I have not heard a clarification between science, invention and technology.



Are the internet and cars purely a product of science or mainly a product of invention and technology with little scientific input.

I think there has been a deliberate fudge so science can take credit of disparate things.

Reductionist science can tell us what is going on between particles but invention goes beyond emprirical evidence and creates something entirely new like the telephone.

This creativity is distinctly different than seeking answer and any science being used is not being used in a limited or explanatory way.



An Einstein character might discover unusual properties in physics but an inventor may then see in a different way how to utilise this property in a radical way.



Creativity is a puzzle in terms of philosophy and social science especially because it involves creating something new that didn't preexist.



Some people have believed everything has been created before. A determinist would have to claim they could extrapolate from the big bang what would inevitably exist by the laws of physics which seems a tad implausible.

jamest wrote:

Andrew4Handel wrote:
An Einstein character might discover unusual properties in physics but an inventor may then see in a different way how to utilise this property in a radical way.

At first glance, there didn't seem to be much of interest in your post. All you are suggesting is that there is an artistic element to invention which you don't get in [pure] science. However, 'relativity' didn't just fall onto Einstein's head, like an apple. The complex elements of his theory were invented by taking a new approach regards thinking about that particular issue. What Einstein did was to gather and utilise old processes; teachings; laws; theories (physics and maths); etc., to develop a new theory. This is no different, essentially, to what engineers do: they invent new things from existing knowledge. So, I reject the notion that [pure] science isn't creative.

Good point. Designing something like a car is really just another scientific experiment. You're testing a hypothesis that a particular design will work, and if it doesn't then you go back and figure out what was wrong with your original hypotheses. That's not just an extension or "fudge" of the scientific method. It is the scientific method.

Andrew4Handel wrote:I have not heard a clarification between science, invention and technology.

Then allow me to provide you with one.

Science provides the basis of our understanding of material interactions. It's possible to have both inventions and technology without it, but only at a Palaeolithic level or thereabouts. If you want technology such as computers, you need science, because you need to develop the proper understanding of the behaviour of complex interacting systems, before you can hope to construct such entities. Which is why we didn't have 747s in the Stone Age. Though why you can't work this out for yourself from first principles leads me to ask the question, just what did you do during your schooldays?

Andrew4Handel wrote:Are the internet and cars purely a product of science or mainly a product of invention and technology with little scientific input.

If you think there is "little scientific input" in a car, then you really need to go back to school and re-learn Basic Science 101.

First of all, in order to stand a chance of building a car, you need to be able to build an engine to propel it. which immediately brings you into such areas of science as, for example, thermodynamics, in order to determine such things as how efficient your engine is going to be, and how much power it is going to deliver, which in turn has an impact on the mass that the engine in question can propel. Which in turn brings you up close and personal with basic dynamics, which again has a rigorous scientific foundation. Then there's the little matter of chemistry. What compounds will make the best fuels for that engine? Which compounds will, upon combustion, produce the highest energy yields? What secondary effects do we need to take account of during the combustion reaction? For example, possible oxidation of the metal surfaces inside the combustion chamber, which might lead to the development of extra internal friction, decreased structural integrity of the cylinder, and so forth, all of which are well within the remit of chemists to investigate. So already, just concentrating upon the engine, there are a whole host of questions to be answered, that are properly the remit of physics and chemistry, and without which, you won't obtain those answers.

Then of course, once we have a working engine, there's the matter of integrating it into the vehicle. Which results in other questions that involve answers from basic physics. Such as the matter of vibration, and how that is going to affect the structure as a whole. Or the matter of noise from the engine, and how best to reduce it, which opens up some interesting questions involving research from the world of physical acoustics. Then, of course, we have a range of physical questions arising from the use of any suspension system, which brings us up close and personal with the world of harmonic oscillations, which again has a well-developed theory associated with it, along with several nice differential equations that need to be solved in order to produce an optimal solution.

Now whilst it might feasibly be possible to put something together in this manner via trial and error, and indeed, quite a few early vehicles involved at least a part of this, doing so in a manner likely to succeed involves asking oneself basic scientific questions, and finding answers thereto.

