Help please. Which is real: order or chaos? Take the snowflake as a case in point...

[adimus]

I have a big hairy problem trying to sort this out. Is there such thing as order? Is there such thing as actual chaos? Or is there somehow both?

Take the snowflake for instance. Various meteorlogical conditions will transform a small bit of liquid water into a sublimely complex and "ordered" snowlflake.

Each flake is absolutely symetrical. The various points of the flake somehow "know" exactly what pattern to form at exactly the same time as every other point.

It all starts from a tiny ball or cluster of ice crystals of some kind. Apparently the chaos of nature instantly "creates" a sort of "computer" that perfectly plans and orchestrates the symetrical and complex beauty of each unique snowflake.

Coded, specifically ordered complex information is generated spontaneously in each flake. This info includes the exact pattern of how to uniformly generate a unique flake pattern without error every single time.

But ultimately this "orderful" beauty is all just random chaos unfolding without aid from God, tiny aliens or people's intelligence.

It reminds me of the complexity and depth of genetic information. The theory is that naturally occuring evolution generated DNA in time and with chance and natural selection. Is DNA that much more of a miracle than countless complex unique snowflakes spontaneously forming? Is it?

And that leads to my question. If random chaos appears to creat such beauty and order so easily such as with snowflakes- and if life is also a product of this same chaos, time, time, chance and natural selection,
then is there really any actual "order" at all ultimately? Would not that make all "order" merely an illusion?

Or is it that there really is no such thing as actual randomness and/or chaos at all?

If God, or as atheists and agnostics would say if the universe naturally on its own produced all apparent "order" is there really no such thing as chaos at all?

Is all apparent chaos really just order that is so deeply hidden that is appears to be chaos much like an untrained eye observing biological life under a very powerful microscope would appear to be utter chaos as well?

Is my querry clear enough?

 

[ragarth]

It is an interesting question, and one that I'm working on myself, though from a different route. Before going into any discussion, let me clarify some terms.

Randomness is the idea that something cannot be predicted, that there is no way to know the result from the premise.

Chaos is not necessarily random, however. In a chaotic system the susceptibility to small perturbations in the inputs is sufficiently great that very small changes can rapidly develop very large deviations of the system from the model. In other words, the idea that a butterfly in Africa flapping it's wings could cause a hurricane in the Atlantic.

Given this, a snowflake is the product of a chaotic system because there is no way for us to precisely predict the shape of the snowflake, there are too many variables and the process is too sensitive to change, but it is ordered, however, because the state of those variables (hypothetically) invariably lead to that particular snowflake shape, it's just that no two snowflakes have the exact same set of initial conditions and so they all look different. This is illustrative of two worldviews, and I think this is the heart of your question: Determinism vs Nondeterminism.

In determinism, the idea is that the state of every moment is precisely dictated by the moment before it. If this is true, then if we could build a computer capable of calculating every variable in the universe for a given moment, then we could predict any future moment based on that information.

In nondeterminism, something about the universe generates true randomness, or values from moment to moment that have no basis in previous moments of the universe. This would mean that even if the initial conditions of two universes were *exactly* the same, the two would diverge because there is at some level an inherent source of randomness.

I've been a proponent of deterministic universes for a long time now, but it's been proven to me that scientific testing on particle spin has proven that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is indeed nondeterministic rather than the result of unknowns within a chaotic system. This means that there is indeed a source of true randomness in the universe, and so I'm working out the implications of this.

 

[adimus]

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle was the tilting point for me on this issue also. I intuitively leaned toward nondeterminism until I read about that.

Being that God has a free will, man has free will, angels etc have free will, nondeterminism would only make sense.

It makes you think of the "how" of God knowing the future when it is not set in any entirely predictable fashion. I would postulate that God is transcendant over time and space. Therefore He can see the past present and future all at the same "time" since he is both inside and outside of actual time and space.

So the future is not set, but only a transcendant being could actually "see" the actual future that will definitely occur. Follow me?

So it seems that the Uncertainty Priciple is like a veil that both conceals and reveals the glory that belongs to God alone in a sense.

It is either that or the occult is right about their worldview- specifically Aleister Crowley. And I don't believe he is right. I believe the words of Jesus being that he completely demonstrated the power and character of the God of the Old Testament. Crowley died a drug addicted and troubled lonely old man in obscurity. Jesus rose again and ascended.

