“The Edge of Chaos” (2017)
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“The Edge of Chaos” (2017)
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Re: “The Edge of Chaos” (2017)
#2There's no focused argument here. Mere polemic.
> the evolutionary argument...rests of [sic] a big mistake about what nervous systems, immune systems, genetic regulatory nets, etc., evolve to do. This is not transmit information from one place to another, or be "flexible" in some abstract sense, but cause actions which enhance the fitness of the organism they happen to be in.
What reasons does the author have for maintaining these ideas? Naturally, none are given.
It's just a bunch of disconnected opinions.
Re: “The Edge of Chaos” (2017)
#3Logistical maps of chaos are interesting. You can use it to collapse the zeta function when r approaches the onset of chaos when you plug it into the Young modulus in terms of the elastic constants which yields a zero at x = 4/5. From there, you can model the zeta function as z(x) = sin(10(3x + 1) - 180)^(5s + 4) derived from a ramanujan congruency. All sorts of weird things can be conjectured from there.
Re: “The Edge of Chaos” (2017)
#4There's no focused argument here. Mere polemic. > the evolutionary argument...rests of [sic] a big mistake about what nervous systems, immune systems, genetic regulatory nets, etc., evolve to do. This is not transmit information from one place to another, or be "flexible" in some abstract sense, but cause actions which enhance the fitness of the organism they happen to be in. What reasons does the author have for mai…
The reason for the first sentence quoted is the second sentence quoted.
I, for one, am happy that my homeostatic regulatory nets have not evolved to "the edge of chaos."
Is there something provocative about his thesis, that would require focused argument?
Re: “The Edge of Chaos” (2017)
#5> I think the evolutionary argument, as usually stated, rests of a big mistake about what nervous systems, immune systems, genetic regulatory nets, etc., evolve to do. This is not transmit information from one place to another, or be "flexible" in some abstract sense, but cause actions which enhance the fitness of the organism they happen to be in.
Transmitting information and being flexible enhances the fitness of the organism.
It would be an interesting piece if the author elaborated on their claim, as to refute this obvious counterargument.
Re: “The Edge of Chaos” (2017)
#6>I think the evolutionary argument, as usually stated, rests of a big mistake about what nervous systems, immune systems, genetic regulatory nets, etc., evolve to do. This is not transmit information from one place to another, or be "flexible" in some abstract sense, but cause actions which enhance the fitness of the organism they happen to be in.
Biological systems don't evolve to do anything - they randomly mutate and are selected by a stochastic process that loosely correlates with Darwinian fitness. Chaos is the default state of all matter; most systems operate on the edge of chaos not because there is something desirable about that state, but because any amount of order emerging from chaos is highly improbable.
Re: “The Edge of Chaos” (2017)
#7Whoever wrote this doesn't seem to make the connection with Prigogine's work on non-equilibrium thermodynamics, which seem to me to have as much to do with the "edge of chaos" idea(s) as anything from the cellular automata world.
The overly quick summary: most convention thermodynamics/chemistry concerns itself with systems that reach equilibrium (various reactions take place, energy is consumed or produced, and a new state is reached in which things are stable). Living systems (and a few non-living) systems don't work this way, but use a continual input of energy to drive reactions and maintain a "non-equilibrium" state.
Re: “The Edge of Chaos” (2017)
#8Let me drop in a plug for my favourite book, William Gary Flake’s The Computational Beauty of Nature (1997), by far the best exploration of these kinds of concepts I have ever encountered. It’s rich in discussion, beautiful diagrams, formulae & equations, and even compilable code—kind of like Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science (2003) but without the bombast and done right.
Re: “The Edge of Chaos” (2017)
#9Whoever wrote this doesn't seem to make the connection with Prigogine's work on non-equilibrium thermodynamics, which seem to me to have as much to do with the "edge of chaos" idea(s) as anything from the cellular automata world. The overly quick summary: most convention thermodynamics/chemistry concerns itself with systems that reach equilibrium (various reactions take place, energy is consumed or produced, and a ne…
There’s also the whole fringe topic of disequilibrium economics, which eschews most of what all economics assume by fiat (that economies are in equilibrium and get shocked out of it, and then resume some kind of trajectory back to the new equilibrium).
Re: “The Edge of Chaos” (2017)
#10Whoever wrote this doesn't seem to make the connection with Prigogine's work on non-equilibrium thermodynamics, which seem to me to have as much to do with the "edge of chaos" idea(s) as anything from the cellular automata world. The overly quick summary: most convention thermodynamics/chemistry concerns itself with systems that reach equilibrium (various reactions take place, energy is consumed or produced, and a ne…
Author is Cosma Shalizi