sethoflagos

I fully take on your point of not throwing out the baby with the bathwater and agree wholeheartedly. However, while monolithic organisations are able to claim ownership and flag wave these beneficial ethics as symbols of their fitness to hold sway, rather than see much in way of benefit we tend to get lumbered with all the detestable baggage following on in the wake.

Bogus positions of undeserved influence and authority will always attract the walking dog turds of our communities.

The goal may indeed be very distant; possibly unattainable for many generations to come. But is that any reasonable excuse to stay clinging on to the old shackles of the distant past that have clearly denied so many the opportunity to realise their full potential for so long?

Thank you for this. I believe that there is a general consensus that entropy is Lorentz invariant and much of what you say seems to follow on from this sensibly enough. Minor-ish exceptions: For 1) I'd say that it may operate equally in both the abstract and concrete realms as one might expect if it were one of the most fundamental of laws (ie holds for all physically possible universes) as some suspect. 5) For similar reasons, I'd be tempted to consider substituting 'non-physical' for 'teleological'. If I understand you correctly, the time reversed transitions appear to be goal-driven (teleological) towards simply restoring the initial state in the absence of any convincing causal mechanism to drive it. A bit off-topic perhaps but appreciated here anyway.

He gained his Nobel prize for his work in irreversible thermodynamic processes during my first year chemical engineering course so a few of us dipped into his work out of interest (long before the pop-sci chaos carnival kicked off): Rather than his self-organisation stuff(which I found hard to grasp) my main take away at the time can be summarised in this little snippet from his Wikipedia page: Maybe that helps frame some of my earlier posts here and elsewhere. I'm averse to hard determinism and not just for religious reasons. If we loosen the thrall of determinism a little, then I can nod my head in agreement. Catalytic Synthesis of Polyribonucleic Acid on Prebiotic Rock Glasses has already got us up to sequences of several hundred nucleotides with no resort to 'quantum woo'. It isn't so much a question of increasing the number of physical interactions as such. More maybe assembling some virtual low probability microstate within a superposition to which a phenomenon like tunnelling can help bypass the sometimes significant energy barriers to gain access. (Woo alert!) To get around ergodicity issues etc. A classical, determinist model may be overly pessimistic by orders of magnitude if this isn't merely a pipedream. Precisely. So happy you butted in there 😁

Please feel free to butt in! I was hoping someone would raise the topic of ergodicity as it is relevant, Thermodynamic equilibrium is often presented as a dull, featureless system state, but it seems quite the opposite to me. If it is interpreted as the condition of maximum quantum entanglement of its constituent parts, each of those linkages existing as superpositions all of their possible outcome states, then in at least some limited sense, thermodynamic equilibrium can be seen as a superposition of all possible arrangements of its constituent parts consistent with its geometry, chemical makeup and total energy content. That is, that all structures that can possibly exist within that state do so simultaneously at least within the non-material abstractions of the mathematical space wherein the superpositions reside prior to 'being looked at' (ahem). Ergodicity (the limitation that in the concrete, individual microstates can only be accessed by stepwise progression from a neighbour) places limits on this picture, but I hope there is some truth in it as it helps me get my head around quite a few practical situations that are otherwise difficult to comprehend. For instance, abiogenesis becomes considerably less problematic if all necessary component building blocks continuously coexist at least to some degree when conditions render it a non-zero possibility, even if that space is temporarily abstract rather than concrete.

From the Lorentz interpretion of chaos I mentioned above, it is possible for some number of associated parameters to evolve under the action of linear operations in entirely deterministic fashion and yet produce significantly unpredictable futures such as the weather phenomena you describe. The (local) universe is not big enough to define general numbers with suffient absolute precision to prevent this from being the case. However, it is not the full story. For example, it seems implausible for the above mechanism to produce all emergent properties not explicitly existing in the fundamental low level interactions. Yet, everyday experience tells us that we are likely to hear dull music in supermarkets.

The beauty of 'diversity' is that it emcompasses elemental domains of both order and disorder within a heterogenous whole, which corresponds with everyday macroscospic experience.

Yes. However, I find the word 'chaos' more misleading than helpful. Lorentz (or deterministic) chaos has the particular sense of ...which may appeal to mathematicians but not to me. I much prefer to think in terms of systems that spontaneously trend towards high diversity. This correlates in simple proportion to both maximal entropy and quantum entanglement. As an engineer, this helps give an inituitive feel for how, for example, the system's thermodynamic and chemical equilibria are likely to evolve.

Bien sur. Voila: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Équations_de_Navier-Stokes https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexité

'Rover' was a wolf in sheep's clothing and quite lethal. The main theme of the series is the conflict between individualist vs collectivist principles which quite coincidently has been explicitly referenced earlier today by @Phi for All. Also coincidently, I've just been musing on the difference in moral responsibility for their actions between say, a Macbeth and an actor playing Macbeth obliged to perform his part to the letter.

Only the radionucleides. In principle, hydrocarbon reserves can be restored from water and carbon dioxide via photosynthesis which is how they were created in the first place. Strategic metals can be recovered from wherever their used form was disposed of. Don't confuse 'financially viable exploitable deposits' with total disappearance. It's a myth perpetuated by those who demand maximum profit from minimum investment.

