Does consciousness affect matter?


jts

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Anya,

What you are talking about is called duality. I'm not talking about duality.

What you call "physicality" is what can be boiled down to perception by the human 5 senses. Even starting from the most complex abstraction.

But what happens if we evolve a sixth sense organ to detect a part of reality that does not appear to be physical right now?

Here's an example of what I am talking about. There are some totally blind animals (see here). They do not perceive light. Does that mean light does not exist? That light does not have physicality for them?

In other words, which part is perception and which is metaphysical?

Let's do a thought experiment and imagine one of these species had conceptual communication. (Far-fetched, I know, but bear with me for the sake of example.) If one member of that species developed sight (or, more likely, partial unreliable sight being the first to evolve) and tried to communicate the experience of light to the others, would they accuse it of being mystical or anti-physical? Or crazy? I think all of them.

We could do that with deaf animals and sound, too.

If you want to argue that the mythology of religions is not physical fact, but imaginary instead, I agree.

If you want to argue that humans currently know all the fundamentals of existence, I don't agree or disagree. I call that a supposition or speculation. Further, when I think about evolution and some other things--for example, vast numbers of similar experiences reported across different human cultures and times (from ancient to modern)--I lean toward disagreeing, but without claiming fact. I believe these experiences could be akin to "glimpses" from an evolving sense organ, which could explain both the similarity and lack of consistency in the reports. But like I said, that is speculation.

If you argue that humans currently know all the fundamentals of the part of existence available to the perception of the five senses, I agree.

I hold we are within reality, i.e., we are part of reality, not the contrary.

To claim knowledge of all reality as if we are greater than it reminds me of a popular Terrence McKenna thought (paraphrased): The philosophers of science say, "Give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest."

I don't know if that's clear, but it's the best I can do right now.

Michael

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Bob,

Insturmental means? Not really. But I don't expect to detect color with a magnet, either.

We detect biomorphic fields simply by watching something grow.

You want measurement? The biomorphic field for humans means two legs and two arms. As the child grows, you can measure those. If there are three legs, for example, something popped outside the field. If only three legged people start being born, the field has changed and we are in deep shit. :smile:

btw - Can you measure gravity? Not the things gravity operates on. Gravity itself.

If not, that must be a fiction. Right?

Heh.

Michael

One way of determining causes is seeing the effects. There is no such -thing- as gravitation. Gravitation is an interaction (a process) the takes place among masses or energetic ensembles. Mass/Energy bends spacetime. You can see what the bends are by watching things move.

Caution: Do not let your clever witty verbalizations get in the way or real thinking. Language is a useful servant and a dreadful master.

Ba'al Chatzaf

First you say no such thing then you say such a thing. Make up your mind, then tell us about it.

--Brant

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I believe that materiality (and the finiteness of any particular, which may not include the Universe) is simply a property of things which actually exist, as a species of logical coherence. I don't think it would mean anything to say something exists but has no physicality, it gets to the problem of 'souls' if we deny this, because the relationship between a material and an 'immaterial' object is anything but clear.

An "immaterial object" is a contradiction in terms.

--Brant

are we confusing matter and energy?--matter is another form of energy or energy is reflected in different types of matter--regardless, matter is actually a subcategory of energy and is why absolute zero is an impossibility except as a theoretical mind construct, for if vice versa energy would be a subcategory of matter and absolute zero possible--that is, a true vacuum or actual non-existence, except non-existence cannot exist; it's a contradiction!

--Brant

sort of drunk, as usual, for those who want to hit me with a. ad h.

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I believe that materiality (and the finiteness of any particular, which may not include the Universe) is simply a property of things which actually exist, as a species of logical coherence. I don't think it would mean anything to say something exists but has no physicality, it gets to the problem of 'souls' if we deny this, because the relationship between a material and an 'immaterial' object is anything but clear.

An "immaterial object" is a contradiction in terms.

--Brant

are we confusing matter and energy?--matter is another form of energy or energy is reflected in different types of matter--regardless, matter is actually a subcategory of energy and is why absolute zero is an impossibility except as a theoretical mind construct, for if vice versa energy would be a subcategory of matter and absolute zero possible--that is, a true vacuum or actual non-existence, except non-existence cannot exist; it's a contradiction!