So if you think there's no science involved in building a car, you really need to go back to school and re-take Basic Science 101.

As for anyone who thinks science had no input into the Internet, hoo boy. It would probably take me the best part of half a million words to do justice to this.

Andrew4Handel wrote:I think there has been a deliberate fudge so science can take credit of disparate things.

Bollocks. This is another of your all too familiar and tiresome apologetic fabrications, erected so that you can shoe-horn a magic man into places it doesn't belong. The precedents you've set in past posts point to this inexorably.

Andrew4Handel wrote:Reductionist science can tell us what is going on between particles but invention goes beyond emprirical evidence and creates something entirely new like the telephone.

Oh, and you think there was no scientific input into the development of the telephone?

HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Can some electrical engineers come in here and teach this individual about such things as signal amplification, oscillation in electrical circuits, and the application of, for example, Ohm's Law to the relevant circuits?

All these issues had to be addressed before a successful telephone could be constructed. Which once again, means the prior work of scientists working to understand how electricity behaves.

Andrew4Handel wrote:This creativity is distinctly different than seeking answer

Poppycock. You think people who try to devise new technological devices aren't engaged in problem solving? This really has to count as one of your more retarded assertions.

Andrew4Handel wrote:and any science being used is not being used in a limited or explanatory way.

But without the prior scientific work explaining how the relevant phenomena behave, it wouldn't have been possible to figure out how to harness those phenomena. You really are clutching desperately at straws here, in order to try and hand-wave away the importance of science.

Andrew4Handel wrote:An Einstein character might discover unusual properties in physics but an inventor may then see in a different way how to utilise this property in a radical way.

Which would be impossible without the prior science. What part of this elementary concept do you not understand?

Of course, even with that prior science in place, there's still the matter of trial and error in the application thereof. Indeed, a large part of the history of human design involves trial and error, followed by discarding the failures, and building upon the successes.

Andrew4Handel wrote:Creativity is a puzzle in terms of philosophy and social science especially because it involves creating something new that didn't preexist.

No it isn't. Not to those of us who paid attention in the relevant classes, it isn't. See above.

Andrew4Handel wrote:Some people have believed everything has been created before.

So fucking what? Some people believe the Earth is flat, but it doesn't make them right.

Andrew4Handel wrote:A determinist would have to claim they could extrapolate from the big bang what would inevitably exist by the laws of physics

Except that your simplistic strawman caricature bears no relation to the reality. Because, amongst other things, scientists have learned that even purportedly "deterministic" systems can exhibit what is termed 'chaotic' behaviour, though I emphasise here that the use of the word 'chaotic' with respect to dynamical systems has a precise mathematical definition, so don't even think of playing specious apologetics with this.

Andrew4Handel wrote:which seems a tad implausible.

You've demonstrated in past posts that elementary ideas are "implausible" to you, and I've schooled you on a number of them. So what?

Tell me, do you have any substance to offer us sometime, or are you merely going to post yet more vacuous drivel, of the sort that has been a defining feature of most of your posts here? In addition, are you going to learn anything from the free education you're receiving here from many people who take time out to explain important principles to you, or are you merely going to continue demonstrating that you never pay attention to these people, and continue blathering on, posting witlessly misamatic concoctions that bear the manifest stench of having been extracted from your rectal passage?

Andrew4Handel wrote:I have not heard a clarification between science, invention and technology.
<snip>

Not tl; dr...but too stupid, didn't read!

When I refer to reductionist science I am not referring to all science but the science that is offered as an explanation of what exists.

The difference with technology and invention is that it creates something new or novel. This kind of creation of novelty also posited in evolution isn't predictable and doesn't have a scientific law attatched and makes future phenomena and states unpredictable With the potential for black swan moments.

The dogma now from some quarters is that science is explaining everything (away) but it fails to mention that science with technology and invention is creating new things including the potential for things such as transhumanism and reversing ageing. The potential to change the nature of our existence.

Reductionists/materialist will claim that we are just fundamentally protons and bosons but what ever fundamental properties are the properties of reality, change and have much more flexibility than is being ascribed to them. The notion of emergence is also taken for granted without a law like relationship between properties.