Not in the general case. Navier-Stokes for example are parabolic I think a key point to understand is that while Newton's Laws of Motion and Newton's Law of Viscosity (and the underlying quantum laws that give rise to them) are both linear in themselves, when they are employed in combination (as in Navier-Stokes), the nett result is non-linear. In general, the more interactions you add (linear or otherwise) to the analysis, the more non-linear the end product. This is can be understood as the basis of complexity in the macroscopic world.

We already have them! They are explicitly represented in the systems of partial differential equations that describe most macroscopic physical processes eg Navier-Stokes equations, macroscopic form of Maxwell's equations, Heat equation, Fokker-Planck eqn etc. etc.

Like deciding not to simply ignore the advance wave in the wave equation? No probs so long as there's no informative content?

Is it my imagination or has Fatalism suddenly gone on the rampage on this site? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbL9Vsobx8I

I could order you to have a medical examination...

Google says that charge and current have been described as 'epiphenomena' of events in the 'more fundamental' underlying electromagnetic field. I could imagine someone describing them as 'weakly emergent' also, but there are problems with both usages, However, if those field events were of appropriate frequency to effect a mental response of 'red', then in philosophy of mind the colour would be epiphenomenal to the field. In this sense, the causal relationship differs significantly from those implied in Maxwell's equations. Distinguishing physical events from mental events in this way have indeed lead some to a new form of dualism so I guess this is the extreme interpretation understandably condemned by @Eise.- "any perceived impact of free will on the physical world is illusory". 'Epiphenomenon' again means something entirely different in medicine (symptoms that just happen to correlate) And all three differ from the original sense employed in metaphysics. Bad word! A better framing of the question may be to determine initially whether 'volition' as a concept is abstract or concrete.

Yes, it did rather, and thank you. It was a bit bloggy, I know, but these days I find it difficult to get a complex train of thought in order without actually writing it out longhand. Otherwise I get halfway through and forget both the point I'm responding to and the response I intended to make. Apologies to those who find that sort of thing too me-me-me.

At every instant, the sun is rising in a variety of locations around the solar system. Would anything short of a vacuum decay catastrophe halt this phenomenon?

Given that my wife and I are often residing in different countries, I must declare this a moot point.

I try to steer a course through life in such a way that I never get boxed into an undesirable situation from where there is no escape. One key principle that has helped me in this over the years is to resist any urge to commit myself to a dogmatic position unless it has the firmest of foundations. I might drift through most days with the spirit of Sartre in my blood yet spend other darker days going full on Freddie Ayer. There is value to be found in both so why commit to one tribalist belief and so deny myself the benefits and personal connections I can only find with the other camp? This is not the way to maximise my options for overcoming any future challenges to my comfort and well-being. So no. I will not choose between one obscure definition of free will and another. Neither will I even commit to the existence of any abstraction of free will since the concept is so nebulous it seems to have lost any shred of meaning that I could pin a flag on. That is not to say that I am reluctant to take decisive action when necessary, but nine times out of ten I shall wait until I believe it IS necessary (much to my wife's irritation!) and then act in the surety that I have done so in the light of all relevant considerations and to the best of my judgement. I trust that clarifies precisely where I stand on this issue (and many other diversity limiting false dichotomies as it happens). In the words of the Prisoner - "I am not a number!" So yes, I do find the Compatibilist position inconsistent. But only on certain days. Others not so much.

La plus sa change, la plus c'est la meme chose. If you believe that these four statements are mutually consistent and affirm compatibility, then that's fine. We can leave it at that. It's an interesting position but not one I would care to take on board. Thanks anyway.

Genetic mutations and related changes are sporadic events. Therefore evolution cannot be a continuous process and we may have to wait some time before we suddenly observe a small step change in a population. This waiting time can be quite short for microorganisms that reproduce very quickly. In recent years we've observed evolutionary process produce new strains of COVID every few months. Evolution in larger creatures can take much longer to accrue sufficient change for an observable effect. In the last 10,000 years or so we've seen the evolution of blue eyes in some eurasian populations of humans; lactose tolerance in pastoral populations reliant on dairy produce; the appearance of the sickle cell gene in populations subject to infection with malaria. Such timescales are far beyond the lifetime of any single human; beyond the lifetime even of a civilisation; so why should we expect to see anything happening before our very eyes? However, if we can see some small change occur on the scale of 1,000 years, think how much change we could see in 1 million years! Our ancestors of 1 million years ago didn't actually look that different to how we look now. But we would see that they were different enough to consider whether or not we were all of the same species. If we could go back in time 100 million years, we'd probably see no more evolution happening in our daily lives than we do now. But the animals around us, including our ancestors, would have looked very different. And there is no need for any 'guiding hand' here. A bit of low level background radiation, and some small degree of unreliability in certain complex chemical reactions are quite sufficient to explain the all the natural diversity we see. And time is, along with the space occupied by the planet's surface simply the passive stage on which this activity plays out.