--Brant

sort of drunk, as usual, for those who want to hit me with a. ad h.

I agree.

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elationship between a material and an 'immaterial' object is anything but clear.

An "immaterial object" is a contradiction in terms.

What do you make of the magnetic field eminating from a bar magnet?

Ba'al Chatzaf

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What do you make of the magnetic field eminating from a bar magnet?

Bob,

Bingo.

That's called a field.

It's not energy and it exists.

(btw - Just to be a smartass, the word is emanating, not eminating. :smile: )

Michael

The field is generated by the synchronized electron spins of the atoms within.

Magnetic fields are the relativistic (side) effect of charges in motion.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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What do you make of the magnetic field eminating from a bar magnet?

Bob,

Bingo.

That's called a field.

It's not energy and it exists.

(btw - Just to be a smartass, the word is emanating, not eminating. :smile: )

Michael

The field is generated by the synchronized electron spins of the atoms within.

Magnetic fields are the relativistic (side) effect of charges in motion.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Well, let's see how well I remember my physics. The electric and magnetic fields are carried by photons which are physical. That is, a field is a real, physical/material thing.

Darrell

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What do you make of the magnetic field eminating from a bar magnet?

Bob,

Bingo.

That's called a field.

It's not energy and it exists.

(btw - Just to be a smartass, the word is emanating, not eminating. :smile: )

Michael

The field is generated by the synchronized electron spins of the atoms within.

Magnetic fields are the relativistic (side) effect of charges in motion.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Well, let's see how well I remember my physics. The electric and magnetic fields are carried by photons which are physical. That is, a field is a real, physical/material thing.

Darrell

Let's clarify what we mean when we say that a field is physical. Particles surely carry three of the four fundmental forces (we haven't discovered gravitons), but is that the same as saying the field itself is physical? Methinks not.

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What do you make of the magnetic field eminating from a bar magnet?

Bob,

Bingo.

That's called a field.

It's not energy and it exists.

(btw - Just to be a smartass, the word is emanating, not eminating. :smile: )

Michael

I am highly skeptical whether magnetic fields exist. All those phenomena are better explained by superposition of particles. 'Waves' and 'fields' are old-hat, boy. They are entirely explained by the actions of subatomic particle exchange. Gravity is a bit weirder, but space isn't an object.

However, these models are speculative. And I don't want to say I have an exhaustive theory of physical existence and reality more broadly. I just think that physicalism is necessary for realism, if things have 'properties' they must exhibit them upon objects in the Universe at least potentially.

but is that the same as saying the field itself is physical? Methinks not.

I don't think the 'field' is quite the object, though it may be real as in 'this relationship obtains'. The 'four physical forces' are properties of discrete objects, abstracted from the concrete that a number of particles have a certain behaviors which we've distinguished as electro-magnetic, weak nuclear, etc.

However, model interpretation is problematic because we know the models don't contain a lot of elements which would have to exist in order to work. Thus we may end up assigning more primacy to, say, atoms than they deserve.

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Consciousness may not be identical to any particular bit of matter, but consciousness must derive its reality from matter (and by 'matter' I mean 'physical stuff', not the more specific physics models like mass/energy).

This is a presumption, not a fact. I'm not sure consciousness must derive from anything just like I'm not sure space or electrons or hierarchical forms must derive from anything.

I used to believe like you do, but I decided to limit my knowledge to things I can know for certain and be serene in not knowing the things I cannot. I find great comfort in saying I don't know when I truly don't.

The problem is that there is no evidence that consciousness requires any "force" or "field" that we don't already know about. I can't argue with a statement that you don't know that such things don't exist, but let me try to argue that they aren't really necessary.

To me, it is clear that consciousness and the operations of the brain are just two different levels of description of the same physical process. First, let me use an analogy. If I were to ask my son, some day, what he was doing, he might say that he was playing a video game called "Call of Duty." He would say that he was shooting and killing enemy soldiers on a battlefield in Europe. And, that would be a perfectly valid description of what he was doing. It would be a high level description.