Here is AI theorist Margaret Boden on the mystery of novelty/creativity.

from her book "Dimensions of creativity". MIT press (1994)



"Creativity is a puzzle, a pardox, some say a mystery. inventors, scientists, and artists rarely know how their original ideas arise. They mention intuition, but cannot say how it works. Most psychologists cannot tell us much about it either. What's more, many people assume that there will never be a scientific theory of creativity-for how could science possibly explain fundamental novelties? As if all this were not daunting enough, the apparent unpredictability of creativity seems to outlaw any systematic explanation, whether scientific or historical."

Andrew4Handel wrote:When I refer to reductionist science I am not referring to all science but the science that is offered as an explanation of what exists.

The difference with technology and invention is that it creates something new or novel. This kind of creation of novelty also posited in evolution isn't predictable and doesn't have a scientific law attatched and makes future phenomena and states unpredictable With the potential for black swan moments.

The dogma now from some quarters is that science is explaining everything (away) but it fails to mention that science with technology and invention is creating new things including the potential for things such as transhumanism and reversing ageing. The potential to change the nature of our existence.

Reductionists/materialist will claim that we are just fundamentally protons and bosons but what ever fundamental properties are the properties of reality, change and have much more flexibility than is being ascribed to them. The notion of emergence is also taken for granted without a law like relationship between properties.

Here is AI theorist Margaret Boden on the mystery of novelty/creativity.

from her book "Dimensions of creativity". MIT press (1994)



"Creativity is a puzzle, a pardox, some say a mystery. inventors, scientists, and artists rarely know how their original ideas arise. They mention intuition, but cannot say how it works. Most psychologists cannot tell us much about it either. What's more, many people assume that there will never be a scientific theory of creativity-for how could science possibly explain fundamental novelties? As if all this were not daunting enough, the apparent unpredictability of creativity seems to outlaw any systematic explanation, whether scientific or historical."

So the fact that someone can use science to design something like car shows that there must some immaterial creative force in the universe that transcends material existence?

Darwinsbulldog has it right. Too stupid to bother reading.

Oh dear A4H. Same old shit, different coloured box.

Shrunk wrote:So the fact that someone can use science to design something like car shows that there must some immaterial creative force in the universe that transcends material existence?

Darwinsbulldog has it right. Too stupid to bother reading.

I am not discussing anything to do with desim or the so called super natural.

I am referring for the ability of new things to arise that didn't previously exist which is a challenge to reductionism and determinism. And this is what seperates technology and invention from science.

A determinist as has been admitted by a few has to believe that from a "god's eye" view the future could be predicted from the initial nature of posited the big bang.

The appearance of novelty is not explained by a scientific theory as mentioned in the Boden exerpt.

By "not explained" I don't mean not causally explained but not explained in a law like manner to say A + B equalls neccessarily C because of X and Y. This is the issue of emergence which is well studied and recognised as a challenge for theorists.

Emergence is a challenge for consciousness theorists who claim that consciousness emerges from brain states but cannot explain how in a law like or even explanatory fashion rather they make a crude correlation.


Here is the comprehensive article from wiki on emergence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

"The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts"

PS I don't expect you to be open minded about this ..lol

jamest wrote:
The difference with technology and invention is that it creates something new or novel.

It creates new knowledge but other than that it doesn't fundamentally change the nature of things unless you think the observer influences the observed as some people posit.

Crass reductionism refuses to see anything beyond fundamental physics.

It is like a mental illness or a child's temper tantrum.

Isn't your knowledge of emergence itself scientific?

Andrew4Handel wrote:I am not discussing anything to do with desim or the so called super natural.

I am referring for the ability of new things to arise that didn't previously exist which is a challenge to reductionism and determinism. And this is what seperates technology and invention from science.

A determinist as has been admitted by a few has to believe that from a "god's eye" view the future could be predicted from the initial nature of posited the big bang.

The appearance of novelty is not explained by a scientific theory as mentioned in the Boden exerpt.

The Boden excerpt just makes an unsupported assertion.

I don't think you've even demonstrated that "novelty" even exists. All we see is rearrangements of already existing matter and energy, which continues to behave in exactly the way predicted by science.