 

[ragarth]

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle was the tilting point for me on this issue also. I intuitively leaned toward nondeterminism until I read about that.

Being that God has a free will, man has free will, angels etc have free will, nondeterminism would only make sense.

It makes you think of the "how" of God knowing the future when it is not set in any entirely predictable fashion. I would postulate that God is transcendant over time and space. Therefore He can see the past present and future all at the same "time" since he is both inside and outside of actual time and space.

So the future is not set, but only a transcendant being could actually "see" the actual future that will definitely occur. Follow me?

So it seems that the Uncertainty Priciple is like a veil that both conceals and reveals the glory that belongs to God alone in a sense.

It is either that or the occult is right about their worldview- specifically Aleister Crowley. And I don't believe he is right. I believe the words of Jesus being that he completely demonstrated the power and character of the God of the Old Testament. Crowley died a drug addicted and troubled lonely old man in obscurity. Jesus rose again and ascended.

I still don't believe nondeterminism has any direct effect upon human cognition, and it most certainly isn't proof of god or the supernatural. Let's look at a major nondeterministic system (the only one I know of)- the casimir effect (aka vacuum energy). Basically this system exists anywhere there is a vacuum. Within it particle pairs are constantly being created: A normal particle and an anti-particle. They spiral outward from each other for a brief moment, then collapse back in upon each other and annhilate. Given this momentary existence, these particles are termed 'virtual'. The effect of them generates a continuous pressure between objects placed extremely close together (but do note you can't tap it as an energy source as done in so many scifi novels, that'd be like tapping gravity for energy- you just can't do it.).

On the macro scale under normal circumstances the nondeterministic nature of the casimir effect is balanced, every effect it could have is balanced by an opposing nondeterministic effect, thereby leaving the universe at large existing as a purely deterministic paradigm. This means that the human brain, the seat of consciousness and mind, operates as a purely deterministic logical engine with no nondeterministic properties inherent within it because it is purely a macro-scale system. The seeming randomness of human action and interaction is nothing more than the product of the highly complex chaotic system designated by the network of your neurons.

This general rule, however, breaks down at extroardinary areas such as the event horizon of blackholes. Since the virtual particle pair is composed of a particle and an anti-particle, and since a blackhole is composed of normal matter, there is a slightly greater attraction between the anti-particle and the black hole. This makes it more likely that the anti-particle will get sucked into the blackhole (thereby reducing it's mass as anhilation takes place) while the normal particle goes buzzing off into space after it's release. This effect is termed Hawking Radiation, aka singularity evaporation, and acts as a motive point to allow the nondeterministic state of the quantum world to effect the macro world.

In this way, most everything we deal with- weather systems, the brain, geology, and stellar formation are all perfectly deterministic in nature. Human life and the human condition are all deterministic, it's just the universe as a whole that is nondeterministic.

If we go to the classic thought problem of 2 universes, both identical, except in one you order a cheese burger and in the other you order a salad, we can hypothetically trace that difference to the generation of a particle or particles at the event horizon of a singularity. Every other reaction from that initial generation is completely deterministic.

 

[Cabal]

Adimus:

I was reading Ken Miller's "Finding Darwin's God", and he made an interesting point, which was that a non-deistic God could not exist in a quantum universe. However, I think this only flies if you accept that a fully deterministic physical universe would also affect our ability to reason and choose. However, you're definitely not the only person with that idea.

 

[sbvera13]

I think it's a non-question. Order/Chaos are artifacts of our perception, and don't exist by nature.

 

[MoonLancer]

I think it's a non-question. Order/Chaos are artifacts of our perception, and don't exist by nature.

bah... you beat me to it. damn.

I agree. Order is what we can structure logically in our mind, and chaos is something that we cannot structure. The moment we understand some part of chaos, it becomes order because its really all about how we classify things.

 

[Maxwell511]

I still don't believe nondeterminism has any direct effect upon human cognition, and it most certainly isn't proof of god or the supernatural. Let's look at a major nondeterministic system (the only one I know of)- the casimir effect (aka vacuum energy). Basically this system exists anywhere there is a vacuum. Within it particle pairs are constantly being created: A normal particle and an anti-particle. They spiral outward from each other for a brief moment, then collapse back in upon each other and annhilate. Given this momentary existence, these particles are termed 'virtual'. The effect of them generates a continuous pressure between objects placed extremely close together (but do note you can't tap it as an energy source as done in so many scifi novels, that'd be like tapping gravity for energy- you just can't do it.).