However, if we were to ask what he was doing at a much lower level, we might say that he was moving levers on a control unit and that moving those levers was sending voltages of various levels to a computer. Looking inside the computer (under a microscope) we would see tens of millions of solid state switches changing states millions of times per second. At the output, we would see a complex electromagnetic wave being transmitted through a wire to a television which, being an old-fashioned television, uses an electron beam to illuminate phosphors on a screen.

At a slightly higher level we might describe the operations of the switches in the computer as implementing logic gates and adders and multiplication units, and memory, etc. At yet a higher level we might see hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of assembly code that implemented a certain sequence of commands and above that we might see millions of lines of a higher level language that was compiled into the assembly code to run on the computer.

All of the descriptions are valid. There is no duality. There are only different descriptive levels.

Looking at the activities of the brain, we would see similar situation. I might say that I am thinking, that I am aware of my surroundings, or that I am imagining the trees in the yard in front of the house in which I grew up. Awareness, thought, and imagination are all parts of consciousness and are a valid description of a person's faculty of consciousness. However, it is equally true that lower level descriptions are possible.

Looking at a very low level, we would see tens of billions of neurons all firing hundreds of times per second with each one firing at its own, individual rate, and those rates would be changing over time in response to the firing rates of other neurons that are connected through thousands or tens of thousands of connections per neuron. At a somewhat higher level, we would see various regions of the brain that are specialized to process incoming sensory signals from each of the sense organs --- the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and tactile neurons We would also see regions of the brain that control different muscle movements and specialized regions for speech production and other important functions.

Again, there is no duality, just different levels of description.

In this view, it makes no sense to talk about the mind controlling the brain. The mind and the brain are the same thing, just described differently.

So, what about volition? Is it possible for a physical system to have volition?

First, we have to ask, what is volition?

Volition is generally taken to mean an unforced choice. It can also mean an non-predetermined choice. Clearly, a person does not operate like a clock. A person's choices and actions cannot be predicted in the same sense that the future state of a clock can be determined by knowing its present state.

The answer, I believe, is randomness. This runs counter to Rand, Piekoff and other major Objectivists, but I haven't seen a satisfactory explanation from them concerning the relationship of volition to physical processes.

Let's look a little more closely at the process of thought and action. In my view, in deciding what to do a person basically goes through these steps, (1) observing the world, (2) thinking up possible actions, (3) evaluating the possibilities, (4) choosing an action, (5) taking an action, and --- returning to the beginning --- observing the consequences. This process takes place over all time scales from choosing where to place one's foot while walking to planning for one's retirement and pertains even to choosing what to think about next.

In my view, randomness probably enters the picture in step 2, the process of generating a set of possible actions. Perhaps neurons in some part of the brain tap into the natural randomness present in real, physical processes. The idea that randomness enters the process in step 2 does not imply that people act entirely randomly because each possible action must be evaluated before one is chosen. So, most crazy ideas are rejected or discarded most of the time. So, most people are not insane. However, the introduction of randomness does engender the possibility of acting unpredictably.

As a little aside, this works nicely from an information theoretic point of view. In information theory, a random source is an information source since no finite set of symbols can encode all of the information from a random source over infinite time. In other words, an information source produces an infinite stream of symbols. Usually, coding efficiency is characterized by the average number of symbols used per bit of information from the source but there is a limit to how compact that list can be and it is necessarily unbounded in size over time.

If humans behave randomly, then humans are an information source.

If humans are an information source, then it is not surprising that they are able to invent new things. They just keep randomly imagining new possibilities, discarding the craziest ones, honing in on the ones that seem promising, and thinking up random refinements for them.

Also, for example, the question of whether criminals are the way they are because of nature or nurture is invalid because a human is an information source. A human is not bound by either nature or nurture. He has the ability to act contrary to both. Of course, if you believe in volition, then that is nothing new, but having a physical explanation for volition is devastating to the arguments for human determinism.

Darrell

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I would agree with most of what you wrote except for a couple of points.

All of the descriptions are valid. There is no duality. There are only different descriptive levels.

