Reality is chaos. The simplest real systems are themselves controlled inextricably by the behavior of other systems. A photon, perhaps the simplest free particle in existence, relies upon the environment of its transmission to define it's trajectory in space and time.
At the lowest levels of analysis, there are a diminishing number of repeatable laws, and an increase in apparently random behaviors. To complicate things further, it is not inaccurate to suggest that observation itself is the only ordering principle for the things being observed. The very light from distant stars appears only if an observer exists to perceive it, although that observer may be no more sophisticated than an electron of lower energy.
In the fundamental sciences it has become an accepted, hardly even noticed norm; that statistical methods, by means of regularity, have come to define laws, rather than the laws predicting the regularities. This is a positive, in that it allows far more utility to be extracted from the information, if the only fact emerging from correlation of information is in fact that it is correlated, rather than why it appears so.
A fallacy of modern reasoning is to assume that structure in an isolated system well approximates the structure of the same system in the presence of others.
But no observer of the world would in fact be capable of making observations if informational linkages in random systems were the only fabric of that reality being studied, it would be an impossible computation.
It is apparent that by means not well understood the chaos undergirding the macro-world couple into highly regular, highly structured, and even beautifully simple structures. The water cycle, an impossible reduction from the chaos of multiphase fluids and energy cascades is a simple circle, meaning each point in the cycle is symmetrical with itself at one cycle in the future. The shell of a snail is a spiral, symmetrical with the seeds of a sunflower, the arms of the Milky way, and the maelstrom of a hurricane.
An abiding principle of nature is this: chaos is organized by time.
The necessary loss of energy in any system limits the number of possible states it may occupy. A rock will never begin thermonuclear fusion, because the necessary states of matter its atoms would have to assume are thermodynamically unavailable.
In the same way, genetic systems organize themselves by losing un-used genetic potential that consume more energy than is available to the organism. The Hydra trades it's brain for food in one lifetime, while sponges, which had the genetic potential for a nervous system in the deep past, have been refined into filters over countless lifetimes, having as they do now no need for an energy consuming brain that would likely cause extinction. The food value of filtered debris is not high.
One of these examples, the rock, is a simple result of physical time, whereas the other is the result of something far more profound.
Both the rock and the sponge however are attractors. Simplifications, one caused by physics, the other by biology that is far less understood than some would have us believe.
It is my contention that all systems, from the atomic to the biologic, are limited by an 'entry function'.
An Entry Function is the upper limit on abstract information in a system. A system with no time has purely initial conditions. This is purely abstract information. Thus the term 'entry function'. An entry function is not simply the measurable quantities in a system at it's initialization, but also the purest relationships between those quantities.
We know very well how to write differential relationships between quantities, analyze them, and solve for a set of initial conditions. However this is not the scope of the entry function. It is impossible to write an entry function for a real system.
We can observe the current attractor the system has settled upon, and infer a current function, perhaps less deterministic as the quantities being measured become more physical, and less abstract, but only in hypothetical un-connected systems is it possible to consider an entry function as definite and knowable.
Abstract information becomes structure as time progresses. Conscious observation is the only path from structure back to information.
댓글