On the macro scale under normal circumstances the nondeterministic nature of the casimir effect is balanced, every effect it could have is balanced by an opposing nondeterministic effect, thereby leaving the universe at large existing as a purely deterministic paradigm. This means that the human brain, the seat of consciousness and mind, operates as a purely deterministic logical engine with no nondeterministic properties inherent within it because it is purely a macro-scale system.

The propagation of perturbations to a system are dependent on the phase of the system. The reason that the universe is "interesting" is because most systems exist in phase transitions or critical states. At these phase transitions there are no characteristic lengths. Being a macro-scale system does not mean that that system does not organise itself randomly, because if it exists in criticality any micro random perturbation can reorganise the entire system.

The human brain does seem to exist in such critical states which would suggest that it is not a "purely deterministic logical engine".

 

[smog]

There is absolutely nothing about quantum mechanics that is inherently nondeterministic. Quantum mechanics are provedly nonlocal, which as far as I can tell has eventually been twisted to mean something akin to nondeterminism in mainstream interpretations. But the fact is that there exists no measurement that can tell apart true randomness from a sufficiently elaborate pseudo-random number generator - for one, it should be trivial to understand that for any finite sequence of numbers there exists one finite deterministic program that produces these exact numbers, so if you only have a finite number of observations you evidently can't tell whether they are truly random or were produced by one of the programs I just described. So whatever result "proved" that quantum physics are not deterministic is definitely bogus. Regardless, the many-world interpretation as well as the Bohm interpretation of quantum physics are both consistent with every observation made thus far and completely deterministic. I'm too lazy to provide links, so you'll have to look them up

Now, considering that for any deterministic system we can posit that the system itself arised randomly, or conversely, that any nondeterministic system can be trivially reduced to a deterministic system by replacing random number generation by a lookup in a precalculated table, it ensues that the determinism versus nondeterminism debate really is a red herring. Whether the universe is deterministic or not is impossible to determine and any hypothesis regarding this question is unfalsifiable. I also fail to see how nondeterminism helps the case of free will at all - if the universe is nondeterministic, your actions would basically depend on random draws from a probabilistic distribution. That's already pretty far from glorious. And then, may I ask, what difference does it make if the random number is drawn at the time you make the decision or eons earlier? If God can see the future, clearly, all the random numbers needed by the nondeterministic universe have already been drawn (or are already known by him, which is equivalent). But if the universe runs on random numbers that have already been generated, then it's deterministic, isn't it? For these reasons I would argue that there exists no meaningful difference between determinism and nondeterminism.

It is possible that quantum physics have some influence on cognition, though I would deem it unlikely. But what you have to understand is that whatever influence it has is not going to bring nondeterminism to the table. To give you an example, people working on quantum computing aren't doing it to get better random number generators. Quantum physics can bring significant performance boosts to several algorithms - for example, you can use it to search the space of possible solutions to a problem much faster than you could by classical means, which I imagine would be nice to have for cognition. But when deterministic processes in the universe produce as much noise as they do, to argue for a quantum-induced nondeterministic influence to cognition is like trying to hit a nail with a spoon when you're surrounded with hammers. If quantum physics were to be used in cognition it would be for something that they are actually useful for, not for something that thermodynamic noise can provide much more cheaply.

I would say that the main interest of chaotic systems (or randomness) is to produce variability, jump quickly from one place to another in order to better explore the state space. Chaotic systems often have some underlying logic but "mix it up" to maximize variation, which often makes them look "random", but is actually very useful work. The advantage of chaos is akin to the advantage of exploring the Earth by teleporting randomly to various places - you'd probably see much more than you would by exploring it in an orderly way and would learn much more because it would regularly send you to places you've never seen before, force you out of your existing biases. Of course, ideally, you'd do a bit of both! Randomness is a tool and not an end in itself.

If small changes could not cascade into large changes, the world would pretty much immediately stagnate and "die out" because it's this constant influx of change that allows us to branch out, adapt to new situations, imagine, evolve, explore new things and better ourselves. A dubious analogy to chaos and order that I would give is that order is the traveler and chaos is the journey. One is not very interesting without the other.

 

[Gracchus]

I will repeat here the answer I gave to the same OP in the "Physical and Life Sciences" forum:

Obviously, you have not looked closely at many snowflakes. They are rarely, if ever, "absolutely symetrical (sic)".

