthquakes
> and the tributary patterns of river systems...
Everyone knew that there was quite a bit of randomness in stuff like that.
> ...The distinction between chaos and complexity can seem
> hazy at times, but, essentially, chaos theory describes how
> a simple, repetitive interaction, left alone to rub along, can
> produce something of rich structure.
Nope. There is no 'structure' by definition, stupid.
> It is about the feedback-driven generation of complication.
Nope.
> Genuine complexity is something else, however. Shorelines,
> rain puddles and weather patterns have an intricate structure,
> but the really interesting things in life - systems like cells,
> economies, ecologies, and, of course, human minds - have
> extra properties such as an ability to adapt, to self-organise,
> to maintain some sort of coherence or internal integrity.
Must be one of those rocket scientist desperate wankers.
> These systems are not slaves to their maths, passively
> following a trajectory through phase space.
More meaningless waffle.
> Instead, they have developed some sort of memory or genetic mechanism
> which allows them to fine-tune the very feedback processes that drive them.
Nope.
> They can change the attractor landscapes in which
> they dwell, and so reshape their own futures.
Nope.
> A complex system is one that has harnessed chaos,
> rather than one that is merely produced by it.
Wrong, as always.
> In its most straightforward guise, complexity theory sounds
> no more than a restatement of classical Darwinian evolution,
Wrong, as always.
> which is based on the simple statistical fact that
> what works has a tendency to outlast what doesn't...
You'll end up completely blind if you dont watch out.
Wota fucking wanker.