PS I don't expect you to be open minded about this ..lol

I think lack of open mindedness is best demonstrated by your continuing to post the same unsubstantiated woo despite its repeatedly being shown to be wholly without merit.

Andrew4Handel wrote:I have not heard a clarification between science, invention and technology.

Science is a process by which we generate knowledge of the natural world.
Technology is what happens when we use this knowledge to do something. This always has a non-scientific component, namely ethics: Should we do that thing?
But it´s also clear that Technology is only possible when the knowledge has previously been generated. Either by science, or by other disciplines (maths for instance, but even philosophy comes with its technology).

Andrew4Handel wrote:Are the internet and cars purely a product of science or mainly a product of invention and technology with little scientific input.

They aren´t purely a product of science, but without science they would be unthinkable.

Andrew4Handel wrote:I think there has been a deliberate fudge so science can take credit of disparate things.

I don´t think so. Most scientists I know have rather strong opinions on this and they don´t want the line between science and engineering to be blurred. We try to figure things out. Period. If you want to annoy a scientist ask him about the applications of her work...

Andrew4Handel wrote:An Einstein character might discover unusual properties in physics but an inventor may then see in a different way how to utilise this property in a radical way.

You know Einstein invented a safer fridge between 1926 and 1928...

Calilasseia wrote:Except that your simplistic strawman caricature bears no relation to the reality. Because, amongst other things, scientists have learned that even purportedly "deterministic" systems can exhibit what is termed 'chaotic' behaviour, though I emphasise here that the use of the word 'chaotic' with respect to dynamical systems has a precise mathematical definition, so don't even think of playing specious apologetics with this.

Still in deterministic systems the same innitial conditions produce the same results. That´s the definition of deterministic systems. Chaotic systems have the property that similar innitial conditions do not produce similar results. But I don´t think determinism is worth defending at all (since evolution is impossible in a deterministic univer that´d make you a creationist).

Andrew4Handel wrote:"Creativity is a puzzle, a pardox, some say a mystery. inventors, scientists, and artists rarely know how their original ideas arise. They mention intuition, but cannot say how it works. Most psychologists cannot tell us much about it either. What's more, many people assume that there will never be a scientific theory of creativity-for how could science possibly explain fundamental novelties? As if all this were not daunting enough, the apparent unpredictability of creativity seems to outlaw any systematic explanation, whether scientific or historical."

It´s worth noting that stochastic systems exhibit precisely this behaviour and that fundamentally science has turned to these, ever since Darwin.

Oh dear, it's another shower of fail bosons in the particle accelerator of discourse ...

Andrew4Handel wrote:When I refer to reductionist science I am not referring to all science but the science that is offered as an explanation of what exists.

Ahem, ALL science deals with explanations of entities that exist, and the interactions they take part in. What part of this elementary concept do you not understand?

Andrew4Handel wrote:The difference with technology and invention is that it creates something new or novel.

Oh, and you think devising a precise, predictive quantitative theory for a given class of entities and interactions, that didn't exist before, isn't "something new or novel"?

Your tiresome apologetic fabrications, erected to hand-wave away science because you don't like the fact that it doesn't genuflect before mythological bollocks, or because you can't be bothered learning anything substantive about it, are precisely that - tiresome.

Andrew4Handel wrote:This kind of creation of novelty also posited in evolution isn't predictable

So? Care to get to the point of this miasma of muddled thinking you're posting here?

Andrew4Handel wrote:and doesn't have a scientific law attatched and makes future phenomena and states unpredictable With the potential for black swan moments.

And if you think devising new scientific theories doesn't count as "creative", then you really need to go back to school and learn the basics.

Andrew4Handel wrote:The dogma now from some quarters is that science is explaining everything (away)

Your duplicitous misrepresentation of science, with that last part in brackets, is duly noted. Sleazy little rhetorical devices of this sort have been a feature of your posts in the past.

Plus, the increasing growth of scientific knowledge isn't "dogma", it's observable fact. Learn the elementary difference between the two, before you post more embarrassingly crass nonsense such as the above.

Andrew4Handel wrote:but it fails to mention that science with technology and invention is creating new things including the potential for things such as transhumanism and reversing ageing.