No Two Alike: Snowflake Photography Reveals Nature's Symmetry [Slide Show]: Scientific American Slideshows

The devil is in the details.

That makes the rest of your post problematic.

It is as clear as any question based on a false premise can be.

By the way, the "chaos" in Chaos Theory is merely sensitivity to intial conditions. Since the radiating arms of the snowflake share a very similar, but minutely varying environment, it is not surprising they are very similar, although not "absolutely" identical.

 

[ragarth]

Just a case in point about quantum mechanics explicitly affecting cognizance. While it is true that quantum effects have been found in some cellular structures (chloroplasts), the very structure of the brain precludes any form of quantum noise from effecting it.

The vast majority of the electrical aspect of the brain takes place at the cell membrane, ion pumps maintain a constant -70mV voltage potential across the membrane by exporting ions out of the cell while chemical messengers in the synapses (neurotransmitters) trigger the opening of chemically gated ion channels to allow ions to enter into the cells. If enough ions enter the cell and cause the voltage potential to go above a certain threshold (~-55mV), then it triggers a flux of opening voltage gated ion channels across the membrane. This creates a local change in voltage potential, spiking to +30mV. Once the local portion of the cell hits +30mV the voltage gated ion channels are desensitized long enough for the local change in voltage potential to return back to -70mV. This creates a 'wave' effect of open ion channels that move from the soma and down the axon, which is effectively the electrical pulse so commonly depicted. (note it's electrical in nature, but the carrier method is chemical- opening ion channels. This is why myelin and thicker axons promote faster transit of the impulse down the axon. This also ensures that the voltage and amperage remain constant no matter the length or number of synapses of the axon). At the synapses the voltage triggers a release of neurotransmitters which then travel across the synaptic gap to the post-synapse.

The neuron itself is considered a simple-summer or simple summation engine. Chemically, all that's happening is that when enough neurotransmitter is attached to the post-synapse, it changes the voltage potential enough to trigger an impulse. In this way neurons are doing nothing more than counting the total voltage potential change due to neurotransmitters (this is a general rule, it's more complex. There are synapses which use direct electrical stimulus in the heart, and neurotransmitters which don't open ion channels but rather produce other effects such as closing ion channels or changing gene expression, etc. There are also neurons which are not simple summation engines, but that's a whole other story). The real meat of neuronal stimulation takes place in the synapse, where synaptic weight allows a given neuron to have an increased or decreased effect upon the post-synaptic neuron, and the change in this provides the plasticity which allows us to learn and change over time.

In all this process there is not a single point at which quantum effects can have a significant impact. All aspects of a biological neural network uses group effects- groups of ion channels, groups of synapses, groups of neurons to generate the whole, and so even if a quantum effect managed to somehow trigger a release of neurotransmitters (not possible since the release is voltage-triggered, which is generated by groups of activated ion channels), the 'noise' would be unlikely to activate the post-synaptic cell, and would rapidly be lost in the rest of the activity.

There is an ill-understood effect where a synapse will spontaneously fire. We don't know how this happens, but it is rare, rare enough that we aren't sure of the chemical or electrical characteristics of a neuron that undergoes this effect. It is, however, lost in the noise, the digital/analog hybrid nature of the brain is extremely good at noise filtering, and tests have proven that spontaneous firing has nothing to do with original thought since thought itself is a group action of numerous neurons- a single stray synapse is insignificant.

This is why any form of quantum effect would have to be indirect- another source would have to provide impetus to make the quantum effect macroscopic, such as the aforementioned blackhole, and then the results of that macroscopic effect induces change in our brains through normal means- ie our senses.

//Disclaimer: I'm running on no sleep and no caffeine, I apologize for rambling or any other results of needing a tall glass of tea.

 

[Gracchus]

Just a case in point about quantum mechanics explicitly affecting cognizance. While it is true that quantum effects have been found in some cellular structures (chloroplasts), the very structure of the brain precludes any form of quantum noise from effecting it.

Most organisms, including cells, seem to be chaotic, which is to say, their present state may be very different due to a very small change. (Or not!)

To say that any single quantum fluctuation will be lost in the noise is like saying that a single bullet cannot change the course of a battle because tens of thousands of shots are fired. Remember, quantum mechanics relies on statistic, and even very rare phenomena may occur.

