Re: determinism, freewill, chaos, and circular causality


Curt Welch wrote:



I've never had any issues understanding that for one, there are events
which we can't know the cause of (QM and other events which happen at the
limits of our ability to measure). Whether they have a cause or not is
something we will probably never know - and no matter what science uncovers
in the future to explain the cause, there's likely always going to be some
lower level event which will replace it which we won't know the cause of.
And at the same time, I've also had no issue with understanding how these
events can be amplified through iteration and feedback effects to create
what is generally know as chaotic systems. All this seems fairly obvious
to me. It's the source of all noise in the universe.

What I take issue with however and what strikes me as invalid, is to
believe that these types of effects have something important to do with the
operation of the brain or intelligence. On the contrary, I see the entire
purpose of the brain as being a system which must find, and amplify, all
the non chaotic effects of the universe. Brains are in effect, noise
filters designed to remove all the noise which the universe is full of.
They are anti-chaotic devices if anything.




The first thing is that the events referred to occur at a level far far
"above" QM effects, and likely have very little to do with QM. Every
physical system in the universe can ultimately be reduced to atoms and
quarks and QM whatevers, but these chaotic effects are occuring at
"macro-levels" of interaction between the units. That's the first
thing. The 2nd thing is that the brain has all of the same fundamental
aspects as every other system that exhibits chaotic behavior. Thirdly,
from Briggs+Peat again ...

pg 145: "... Biological systems remain stable by damping most small
effects except in those areas of behavior where a high degree of
flexibility and creativity is required. Here the system remains highly
sensitive to to influx, close to a state of chaos...".

Likewise, a chaotic system can have relatively stable modes
[attractors], in which case its sensitivity to noise is minimal, but
when given the correct input it can move to another attractor.



Most of what you quoted above I agree with - except that last part where
they seem to be justifying noise as a source of creativity. It's even
worded in way to imply that maybe, without a universe full of noise, there
would be no creativity. I don't agree with that at all. I believe
creativity is nothing more than the result of a system which has the power
to search a design space for useful solutions.



In a highly complex system, with many interacting units and feedback
loops, there are potentially an astronomical number of different
operational states [attractors] that the system can go between.




It makes no difference if
the search is random and chaotic and influenced by unpredictable low level
noise sources or whether it's totally deterministic.




Actually, this is an important point with chaotic systems, as once near
a "bifurcation point", then noise can drive operation in an
unpredictable direction from there.




The end result is
just the fact that "good" options are found. There are plenty of examples
of genetic algorithm programs which are 100% deterministic but yet have no
problem being extremely creative (creating things that no human was able to
create). Creativity is just the ability of the system to recognize a good
solution when it sees it and to take advantage of all the good solutions it
finds.



.... and to get into such a state in the first place.




I just keeping seeing all these attempts to link chaos and QM and other
hard to understand effects with a desperate attempt to explain the



As mentioned, I think there is nothing whatsoever to do with linking QM
and chaos - in general. Maybe a lot of people have trouble because they
believe these are the same thing.




complexity of human behavior by people who have failed to appreciate (or
find) the simplicity behind human behavior. It's as if they believe that
it can't be the result of something simple or else someone would have
uncovered the answer - so they turn to everything complex in hopes of
finding the answer. I just don't agree with that because I'm sure that
intelligence is simple. I don't think it could work if it was complex.



Of course, my conception is exactly the opposite. IOW, there is a
reason it takes 100B neurons and 100T synapses to produce human-level
intelligence. Ape brains, for instance, have maybe 1/10 the number of
neurons as humans, and their intelligence is a lot less for it. So, a
fundamental question is, why can you get such a tremendous increase in
intelligence, especially in a "qualitative" rather than just a
quantitative way, by increasing the #units by that amount?

.

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