Chaos Theory

C

Cactus Jack

Death Knight of Northrend
Registered Senior Member
Related to Philosophy do believe in chaos theory? In another disscussion I had many members believed death is the end of counciessness and it is difficult to make an impact on the future. Believeing Chaos theory everything makes an impact. A good way of thinking of it is a debate on time travel: Some people belive traveling into the past is allright because you can't possible effect the future in a major way, others say moving a matchbox two inches screws everything over.

So do we make a major impact that we can't comprehend or not?
 
Well if you think about the example of the butterfly causing a hurricane on the other side of the world, then i guess you can say that we all make a great impact weather we want to or not. The question is if this impact is meaningful in a global perspective and if it is an essential part in some great scheme. In this respect I think the individual is totally redundant. Like for any complex system it is the quantity that counts.

If we examine our world and try to derive what all our impacts summerize up to I don't think we can come to any correct conclusion. Just as the electrons or components in a computer have no way of deriving what the computer program is doing.

Hopefully this has some relevance to your question.
 
cactus,

i believe it is very possible that a chaos umm structure (excuse the pun) exists, however what i can not believe is that we can comprehend this. There are close to an infinite number of varibles for the butterly/hurricane thoery. So possibly it can, but perdicting it is near impossible. a supercomputer moght be able to constuct a formula for this, but at this point i would just as soon say everything is random, for the requirment of the nauseating proof.
 
Small initial differences in nonlinear systems may lead to very different states. The states may still be somewhat predictable. The weather may be impossible to predict with any accuracy a month from today but the climate is relatively stable. Chaotic systems sweep out ranges of possible values. That range of possible values may be known even when the precise value cannot be determined.

For every butterfly that “causes” a hurricane, many more do not. Would guess that some individual actions have major consequences while most do not.

As for larger meaning…who can know? And if one can’t know does it matter?
 
"For every butterfly that “causes” a hurricane, many more do not. Would guess that some individual actions have major consequences while most do not. "
Or : mosty of the times there is a fruitfly somewhere preventing the storm to occure :)

hamster2, you seem to be educated in the theory of nonlinear system dynamics. (at least you know the language) Forget not the attractor states. For some systems it is very easy to predict a future state.
 
i don't know here im just gessing but

Wouldn't the Chaos Theory have to do with the possablitys not the outcomes?

I don't even know how to describe what i mean

Like in a controled system you may have 100 outcomes but in a chaos system there are INFINITE outcomes and each are equaly valid

That makes sences?
 
State Spaces

Asguard,
You are right, chaos theory is a part of the theory of complex systems. That theory is concearned with state spaces, which describe all possible trajectories of evolution of a complex system (i.e. describes all possible behaviours). But also: given a certain starting point, one should be able to tell how the system will develop (i.e. what is the outcome).
Chaotic systems are complex systems of which the behaviour is extremely sensitive to the original state of the system. So one can only predict the behaviour of a chaotic system if one knows exactly (to an infinate degree) what is the starting state. The problem is, that is impossible.

Other complex systems have only a limited amount of possible outcomes in the state space. There trajectories of evolution in the state space will converge to a signle point (an attractor) or to a loop in the statespace (or a combimation).
A notorious example is the number of rabbits and the number of foxes in a simplified enviromnet. If the number of foxes is large, the number of rabbits will decline, because so many get eaten. But that will cause hunger (and starvation) in the fox colony.So there are few foxes and the number of rabbits will grow again, resukting in abundance for the foxes and their number will grow as well. Et cetera and so forth. An other possible end state of the system is that there are no foxes and no rabbits, or no foxes and a lot of rabbits. So there are three attractors in the state space. A dynamic attractor (the dynamic equilibrium) and two point attractors (no foxes + no rabbits OR no foxes + a lot of rabbits).

Fun, isn't it?
 
Merlijn, that was a good population example. Wanted to describe climate as a strange attractor for weather but also wanted to avoid jargon. Wonder if a new ice age or runaway global warming could be seen as two more weather attractors.
 
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Hamster2,
intersting! and I think you're right (just a gut feeling).

I'm not certain: was the start of my last post clear?
 
Merlijn, it was to this hamster. It is difficult to balance understandability with accuracy when introducing a technical topic. Felt you gave a good explanation. (In such a diverse group one can’t expect universal comprehension.)
 