 

[smog]

Most organisms, including cells, seem to be chaotic, which is to say, their present state may be very different due to a very small change. (Or not!)

But the small changes cannot be used to "steer" the system, the point of chaotic systems is that the effect of small changes is intractable, so you can hardly use it to your advantage. Also, a chaotic system, despite reacting to small changes, still reacts much more (or, anyway, at least as much) to big changes. In other words, the magnitude of the change is still proportional to the input. The quantum noise is still drowned out, not to mention that the effect will be the same regardless of whether the noise is quantum or not.

To say that any single quantum fluctuation will be lost in the noise is like saying that a single bullet cannot change the course of a battle because tens of thousands of shots are fired. Remember, quantum mechanics relies on statistic, and even very rare phenomena may occur.

Except there are billions of bullets and you are shooting blind. In any case, even if you're right that it could have an influence, what you have to realize is that there is nothing useful quantum noise can do that other sources of noise will not do even better (more consistently). There is no magical property in quantum noise that makes it better than other noise.

 

[Wiccan_Child]

Most organisms, including cells, seem to be chaotic, which is to say, their present state may be very different due to a very small change. (Or not!)

To say that any single quantum fluctuation will be lost in the noise is like saying that a single bullet cannot change the course of a battle because tens of thousands of shots are fired. Remember, quantum mechanics relies on statistic, and even very rare phenomena may occur.

The improbable almost certainly occurs (now there's an odd thing to say...), but that doesn't mean it's important. Quantum fluctuations does indeed rely on statistics: the aggregate is the average. And on average, even on cellular scales, quantum effects are so small that they cancel each other out. Every particle that pops to the right will, statistically speaking, pop just as far to the left.

 

[ragarth]

Most organisms, including cells, seem to be chaotic, which is to say, their present state may be very different due to a very small change. (Or not!)

To say that any single quantum fluctuation will be lost in the noise is like saying that a single bullet cannot change the course of a battle because tens of thousands of shots are fired. Remember, quantum mechanics relies on statistic, and even very rare phenomena may occur.

Ah, but due to the very nature of neural networks, a single misfiring neuron won't have an impact. Let's look at this a bit.

Neurons are summation engines, they take input, compare the total sum to a threshold value, and if the sum exceeds this value then the neuron fires. If it doesn't exceed this value then the neuron doesn't fire. So we're talking first about a quantum event that could either cause a +15mV change in potential, or circumvent the system to stimulate a neurotransmitter release without that voltage change.

Now let's look at the effect of this, in a neuron, the voltage changes happen over an area of a cell's membrane, this means that a single quantum event wouldn't be able to make much if any change in the voltage potential of the cell, quantum events just don't cover enough area with enough oomf to do it. This relegates the potential for a quantum event to a single synapse (more than likely a single dendrite within a synapse, but I'll be generous. ).

So we have a single synapse spontaneously fire. The chances of this causing a cascade event are very very slim, a single synapse is very unlikely to put another neuron over it's threshold value. So from the get go our quantum event dies in the crowd, unable to cause the post-synaptic neuron to fire because a single synaptic firing does not have the oomph of either spatial or temporal summation that's requires to make the post-synaptic neuron reach it's threshold value. It takes either a synapse firing multiple times rapidly (temporal summation) or multiple synapses firing (spatial summation) to make most neurons reach their threshold value, and the chances of multiple quantum events being imbalanced enough to cause either pattern is slim to none. This is what I mean by the analog-digital hybrid nature of neural networks filtering out noise.

 

[Gracchus]

It takes either a synapse firing multiple times rapidly (temporal summation) or multiple synapses firing (spatial summation) to make most neurons reach their threshold value, and the chances of multiple quantum events being imbalanced enough to cause either pattern is slim to none. This is what I mean by the analog-digital hybrid nature of neural networks filtering out noise.

Slim to none? What sort of number attaches to that? 1 in 10^167? Would you call that slim to none? That is the chance of any random arrangement of two decks of cards with differing backs. I think you have let your mind be boggled by numbers very large and very small.

It's not the sort of odds to gamble on, but although the probability of each event is very small, one outcome, no matter how improbable, is certain.

One flap of the butterfly's wing in Shanghai in August may be the event that triggers a hurricane the following year, or ten thousand years later, in the south Atlantic. It may outrage your intuition or common sense, but there it is.

