UNCLE HERKIMER'S KORNER: ©1988 MensaMuse
Of computers and chaos and bizarre experiments and evolution, and maybe the world beyond the one we're used to.
Just this morning there was a news segment regarding the adaptation of politicians to the electronic media. Long gone are the rhetorical masterpieces of yesteryear, of fully reasoned and developed arguments leading the listener inexorably to some firm conclusion. This is the age of one-liners, of disjointed speeches sprinkled with quotable punch lines designed to get you to act (or at least to permit action) without having a firm argument in hand for doing so. Ronald Reagan is a master of this practice, and he is called the great communicator despite the fact that his speeches would not rate higher than a D in the average high school communication class.
Even though it would be easy to believe otherwise, this change from rhetorical precision to hodgepodge thirty second news program quotables is not a reflection of the politicians dishonesty or a measure of their deceptive intent (not that they don't have those traits in ample quantity) but represent a reasonable adaptation to an overwhelming effluvium of information that defies full presentation. Not even the simplest subject can be presented fully, with all the relevant factors thoroughly considered. As soon as one set of supportive documentation is presented, another batch of data emerges pointing to other conclusions. This Promethean deluge of information comes to us largely by way of the computer, and happily the computer also delineates the consequences of this information surplus and gives us some suggestions regarding how best to cope.
Our first real evidence that all was not well in the land of logic and elocution (nor in any area that needs to make predictions) came to us by way of the weather. Edward Lorenz was playing on his new Royal Mcbee computer in the early 1960's with the goal of developing a program to predict the weather. At some point, in feeding data to his computer, he rounded off a set of numbers from six decimal places to five, an absolutely inconsequential change according to current scientific investigative procedures because experiments cannot be performed unless very small influences are neglected. What happened was that the small alteration completely changed the outcome of the program. Irrespective of the seemingly inconsequential changes in the system, if it did not repeat exactly, in every respect, it rapidly became unpredictable. Eventually this new phenomenon came to be called the "butterfly effect" from one scientist's wry observation that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Kansas could potentially have a measurable effect on the weather in the South Pacific. Though Lorenz did not suspect it at the time, he had introduced us to the worlds of aperiodicity and chaos.
Aperiodicity develops from what is now recognized as an extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, whereby even the most minute factor at the beginning of a sequence can have far-reaching effects. Probably human communication presents the most aperiodic set of data in the universe. With subtle differences lurking in the nuances of every word, our efforts to communicate are mined with an infinity of potential variations; the possibility of chaos developing at every point. And, as chaos so impudently pointed out to Lorenz, aperiodicity precludes predictability.
While the politicians hope to develop some catch phrase that will inspire us all to jump on their particular bandwagon without asking too many questions about the potential outcome of our doing so, and while I suspect their motivations are most often less than sterling, the fact is that they can do little else. Nothing works out exactly like it was planned, and no aperiodic set of events ever will. Yet we don't really live in some totally random, unpredictable world. Indeed we are all skilled at seeing enough accurate patterns in the behavior of others to allow us to function adequately in most circumstances. Pay attention the next time you drive across town. Notice how many times you adjust your driving to what you predict others are going to do, constantly making accurate judgments about the actions of others that do not follow explicitly from knowledge of the traffic laws.
Frequently, in limited circumstances, we are able to function well acting as though human behavior was periodic, hence predictable. Trusting too much in that capacity, we have developed ways of not noticing the huge segments of our predictions that prove to be inaccurate. It's almost considered dirty politics to point out when a candidate is running for office that most of the marvelous predictions she/he made in order to get elected went unfulfilled. We simply blank out that perception and listen just a naively as we did previously to the new batch of predictions. Earlier columns have described the deleterious repercussions resulting from failure to adapt to our erroneous predictions, and chaos theory illustrates the futility of our getting better at predicting our future from linear methods.
Just when the mathematics of chaos closed the door on the way we have made predictions about the world, it opened up entirely new possibilities for seeing our world in ways heretofore outside the bounds of science. As computer graphics allowed scientists to explore the world of chaos it became clear that self-regulating patterns did seem to function in the midst of chaos. The non-linear planes along which these patterns emerged came to be known as strange attractors, in keeping with the refreshing shift by the scientific world toward whimsical rather than Latin descriptions for new concepts.
Unfortunately, the rush of attention these concepts garnered came more from new age mystics than serious scientists. Arguing that the mathematics proved the existence of extra sensory knowledge, they saw in the mathematics the proof of some higher intelligence controlling the universe. But there is nothing in the mathematics to indicate the existence of consciousness, only of patterns. The need to see the universe in terms of human consciousness has created an anthropomorphic aneurysm (eat your heart out Spiro Agnew) that severely limits the application of this new knowledge.
The question becomes, is there a reliable source of information available from the milieu currently reserved primarily for warriors claiming to be 50,000 years old having knowledge relevant to todays needs? Widely scattered evidence outside the realm of mathematics seems to support that idea.
Rupert Sheldrake's development of morphogenetic fields indicates that communication does exist outside the linear pathways we now know. Nature just published, with considerable misgivings, a study wherein an aqueous solution containing an antibody was diluted to 10120 with distilled water, a dilution so weak that the possibility of even one molecule of the antibody remaining in the solution was beyond imagination. Yet the solution still produced a biological reaction in blood cells. Clearly there are messages we are not hearing, and what that might mean for our decision processes will be the subject next month.