And this is a problem how, precisely?

Andrew4Handel wrote:The potential to change the nature of our existence.

Well if that change involves being freed once and for all from bullshit, I welcome it.

Andrew4Handel wrote:Reductionists/materialist will claim that we are just fundamentally protons and bosons but what ever fundamental properties are the properties of reality, change and have much more flexibility than is being ascribed to them.

Er, how much physics have you actually studied, once again?

Plus, scientists consider these entities and interactions 'flexible' enough to account for an entire observable universe. How much more 'flexibility' do you fucking want?

Andrew4Handel wrote:The notion of emergence is also taken for granted without a law like relationship between properties.

No it isn't. Your crassly banal misrepresentation of the science is beneath deserving of a point of view. As I have repeatedly told you in the past, READ THE FUCKING RESEARCH. You know, get off your discoursive arse, exercise some actual effort, and read some real scientific papers. You might learn something. Oh, but of course, learning something that shatters your cosy illusions, including your attachment to mythological bollocks, is the last thing you'll do, isn't it?

In case you slept through the requisite classes, relationships between various entities and interactions are the fundamental working substrate of the whole of science. If you weren't so busy trying to erect some specious apologetic bollocks, aimed at replacing science with wibble, you would have been able to derive this from first principles.

Andrew4Handel wrote:Here is AI theorist Margaret Boden on the mystery of novelty/creativity.

Ok, let's have at it shall we?

"Creativity is a puzzle, a paradox, some say a mystery. inventors, scientists, and artists rarely know how their original ideas arise. They mention intuition, but cannot say how it works. Most psychologists cannot tell us much about it either. What's more, many people assume that there will never be a scientific theory of creativity-for how could science possibly explain fundamental novelties? As if all this were not daunting enough, the apparent unpredictability of creativity seems to outlaw any systematic explanation, whether scientific or historical."

Why do I smell a quote mine here? Only I suspect many scientists, if asked, would answer that once appropriate rigorous concepts were in place, and empirically supported, the question above that Boden appears to claiming doesn't have an answer will actually have one.

Andrew4Handel wrote:

Shrunk wrote:So the fact that someone can use science to design something like car shows that there must some immaterial creative force in the universe that transcends material existence?

Darwinsbulldog has it right. Too stupid to bother reading.

I am not discussing anything to do with desim or the so called super natural.

Ahem, you're suggesting that there exist so-called "limits" to science with respect to the nature of the questions it can answer. Which means that you're implying, courtesy of those suggestions, that some magical "explanation" is required for those questions you think are purportedly beyond the remit of science. Strange how all the precedents with respect to this, that have been erected in the past by fetishists for magic and mythology, have all crumbled. It's testable natural processes all the way down and the only reason we haven't alighted in detail upon the ones that will render this latest foray of yours null and void, is because we've only had something of the order of 400 years of proper empirical science, which, in that short period of time, has made far more progress than the previous 5,000 years of mythological navel gazing. I suspect that after 5,000 years of proper empirical science, scientists will have answers to questions you can't even imagine the existence of.

Andrew4Handel wrote:I am referring for the ability of new things to arise that didn't previously exist which is a challenge to reductionism and determinism.

Bollocks. We know why new things come into existence. Because people are [1] inquisitive, and [2] act upon that curiosity. Sometimes, those actions result in dismal failure. Sometimes, those actions result in success that can be built upon. This isn't a "challenge" to the current scientific world view at all, and the notion that it somehow is, is manifestly a product of your rectal passage. Oh and once again, since when does the development of new scientific theories, that didn't exist before, fall outside the scope of "creativity"?

Andrew4Handel wrote:And this is what seperates technology and invention from science.

Bollocks. Once again, you're talking complete horseshit. I see you didn't bother reading my previous post, where I dealt with some of this horseshit in detail.

Andrew4Handel wrote:A determinist as has been admitted by a few has to believe that from a "god's eye" view the future could be predicted from the initial nature of posited the big bang.

Except that no one considers this sort of determinism to be tenable. Why is that? Oh, that's right, because of a large body of scientific evidence to this effect, from, for example, quantum physics.