I would not call them different 'levels'. I would say they are different aspects of reality. The physical processes of the molecular structure of our minds, as described by mathematical formula and empirical interpretation, would be the aspect of particular discrete physical processes. Another aspect would be that of human action, a system of volition and judgment which is constituted of these physical processes in any concrete instance, but which has its own science (to make a weak analogy, think of mathematics: mathematics describe a reality about discrete objects, but any actual numbers will only exist as instantiated by material structures) to describe it, and a methodology appropriate to that science.

The other disagreement I have is with 'randomness'. I do not think this is a coherent concept if we mean it to be 'undertermined', see Feyman's lectures in New Zealand where he gives a deterministic explanation of quantum phenomena based on a particle's spin at various potential points. It's not Newtonian, but it's not random or ghostly. As for how volition interacts with the world, I reject 'free will' as a non-concept, a confusion of disparate ideas about non-causality and intentionality. Intentionality, like reason, is a potential product of certain systems in our mind. When we choose to do things we actually intend to do them. However, from a physical and praxeological point of view, these actions are determined by the particular states of our brain and the ideas and valuations which exist. If our actions did not conform to the behavior of our bodies and ends-means concepts already existing they would not be our actions.

I do not think 'free will' is necessary to resolve the issue of legal responsibility or intentional behavior, and I don't think it's even logically related to the question of morality.

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Wow--interesting thread. Darrell, your #65 post is well laid out and compelling, but I would ask the same thing Michael asks, because you use the term "randomness" to describe how choice manifests in our brains. Can you prove, or at least describe, how randomness works in physical processes? My brother, who was an electrical enginneering major, said he thought scientists often look at "randomness" like "probabilities," a range of possible outcomes that are not yet concretized in the physical present, thus could actualize in different ways in the future. Is this similar to you view? You also talk about "different levels of description" for different processes, mental and/or physical. Are these different levels not just epistemological but metaphysical? If so, do these levels mean there are natural hierarchies to things, where one thing would naturally subsume or override over another? If this is true, then is it always true that basic levels have to control more evolved ones? Is it possible that multiple levels can be held and used within any "multidimensional" entity, where that entity could sometimes "choose" one or the other to direct it (e.g. during states of equilibriated balance)?

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If so, do these levels mean there are natural hierarchies to things, where one thing would naturally subsume or override over another?

This is why I prefer to think of them as different aspects of the same thing or things. Certain objects in relation to one another, due to their properties, will develop into systems with distinct properties as a system. The physical brain is identical to the mind, insofar as its parts constitute a sufficient structure to cause such a system to develop.

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The answer, I believe, is randomness.

Darrell,

In other words, in your conception, causality goes out the window when consciousness enters it?

Michael

No, I don't think so. The Objectivist concept of causality, which I accept, does not, at its root, depend upon determinism. The Objectivist concept is that everything has a specific nature and behaves according to it. Part of that nature may include randomness. How is that possible? The randomness is limited in its scope.

Let me use the double slit experiment as an example. An electron is fired at a pair of slits. It seemingly passes through both slits, interferes with itself, and impacts the scintillation screen at a particular point. The particular point at which it will strike is indeterminant before the electron has been fired. There is a probability distribution governing its behavior, but the location at which it will hit he screen cannot be determined.

Some may argue that the reason we cannot determine the destination of the electron is simply that we cannot measure the initial conditions accurately enough, but I don't believe that. I might do some research and write another comment on why I think such randomness is fundamental, but for the time being, lets just assume it is. That does not obviate the fact that the electron has a specific nature. We may not know exactly where it will impact the screen or whether it will impact it at all --- it could be reflected before passing through the slits --- but we know that it won't turn into a pink elephant and crash through the screen. The scope of its randomness is limited.

If we accept the notion that elementary particles can act randomly, then the brain need merely tap into that randomness. It doesn't need to create a new kind of randomness. And, any randomness exhibited by the brain does not obviate the fact that it has a specific nature any more than in the case of the individual particle.

Everything has a specific nature and must act in accordance with it.