Of computers and chaos and bizarre experiments and evolution, and maybe the world beyond the one we're used to.
Just this morning there was a news segment regarding the adaptation of politicians to the electronic media. Long gone are the rhetorical masterpieces of yesteryear, of fully reasoned and developed arguments leading the listener inexorably to some firm conclusion. This is the age of one-liners, of disjointed speeches sprinkled with quotable punch lines designed to get you to act (or at least to permit action) without having a firm argument in hand for doing so. Ronald Reagan is a master of this practice, and he is called the great communicator despite the fact that his speeches would not rate higher than a D in the average high school communication class.
Even though it would be easy to believe otherwise, this change from rhetorical precision to hodgepodge thirty second news program quotables is not a reflection of the politicians dishonesty or a measure of their deceptive intent (not that they don't have those traits in ample quantity) but represent a reasonable adaptation to an overwhelming effluvium of information that defies full presentation. Not even the simplest subject can be presented fully, with all the relevant factors thoroughly considered. As soon as one set of supportive documentation is presented, another batch of data emerges pointing to other conclusions. This Promethean deluge of information comes to us largely by way of the computer, and happily the computer also delineates the consequences of this information surplus and gives us some suggestions regarding how best to cope.
Our first real evidence that all was not well in the land of logic and elocution (nor in any area that needs to make predictions) came to us by way of the weather. Edward Lorenz was playing on his new Royal Mcbee computer in the early 1960's with the goal of developing a program to predict the weather. At some point, in feeding data to his computer, he rounded off a set of numbers from six decimal places to five, an absolutely inconsequential change according to current scientific investigative procedures because experiments cannot be performed unless very small influences are neglected. What happened was that the small alteration completely changed the outcome of the program. Irrespective of the seemingly inconsequential changes in the system, if it did not repeat exactly, in every respect, it rapidly became unpredictable. Eventually this new phenomenon came to be called the "butterfly effect" from one scientist's wry observation that the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Kansas could potentially have a measurable effect on the weather in the South Pacific. Though Lorenz did not suspect it at the time, he had introduced us to the worlds of aperiodicity and chaos.
Aperiodicity develops from what is now recognized as an extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, whereby even the most minute factor at the beginning of a sequence can have far-reaching effects. Probably human communication presents the most aperiodic set of data in the universe. With subtle differences lurking in the nuances of every word, our efforts to communicate are mined with an infinity of potential variations; the possibility of chaos developing at every point. And, as chaos so impudently pointed out to Lorenz, aperiodicity precludes predictability.
While the politicians hope to develop some catch phrase that will inspire us all to jump on their particular bandwagon without asking too many questions about the potential outcome of our doing so, and while I suspect their motivations are most often less than sterling, the fact is that they can do little else. Nothing works out exactly like it was planned, and no aperiodic set of events ever will. Yet we don't really live in some totally random, unpredictable world. Indeed we are all skilled at seeing enough accurate patterns in the behavior of others to allow us to function adequately in most circumstances. Pay attention the next time you drive across town. Notice how many times you adjust your driving to what you predict others are going to do, constantly making accurate judgments about the actions of others that do not follow explicitly from knowledge of the traffic laws.
Frequently, in limited circumstances, we are able to function well acting as though human behavior was periodic, hence predictable. Trusting too much in that capacity, we have developed ways of not noticing the huge segments of our predictions that prove to be inaccurate. It's almost considered dirty politics to point out when a candidate is running for office that most of the marvelous predictions she/he made in order to get elected went unfulfilled. We simply blank out that perception and listen just a naively as we did previously to the new batch of predictions. Earlier columns have described the deleterious repercussions resulting from failure to adapt to our erroneous predictions, and chaos theory illustrates the futility of our getting better at predicting our future from linear methods.
Just when the mathematics of chaos closed the door on the way we have made predictions about the world, it opened up entirely new possibilities for seeing our world in ways heretofore outside the bounds of science. As computer graphics allowed scientists to explore the world of chaos it became clear that self-regulating patterns did seem to function in the midst of chaos. The non-linear planes along which these patterns emerged came to be known as strange attractors, in keeping with the refreshing shift by the scientific world toward whimsical rather than Latin descriptions for new concepts.
Unfortunately, the rush of attention these concepts garnered came more from new age mystics than serious scientists. Arguing that the mathematics proved the existence of extra sensory knowledge, they saw in the mathematics the proof of some higher intelligence controlling the universe. But there is nothing in the mathematics to indicate the existence of consciousness, only of patterns. The need to see the universe in terms of human consciousness has created an anthropomorphic aneurysm (eat your heart out Spiro Agnew) that severely limits the application of this new knowledge.
The question becomes, is there a reliable source of information available from the milieu currently reserved primarily for warriors claiming to be 50,000 years old having knowledge relevant to todays needs? Widely scattered evidence outside the realm of mathematics seems to support that idea.
Rupert Sheldrake's development of morphogenetic fields indicates that communication does exist outside the linear pathways we now know. Nature just published, with considerable misgivings, a study wherein an aqueous solution containing an antibody was diluted to 10120 with distilled water, a dilution so weak that the possibility of even one molecule of the antibody remaining in the solution was beyond imagination. Yet the solution still produced a biological reaction in blood cells. Clearly there are messages we are not hearing, and what that might mean for our decision processes will be the subject next month.
MensaMuse, Boulder, Colorado, Jim Moore
Back to the curator's desk.