Ok so its not really probability or possibility but more that acracy of the measurments needed in order for the predictions to be made
 
but do you guys think that we can determine when or where or anything about these chaos theories? can we perdict when the hurricanes will occur? what do you think in that respect
 
Just a small aside, and I hope this isn't considered irrelevant for this thread, but:

Sensitive dependence on initial conditions, i.e. the "Butterfly Effect", has intrigued me since I first read about it a few years ago (Chaos, Gleick). From my limited understanding of it (I'm not a physicist by any stretch of the imagination), I know it's applied most often on a macrocosmic level, like predicting weather, or population trends, I quess the technical jargon is "complex systems". Well, this got me thinkng. Can't we consider a single human-being a complex system as well? I think so, and it has led me to experiement with applying the butterfly effect in my own life. I mean, using myself as a sort of scientific experienment, taking it down to the microcosmic level and keeping record of the results. Here's a very simple example, taken from my journal, of what I'm talking about:

Experiment: Personal Butterfly Effect #1
Subject: people I meet today
Purpose: determine what effect my choice of clothing has upon others I encounter throughout the day.

Notes:

Today I chose to wear a shirt I have, that has a picture on the front of an eye inside a six-pointed star. This was my "initial-condition" for purposes of this experiment. The shirt is black and the design is red. It's somewhat sinister looking but nothing overtly "evil" or "satanic" per se. Throughout the day, I paid special attention to how others reacted to my shirt. I didn't in anyway try to emphasize it or hide it. I found that some people,, when talking to me would look at the design on the shirt, and I could sense that they were trying to figure out what it was. Not one of them asked me, but would continue to talk as if they didn't just look at it. I also noticed that some people who started out being very friendly to me, after noticing my shirt, became a little more distant and skeptical of my character, one even quickly making an excuse to leave my presence. I also notced that a few people reacted in a very positive manner after noticing my shirt. One, a gas-station clerk, began asking personal questions right after noticing the design. "What do you do for a living?", "Where do you work?" "Did you go to a university?", "Have any degrees?". I can't be sure how much the shirt design was related to all of the observations that I made, and how many just happened to be coincidence that the attitudes of the subjects changed immediately after they noticed it, but it was an interesting experiment.

Again, this was a very simple experiment, and looking back I could have done a lot more to make it more accurate, but it was the first one I attempted. Overall, I want to get better at projecting long-term results from these experiments and get much more indepth, but I'm still working on it. If nothing else, it's better then sitting at home in front of the boob-tube!
 
that interesting, and not entirley of topic,
so you were trying to prove the complexity and sometimes randomness of humans?
good experiment i must try that sometime.
 
Very nice! And I would like to read your findings of the 'control-condition' (i.e. neutral/normal shirt).

Also I think this is relevant: we are complex stystems and our brains are very much so!
In our interaction with others, we constantly influence each other in such a way that you may call our social environment a chatic system.
For example: can you predict what your, or anybody elses mood will be the day after tomorrow? Most often that would be quite impossiblle, even though what happenes today has an influence.

keep up the good work :)
 
Need some incite: I enjoy Chaos Theory, but do you think it applies to all complex systems?
 
no not to all complex systems. But chaotic systems (which is, I believe, related to, but not the same as chaos theory) are a subgroup of complex systems.
 
oedipus ,
so you were trying to prove the complexity and sometimes randomness of humans?
Click to expand...
Mostly I was approaching the experiment to see if I could determine what effect different things in my life had on others, and also what long-term effect seemingly inconsequential things I do or say would have on my life. A lot like what Merlijn said
can you predict what your, or anybody elses mood will be the day after tomorrow?
Click to expand...
I figured to myself that if a physicist can use chaos theory to try and determine such random situations as weather and population, then it is theoretically possible to do the same for interactions between individual humans, and I used myself as the subject. In fact, I haven't done an experiment in awhile, but bringing it up makes me want to continue. It also makes me consider the series of "little details" that caused me to join sciforums, find this thread, make this post and therefore lead me to start the experiment again. :D I think there's something to this, but I'm still just groping around.
 
Its fine in theory to say that 1 butterfly can change the course of hurricane but in reality you have 10 billion butterfys each pointing their wing in different directions.
 
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