Darrell

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Wow--interesting thread. Darrell, your #65 post is well laid out and compelling, but I would ask the same thing Michael asks, because you use the term "randomness" to describe how choice manifests in our brains. Can you prove, or at least describe, how randomness works in physical processes? My brother, who was an electrical enginneering major, said he thought scientists often look at "randomness" like "probabilities," a range of possible outcomes that are not yet concretized in the physical present, thus could actualize in different ways in the future. Is this similar to you view? You also talk about "different levels of description" for different processes, mental and/or physical. Are these different levels not just epistemological but metaphysical? If so, do these levels mean there are natural hierarchies to things, where one thing would naturally subsume or override over another? If this is true, then is it always true that basic levels have to control more evolved ones? Is it possible that multiple levels can be held and used within any "multidimensional" entity, where that entity could sometimes "choose" one or the other to direct it (e.g. during states of equilibriated balance)?

Hi Dan,

I think your brother's description makes sense.

As far as whether levels of description are epistemological or metaphysical, the answer is that they are purely epistemological. They are just different levels of description. Nothing more. There is only one thing being described. It is just being described in different ways.

Darrell

P.S. Anya, I'll try to get to your comments later.

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Hey Darrell,

I agree with you that we can have different desciptions for the same things. If you wanted to describe a pie according to its atomic structure or, its nutritional content, or its taste, texture and aesthetic qualities, these all could be referencing the same spatial-temporal context. but I'm wondering if you're implying more when you say "levels" of description are referencing the same thing. You say concerning cognitive processes:

"Looking at a very low level, we would see tens of billions of neurons all firing hundreds of times per second with each one firing at its own, individual rate, and those rates would be changing over time in response to the firing rates of other neurons that are connected through thousands or tens of thousands of connections per neuron. At a somewhat higher level, we would see various regions of the brain that are specialized to process incoming sensory signals from each of the sense organs --- the eyes, ears, nose, mouth and tactile neurons We would also see regions of the brain that control different muscle movements and specialized regions for speech production and other important functions."

Is there any difference between what you're decribing here and a possible basic and complex, and/or microscopic and somewhat more macroscopic view of cognitive processes? Aren't there metaphyscial/physical differences between how things function on these e.g. microscopic vs. macroscopic levels (i.e. quantum theory vs. general relativity). In this way if "consciousness" describes, for example, any/all our brain functions seen more macroscopically or in total, couldn't some emergent property (or properties) come about from this? Couldn't then, our ability to make (albeit limited) choices, be an effect of some more complex (perhaps within our frontal lobes) or more macroscopic (e.g. through the size and quantitative integration capacities of our brains) arrangement of neural pathways, which we could call self-consciouness?

A lot of scientists (like my brother) seem like they want to reduce everything down to only their gut, microscopic physical descriptions and then use this as a way try to say eveything is determinable, except often leaving open "randomness" or "probabilities" as the solution behind how things change, an perhaps how we can make choices. I just think it is more complex than that and that when we look at things from different levels we are seeing actual different physcial organizational patterns, because we are seeing and measuring more or less of the active processes taking place, and becasue entities actually function differentlly under some of the same forces (like gravity) at different levels. We can try to describe all things with basic physical components, but it is their interactive context that is crutial to understanding how new entities, actions, properties, etc. can emerge, and I think that is lost sometimes when we try to describe things in terms of the underlying physics--becasue it narrows our scope to those entities, rather than their larger context. Would you agree with this?

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Consciousness does affect matter. When you move a muscle intentionally your consciousness has actually caused matter to move.

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I would agree with most of what you wrote except for a couple of points.

All of the descriptions are valid. There is no duality. There are only different descriptive levels.

I would not call them different 'levels'. I would say they are different aspects of reality. The physical processes of the molecular structure of our minds, as described by mathematical formula and empirical interpretation, would be the aspect of particular discrete physical processes. Another aspect would be that of human action, a system of volition and judgment which is constituted of these physical processes in any concrete instance, but which has its own science (to make a weak analogy, think of mathematics: mathematics describe a reality about discrete objects, but any actual numbers will only exist as instantiated by material structures) to describe it, and a methodology appropriate to that science.