Andrew4Handel wrote:The appearance of novelty is not explained by a scientific theory as mentioned in the Boden exerpt.

It's an evolutionary process. We try something out, we discard the failures, we build upon the successes. Next?

Andrew4Handel wrote:By "not explained" I don't mean not causally explained but not explained in a law like manner to say A + B equalls neccessarily C because of X and Y. This is the issue of emergence which is well studied and recognised as a challenge for theorists.

Funny how evolutionary biologists, or for that matter computer scientists using evolutionary algorithms, don't have the problems with emergence that you seem to think they do.

Andrew4Handel wrote:Emergence is a challenge for consciousness theorists who claim that consciousness emerges from brain states but cannot explain how in a law like or even explanatory fashion rather they make a crude correlation.

Oh, and you acquired your Ph.D in neuroscience with which academic institution, again?

Plus, neuroscience is still a relatively young discipline. Come back in another 50 years, and let's see what empirically supported results they have then, shall we?

Andrew4Handel wrote:Here is the comprehensive article from wiki on emergence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

Right ... I don't suppose you'll have any actual scientific papers to present here, will you?

"The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts"

In the meantime, here's a nice scientific paper for you to digest, namely:

The Calculi Of Emergence: Computation, Dynamics And Induction by James P. Crutchfield, 1993 (in the Physica D (1994) special issue on the Proceedings of the Oji International Seminar Complex Systems — from Complex Dynamics to Artificial Reality, held 5 - 9 April 1993, Numazu, Japan) [Full paper downloadable from here

Crutchfield, 1993 wrote:Abstract

Defining structure and detecting the emergence of complexity in nature are inherently subjective, though essential, scientific activities. Despite the difficulties, these problems can be analyzed in terms of how model-building observers infer from measurements the computational capabilities embedded in nonlinear processes. An observer’s notion of what is ordered, what is random, and what is complex in its environment depends directly on its computational resources: the amount of raw measurement data, of memory, and of time available for estimation and inference. The discovery of structure in an environment depends more critically and subtly, though, on how those resources are organized. The descriptive power of the observer’s chosen (or implicit) computational model class, for example, can be an overwhelming determinant in finding regularity in data. This paper presents an overview of an inductive framework — hierarchical -machine reconstruction — in which the emergence of complexity is associated with the innovation of new computational model classes. Complexity metrics for detecting structure and quantifying emergence, along with an analysis of the constraints on the dynamics of innovation, are outlined. Illustrative examples are drawn from the onset of unpredictability in nonlinear systems, finitary nondeterministic processes, and cellular automata pattern recognition. They demonstrate how finite inference resources drive the innovation of new structures and so lead to the emergence of complexity.

Oh look. Looks like someone is working on a solution to Boden's purportedly "unsolvable" problem. Quelle surprise.

Oh, and from that paper, we have this:

Crutchfield, 1993 wrote:Emergence is generally understood to be a process that leads to the appearance of structure not directly described by the defining constraints and instantaneous forces that control a system. Over time “something new” appears at scales not directly specified by the equations of motion. An emergent feature also cannot be explicitly represented in the initial and boundary conditions. In short, a feature emerges when the underlying system puts some effort into its creation.

These observations form an intuitive definition of emergence. For it to be useful, however, one must specify what the “something” is and how it is “new”. Otherwise, the notion has little or no content, since almost any time-dependent system would exhibit emergent features.

In other words, he's saying above that it pays to think properly about the problem before erecting scatter-gun assertions that might be flushed down the toilet later by reality. Not that I expect you to learn that lesson, given that you've manifestly failed to learn it throughout your posting career here.

Likewise, from that paper, we have this apposite observation:

Crutchfield, 1993 wrote:1.1 Pattern!