The resonance in space-time of one quantum fluctuation can give rise to the whole universe.

 

[ragarth]

Slim to none? What sort of number attaches to that? 1 in 10^167? Would you call that slim to none? That is the chance of any random arrangement of two decks of cards with differing backs. I think you have let your mind be boggled by numbers very large and very small.

It's not the sort of odds to gamble on, but although the probability of each event is very small, one outcome, no matter how improbable, is certain.

One flap of the butterfly's wing in Shanghai in August may be the event that triggers a hurricane the following year, or ten thousand years later, in the south Atlantic. It may outrage your intuition or common sense, but there it is.

The resonance in space-time of one quantum fluctuation can give rise to the whole universe.

Forgive me, I don't think you know what it is you're insinuating. How about we get some solid numbers on this? I don't have time to look up the bit I'm missing to do the calculations, but if you'd be willing to dig up either the number of molecules in the average human synapse or the volume of the average human synapse (whichever you prefer) and then either you or Wiccan Child can calculate the chances that a quantum event could effect that entire region, I'll plug in the numbers and generate a percent change that it will coincide with another active synapse on the same post-synaptic neuron. Then we can do a comparison of this to the average statistics of the human brain and generate a value showing if quantum fluctuations can have an impact upon the brain.

 

[smog]

Slim to none? What sort of number attaches to that? 1 in 10^167? Would you call that slim to none? That is the chance of any random arrangement of two decks of cards with differing backs. I think you have let your mind be boggled by numbers very large and very small.

There are 10^27 atoms in the human body. Let's say each of these atoms is emitting a quantum event every Planck time (5.39*10^-44 seconds) and that each of these events can trigger the change that we are talking about with probability 10^-167. Let's also assume that an average human lives 100 years.

Here is the probability that a human will experience that event in his or her lifetime (technically, this is an overestimate, because all of these events are independent but not mutually exclusive, so I should subtract their joints. it's ok though because it's really small here and it helps you)
>>> 10**-167 * 10**27 * 1/(5.39*10**-44) * 3600 * 24 * 365.24 * 100
5.8546820037105752e-88

Let us further suppose that at any and all times the Earth has 100 billion people on it (we'll get there). This is the probability that some human on the planet will experience this once in their lifetime:
>>> _ * 10**11
5.8546820037105752e-77

Let's assume that humanity will last 100 billion years (we'll move out when the sun explodes of course) (I already counted 100 years per generation)
>>> _ * 10**9
5.8546820037105752e-68

So with the probability you have given us, using ridiculously generous numbers for every factor, we still end up with measly 1 in 10^67 odds that the event will happen to some human over the course of ten billion years.

Yeah I really wouldn't bet on these odds.

It's not the sort of odds to gamble on, but although the probability of each event is very small, one outcome, no matter how improbable, is certain.

Only at the limit of infinite trials, but the human brain has neither the mass nor the longevity, so this is a moot point. Also note that this only holds for truly random events and that there is no evidence that anything in the universe is truly random. Chaotic systems, like pseudo-random generators, have finite periods and therefore there are many things that they cannot ever produce.

Also, 1 in 10^167 might actually be pretty generous odds. Probability of events sink very rapidly as the number of links that have to be influenced rises. Given the scale of quantum events and the scale of a synapse, the figure might actually be closer to 1 in 10^(10^100), which will definitely never happen before the heat death of the universe and beyond.

One flap of the butterfly's wing in Shanghai in August may be the event that triggers a hurricane the following year, or ten thousand years later, in the south Atlantic. It may outrage your intuition or common sense, but there it is.

That is a very misleading way to understand (or present) things. The truth is that chaotic systems are not sensitive to a small change, they are sensitive to all of them. The Chinese butterfly's wing would have caused nothing if it was not for the German butterfly's wing one month later, who would have caused nothing if the boy who would have caught it in his net didn't injure himself, which he wouldn't have had he found a blunt knife with which to butter his toast. Furthermore, the Chinese butterfly would have caused nothing had I sneezed once more this morning - air turbulences aren't even additive in this case. What you are saying here is akin to saying that the thirty-seventh straw broke the camel's back. It is both arbitrary and misleading. All the straws, taken as a whole, broke the poor beast's back. None in particular, though a case could be argued for the last one All events and yes, all absence of events, taken as a whole, caused the hurricane. None in particular.

