Chaos
Chaos is the fundamental condition of the early universe and the present microcosmos. The emergence of ordered macrocosmic structures is a consequence of information creating processes that are at the heart of information philosophy.
Chaos corresponds to a state of maximum disorder (entropy) and thus minimal information. Chaos involves irreducible randomness, which is now known to be quantum mechanical in origin.
Traditional philosophers rejected
chance and randomness as unintelligible ideas. Chaos was used to describe situations in which humans simply lack the knowledge of what exactly is going on. Thus chaos was regarded as an epistemological problem only.
The apparent orderly motions of the heavenly bodies led early natural philosophers to the idea of
deterministic laws, of which classical Newtonian mechanics was the culmination.
Theologians were confident that God could know details of which humans were ignorant. Leibniz and Laplace postulated a super intelligence that could know the positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe and thus know the complete future.
The resulting determinism has proved to be an
illusion.
Since the fundamental particles follow the laws of quantum mechanics, their macroscopic behavior approaches the classical motions (the correspondence principle) only in the limit as a consequence of the law of large numbers that describes macroscopic objects made up of vast numbers of quantum particles.
Chaos Theory
"Chaos theory" is a deterministic mathematical formalism that describes the dynamics of physical systems near singular points in their motions where infinitesimal differences in position or velocity lead to exponentially large differences at later times.
In his 1873
Essay on Science and Free Will,
James Clerk Maxwell noted the occurrence of such behaviors in hydrodynamical flows and argued that their extreme sensitivity might allow living creatures to escape from determinism.
Note that Maxwell completely understands the sensitivity to initial conditions that is the basis for today's chaos theory
When the state of things is such that an infinitely small variation of the present state will alter only by an infinitely small quantity the state at some future time, the condition of the system, whether at rest or in motion, is said to be stable; but when an infinitely small variation in the present state may bring about a finite difference in the state of the system in a finite time, the condition of the system is said to be unstable.
It is manifest that the existence of unstable conditions renders impossible the prediction of future events, if our knowledge of the present state is only approximate, and not accurate.
But chaos theorists are
determinists who think that chaotic behavior is only apparently random.
Articles on Chaos
- Chaos and Cosmos (Entropy and Information Growth)
- Chaos Theory and Complexity Are Deterministic Theories
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