Source
Bishop, “Chaos”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, substantive revision of 11 October 2024, LIT-1961, §§4, 6.1, 6.4; read in NOTE-1535.
What was actually shown
An argument, not data.
- Determinism. “Mathematically, chaos is a property of dynamical systems which are deterministic”; Popper’s step from unpredictability to indeterminism “identifies determinism (an ontological property) with predictability (an epistemic property)” (§6.1).
- Amplification is conditional. The SD argument needs a settled interpretation of QM; “damping due to friction can place constraints on how quickly amplification … takes place before being completely washed out”; a perturbation arriving “when the local Lyapunov exponents are negative” will “dissipate rather than amplify” (§4).
- The brain. “Large amounts of parallel redundancy in brain regions and neural networks make changes in one neuron’s firing unlikely to be amplified to any appreciable degree” (§6.4).
- Free will. Under determinism, SDIC “wouldn’t be sufficient for incompatibilist notions of freedom”; under indeterminism, “the challenge remains for incompatibilists, such Robert Kane (1996), to demonstrate agents can effectively harness such indeterminism” (§6.4).
What this does not say
- That harnessing is impossible, or that Kane’s account fails; the challenge is stated as open.
- That the brain is not chaotic. “The presence of chaos in the brain … is an empirical matter that’s hotly debated” (§6.4).
- What harnessing would require. The entry gives no criterion; the record’s attempt at one is CLAIM-533’s coupling of control to the amplifying directions.
- Evidence for the redundancy point, which is uncited.