The other disagreement I have is with 'randomness'. I do not think this is a coherent concept if we mean it to be 'undertermined', see Feyman's lectures in New Zealand where he gives a deterministic explanation of quantum phenomena based on a particle's spin at various potential points. It's not Newtonian, but it's not random or ghostly. As for how volition interacts with the world, I reject 'free will' as a non-concept, a confusion of disparate ideas about non-causality and intentionality. Intentionality, like reason, is a potential product of certain systems in our mind. When we choose to do things we actually intend to do them. However, from a physical and praxeological point of view, these actions are determined by the particular states of our brain and the ideas and valuations which exist. If our actions did not conform to the behavior of our bodies and ends-means concepts already existing they would not be our actions.

I do not think 'free will' is necessary to resolve the issue of legal responsibility or intentional behavior, and I don't think it's even logically related to the question of morality.

Hi Anya,

Welcome to OL. You seem to have a pretty well developed theory/opinion about certain subjects and I would like to know more about how you square intentionality with a lack of free-will, etc. Certainly, intentionality is necessary for morality, but I don't see how it is that is intentionality is possible without a concept that variously gets labeled volition or free-will. How is deterministic intentionality possible? I don't see it.

I also don't agree that different descriptive levels are different aspects of reality. I would agree that some phenomena are easier to describe at one level of abstraction than at another. For example, it is much easier to talk about phases of matter using terms like pressure and temperature than it is to delve into the thermodynamic, molecular level of description, for many, everyday purposes, and those levels are not so remote as the difference between the description of a video game in terms of the characters on the screen versus the states of millions of switches. Would you say that a video game, as perceived by the player is a different aspect of reality than the states of the switches in the computer? Would you say that the pressure of a gas is a different aspect of reality than the thermodynamic state of the constituent molecules?

Back to the issue of randomness, I will take a look at Feynman's lectures, but let me give you a taste of why I think randomness is necessarily a feature of the real world. We had a discussion going when I was in college about the possibility of encoding all of the information in the Library of Congress using a block of aluminum. The idea was that the information would be encoded in a very long but finite number of decimal digits which would be preceded by a decimal point. Then, the block of aluminum would be cut to exactly that many feet (or meters) in length. Tada! Of course, the fact that matter is composed of atoms that have finite, non-zero size would intrude and make the foregoing operation impossible. But, more to the point, it seems likely that any physical system is only capable of storing a finite amount of information.

Now, as physical systems evolve through time, they lose information about their previous history. In fact, the rate at which a physical system loses information is one characteristic of the system. Some systems, such as clocks, are very good preservers of information. At any time, one can know with high precision, the state at some previous time, possibly over a relatively long period of time. Other systems, such as the weather, lose information at a much higher rate. Knowing the weather today doesn't tell you much about what it was three weeks ago. A dripping faucet is another example that is relatively easy to study.

If one looks at the trajectories through phase space of something such as a dripping faucet, what one finds is that trajectories that start out very close together quickly diverge. In fact, for a chaotic dynamical system, which includes almost any non-linear system, which means almost every real physical system, neighboring trajectories diverge at an exponential rate.

To take a simple example, consider a lump of bread dough. Consider a process of kneading in which the lump is first stretched to twice its original length, then folded over so that it regains something approximating its original width and height. The process is then repeated. If one were to examine two neighboring grains of salt within the dough, each time the dough was stretched, the distance between them would roughly double so that after a short time, they would be in totally different parts of the dough. My thanks to Alfred Hubler for that example.

Since the particles in a chaotic dynamical system diverge exponentially, even if the system were deterministic, in order to know where the particles would be to within, say, three significant digits at some time, it would have been necessary to know where they were to within something like six significant digits just a short time earlier. And, the situation quickly gets worse as the system evolves through time. And, since a physical system has only a finite ability to represent information, information must be squeezed out of the system over time.

But, a system cannot simply grind to a halt because it no longer "knows" where it is. As information is lost from a system, new information must be injected into it. Where does that information come from? I would suggest that there are fundamental sources of randomness in nature that supply that information.

Of course, one could argue that the actual physical state of a system is something that is precise to infinitely many digits of accuracy so the apparent information loss is purely observational and not real, but is there any evidence to support such an assertion?

Darrell

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