One recent and initially baffling example of emergence is deterministic chaos. In this, deterministic equations of motion lead over time to apparently unpredictable behavior. When confronted with chaos, one question immediately demands an answer — Where in the determinism did the randomness come from? The answer is that the effective dynamic, which maps from initial conditions to states at a later time, becomes so complicated that an observer can neither measure the system accurately enough nor compute with sufficient power to predict the future behavior when given an initial condition. The emergence of disorder here is the product of both the complicated behavior of nonlinear dynamical systems and the limitations of the observer.[8]

Further on, he has this to say:

Crutchfield, 1993 wrote: Deterministic chaos and the self-avoiding random walk are two examples of the emergence of “pattern”. The new feature in the first case is unpredictability; in the second, self-similarity. The “newness” in each case is only heightened by the fact that the emergent feature stands in direct opposition to the systems’ defining character: complete determinism underlies chaos and near-complete stochasticity, the orderliness of self-similarity. But for whom has the emergence occurred? More particularly, to whom are the emergent features “new”? The state of a chaotic dynamical system always moves to a unique next state under the application of a deterministic function. Surely, the system state doesn’t know its behavior is unpredictable. For the random walk, “fractalness” is not in the “eye” of the particle performing the local steps of the random walk, by definition. The newness in both cases is in the eye of an observer: the observer whose predictions fail or the analyst who notes that the feature of statistical self-similarity captures a commonality across length scales.

And then this:

Crutchfield, 1993 wrote:Although the behavior in these systems is readily described as “coherent”, “self-organizing”, and “emergent”, the patterns which appear are detected by the observers and analysts themselves. The role of outside perception is evidenced by historical denials of patterns in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, of coherent structures in highly turbulent fluid flows, and of the energy recurrence in anharmonic oscillator chains reported by Fermi, Pasta, and Ulam. Those experiments didn’t suddenly start behaving differently once these key structures were appreciated by scientists. It is the observer or analyst who lends the teleological “self” to processes which otherwise simply “organize” according to the underlying dynamical constraints. Indeed, the detected patterns are often assumed implicitly by analysts via the statistics they select to confirm the patterns’ existence in experimental data. The obvious consequence is that “structure” goes unseen due to an observer’s biases. In some fortunate cases, such as convection rolls, spiral waves, or solitons, the functional representations of “patterns” are shown to be consistent with mathematical models of the phenomena. But these models themselves rest on a host of theoretical assumptions. It is rarely, if ever, the case that the appropriate notion of pattern is extracted from the phenomenon itself using minimally-biased discovery procedures. Briefly stated, in the realm of pattern formation “patterns” are guessed and then verified.

All relatively familiar to those of us who actually paid attention in the relevant classes.

Andrew4Handel wrote:PS I don't expect you to be open minded about this ..lol

Oh look, it's cheap shot time. Quelle surprise.

Andrew4Handel wrote:

jamest wrote:The difference with technology and invention is that it creates something new or novel.

It creates new knowledge but other than that it doesn't fundamentally change the nature of things unless you think the observer influences the observed as some people posit.

Crass reductionism refuses to see anything beyond fundamental physics.

Your crass caricature of science above manifestly refuses to see anything beyond your presuppositions.

Andrew4Handel wrote:It is like a mental illness or a child's temper tantrum.

As opposed to the "mental illness" or "child's temper tantrum of continuing to erect fatuous strawman caricatures of relevant science, including caricatures erected after the relevant education has been dispensed?

Once again, do you have any actual substance here, or is this merely another of your manifest exercises in throwing toys out of the discoursive pram because those nasty people who actually bothered to learn something, don't roll over and genuflect before your ex recto assertions and apologetic blather?

If I may add to Cali's comments Andrew4handle seems to be under the impression that the universe owes him an explanation for everything. I see no good reason why there might be brute facts that have no explanation at all. Perhaps that is why A4H insists that science is inadequate and his god the answer.

But get this A4H, scientific explantions are not about reality or truth, they are confined to how well a model [or models] describes and predicts. Science, even with it's built-in skeptacism and prudence, cannot conflate theories with reality. Religious "explanations" [really untested and untestable claims] can do no better, and in fact does a lot worse.

Modern science has gone way beyond what T.H. Huxley called 'science as organised common-sense". The gravity of a neutron star, the speed of light, the no-locality of the quantum world is way beyond our personal experience, and seems unbelievable and counter-intuitive. That is why experiments are done. That is why the maths is worked out. Because are pre-suppositions/beliefs are not reliable in these matters. Nor can we be utterly certain, even if we happen on the truth by accident, could we recognise it as such.