 

[Gracchus]

So with the probability you have given us, using ridiculously generous numbers for every factor, we still end up with measly 1 in 10^67 odds that the event will happen to some human over the course of ten billion years.

Yeah I really wouldn't bet on these odds.

But that is the odds for a specified event.

Only at the limit of infinite trials, but the human brain has neither the mass nor the longevity, so this is a moot point.

How long does it take to shuffle together two decks of cards?

Also note that this only holds for truly random events and that there is no evidence that anything in the universe is truly random. Chaotic systems, like pseudo-random generators, have finite periods and therefore there are many things that they cannot ever produce.

The point is that the universe is composed of a great many really improbable events. The whole is fantastically improbable, but there it is.

 

[smog]

But that is the odds for a specified event.

Of course it is for a specified event. We're talking about how quantum uncertainty could seep in to influence cognition somehow. I am saying that with your made up figure, such a specific event is catastrophically unlikely to have happened in the past or to ever happen in the history of humanity, even once. Sure, it could have happened or it could happen in the future but in the absence of evidence it is quite safe to reject that it had or will.

How long does it take to shuffle together two decks of cards?

You're missing the point. There is only one specific configuration of that deck that we care about. Sure, everytime you shuffle the deck, the configuration you will get will have a 1 in 10^167 chance of happening (even though that is actually untrue - hand shuffling is structured and significantly skew the probabilities, and as far as I know the periods of pseudo-rngs are typically not long enough to cover the whole range of possibilities - but I digress). But this is a red herring. We don't care about these configurations at all. For any particular configuration, we can say that the odds are overwhelming that it never occurred and will never, ever occur within humanity's lifespan. We aren't watching what happens when we shuffle a deck, we're trying to place a bet that some particular configuration will come out (or not).

The point is that the universe is composed of a great many really improbable events. The whole is fantastically improbable, but there it is.

Yes... which doesn't change the fact that the overwhelming, crushing majority of improbable events never happen. Which is why in dismissing them all, one will be wrong overwhelmingly, crushingly rarely.

Also, the difference between whether quantum fluctuations are part of cognition or not and the universe is the difference between an unsubstantiated hypothesis and observable evidence. We can't reject the latter (it's right here), but we can reject the former.

Another huge difference is that despite the universe being "improbable", statistically, it meets the expectations. For example, take a sequence of 10 coin tosses. The sequence you will see will have had probability 1/2^10. But even though a specific normal looking sequence with 4 heads and 6 tails would have had the same probability as a sequence of 10 heads, in the latter case, you'd have a suspicion that the coin isn't fair. Thankfully, this is easy to test! You would make more trials. If the next 10 are approximately 50/50, and all the ones after that, you can suppose that the first 10 were a statistical fluke. It happens. Now if you throw it 1000 times and that it is 1000 times head, you'd have to be deranged not to call foul on this coin. Even though 1000 heads is just as likely as some particular trajectory with 490 heads and 510 tails, the distribution that one would calculate from the trial would deviate from the expected distribution by a staggering amount. The overwhelming majority of possible results for 1000 coin tosses will give you a head/tails ratio close to what you would expect (1.0), and the difference would converge slowly to the right thing as you multiply the trials. Look at the universe like this and it's just fine - the statistics match.

What you are proposing, on the other hand, would downright violate the laws of statistics by introducing systematic deviation from the norm. Perhaps you forgot, but the original point is, could quantum fluctuations play part in cognition. In order for this to be the case, the influence would have to happen frequently in each human brain. If a single occurrence of a synapse misfire because of a quantum fluctuation is 10^-167 and that this has to happen six billion times every second, you'll be looking at a figure whose probability decreases by a factor 10^(10^100) (I made that up but I'm sure it's frighteningly more) every second and (most importantly) which deviates from the expected distribution like a freight train to hell, whereas it should converge quickly. At this rate, of course, the self-imposing conclusion would be that the 10^-167 figure is horribly wrong

And if your point was that quantum fluctuations have an influence on cognition because the Earth (and the sentient beings on it) was "caused" by some fluctuation billions of years ago, see the last paragraph of my previous post that you didn't respond to. Too much causality is like no causality and chaotic systems are not causal in any meaningful sense. You can't pinpoint anything and say that it "caused" another event if it is through a chaotic system, because chances are that you can pinpoint everything that did or did not happen as causes on an equal footing. I mean, you could - but I think that it is meaningless and misleading.