Topic: On Beyond Newton

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Name: Paul Grobstein
Username: pgrobste@brynmawr.edu
Subject: Evolving
Date: Fri Oct 29 11:50:09 EDT 1999
Comments:

To all visitors:

Serendip was born in 1994, and developed forums in 1996. The forums have been and continue to be a place where everyone is invited to make comments, ask questions, and carry on conversations about anything and everything that comes to mind when exploring Serendip. As such, they have been and continue to be an essential part of Serendip's development. At the same time, any developing organism needs periodically to refresh itself. The past remains but is put in boxes to clear the mind for the next part of the future. So have we done, as of today, with Serendip's forums. All past material is still available, by clicking on highlighted years above to access forum archives. And we have, as of today, a blank slate for the next phase of Serendip's development. If you have been here in the past, you're already a part of what Serendip has become so far. Please leave your thoughts as part of the next phase of Serendip's life. And if you're new, please join in as well.

Name: jason palmer
Username: jason@palmer1971.freeserve.co.uk
Subject: newton and god
Date: Wed May 24 16:29:06 EDT 2000
Comments:
Newton was one smart cookie and he reckoned god existed but only intervened 'now and then', what do you reckon ?.. It is awesome reasoning really when you think about it, God can't be bothered with day to day detail so he sets it all up to work on 'auto'. Now thats smart... Even fits with evolution nicely.

Name: LowellDavis
Username: EmporerInExile@aol.com
Subject: The Chaotic Mind
Date: Tue Jan 1 19:02:57 EST 2002
Comments:
I awoke this morning in a melancholic mood. I went surfing on the net and caught a wave that washed me up here. In the double mirror of my conscious mind, i find these reflections on what I've seen: Time is a creation of our own mind; an attempt to externalize the nature of our perception(s). In the duality of forward and retrograde causality we are biased by which side of the wave of biochemical energy transfer that we surf. We see the causes as results, and invent time to explain the difference. In like manner we see order and chaos. Repetition is usefull. Predictability is desireable. If, when in the next instant we assemble our reality, we can use the same bricks over, so much the better. Do we impose form on blank canvas? Or do we extract order from chaos? We determine it. Order emerges from intelligence. Intelligence emerges from life. Life merges from the physical properties of its environment. Those properties emerge from order, which arises out of chaos, which arises from intelligence. Hold hands with the people on both sides of you. We are the froth that floats atop the sea. The nature of this place forms us, and flows through us. Our will selects the outcome of an infinitude of possible events. We collapse the equation as a means to our ends. We are the experiment and we are the Observer. Happy New Year.

Name: Barry Kort
Username: bkort@musenet.org
Subject: Rule-Based Systems Are Chaotic
Date: Fri Dec 6 22:05:19 EST 2002
Comments:
Poincaré was perhaps the first to discover the astonishing result that rule-based systems are, in general, chaotic. His work was largely forgotten for half a century until Edward Lorentz rediscovered the roots of Chaos Theory at MIT while constructing a high-precision orrery.

Now, thanks to James Gleick and Benoit Mandelbrot, at least some portion of the educated public has discovered the joys of Chaos Theory and Fractals.

And yet, I daresay 99% of the public still believes in the foundation axiom of Western Civilization -- that rule-based systems are inherently orderly. How long will it be before the public realizes that our civil regulatory mechanism -- the Rule of Law -- is founded on a mathematically disprovable myth?

Other models (notably Girard's) suggest that the Rule of Law generates (down through the ages) a chaotically rising tide of violence, oppression, injustice, corruption, poverty, ignorance, alienation, suffering, and terrorism. We are moving toward a compelling system model of human socio-cultural mechanics that demonstrates this behavior in a mathematically compelling way.

Of course all is not lost. There do exist regulatory mechanisms which work as desired. They are not rule-based of course. They are model-based and rely on higher-order computations (inversion of the system model) to achieve stability. This method amounts to rocket science, since inversion of arbitrary functions amounts to solving implicit functions (i.e. primitive recursive functions). That is, one must have mastered the tools of thought found in Newton's Calculus, since we are obliged, in general to compute the limits of infinite sequences whenever we deal with functional models that are nonlinear in a nontrivial way.

But evolving Western Civilization from the Rule of Law to Model-Based Reasoning seems all but impossible from a political point of view. And yet if we fail to make that leap, there is a growing probability that our culture will collapse in a tragic failure to think our way into the future.