. . . and solitons! Are quantum particles solitons themselves(other than the binding for between them as suggested in this good/cute physics video?
Further is life and consequently mankind a soliton? What does that mean for our knowledge of the universe? I'll try to get back to that hopefully soon!
I grew up in the James Gleike Chaos theory era(I remember telling people that I taught myself how to read by reading that book!). Strange attractors is the more technical term for chaos(chaos theorist chaos). Chaos comes about by means of feedback loops of errors. There's two types of feedback loop - positive and negative. Really both are at work here. Positive feedback is like when a signal is fed back into the speaker from the mike; you either blow up the speaker or your ears!(or both!). Negative feedback is like the thermostat that keeps the temperature constant. You set a given temperature; either the temperature is too high, the thermostat turns off, or it's too low, and the thermostat turns the heater back on. Chaos, or strange attractors, are positive feedback loops held in check by one or more negative feedback loops(defined mathematically by topology; a given surface is distinguished by whether it has a hole in it or not; each hole corresponds to a negative feedback loop). Chaos is controlled instability(by the positive feedback loops). Because of the positive feedback loops, errors are fed in that grow and make for unpredictability of the system as a whole.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly? consciousness means self-reflective. Self-reflective is feedback(negative feedback). And, similarly to the errors being fed back in because the whole is getting chopped off, because of our feedback conscousness, we hare finite(death?) viewpoints. Related perhaps? could be that our understanding of the world is always finite. When we became technologically dependent species approximatelly four millions years ago, we were set on a path towards ever more technological dependence. Because of our consciousness and technological dependence, our understanding and technologies that we use to harness nature is always finite, it always requires us to learn more. I like to say, or think about it, that because of our finiteness, we've been set on a journey to find those connections that we were first cut off from four million years ago(there's more to say about this; there's differences between the structure of a single cell which can live essentially forever, and a multicellular being which is when death first came about as Lynn Margulis first put it).
I think this turned out alright. There's more to say(see Jacob Bronowski's "Origin of Knowledge and Imagination"); but, i've said what I like about your Einstein quote!
I post this here as an indication of how I'm trying to indicate that this Jacob Bronowski "Scientific Humanism" philosophy is a dynamical one.
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