> At 16:27 11/12/96 -0500, Alexander wrote that Matt wrote:
> >> Besides, if there is no free will, then there's no point to existence
> >> because everything's already predetermined and we should all just kill
> >> ourselves right now. Why not?
>
>
> And then he went on to write:
> >Oh, free will isn't necessary to me feeling a need to survive; as long
> >as "I"'m surprised by the next thing down the pike its OK. Note that a
> >lack of free will doesn't mean predestination in the least; Brownian
> >Motion is completely without free-will, each particle is constrained to
> >react in X way to Y variables. It is, however, always surprising to
> >watch the jinking and swirling of Brownianly moving particles, at least
> >to me.
>
> And so I am about to write:
> Erm... except I'd say the Brownian motion WAS all predetermined... it's just
> that there's no way we can model a system that complex, so there's no way we
> can predict it, so we deal with it by using statistical maths techniques
> (allowing us to describe the motion at some abstract level) and heuristic
> terms like "random". But I agree: it's still a fcken impressive show.
Useless tangent:
I remember one of the math professors here [at K-State], who used Brownian
motion to construct a counterexample to a conjecture he was looking at.
[The procedure only worked between 30% and 40% of the time, and the result
was thoroughly unrepresentable by more conventional techniques. In
particular, it was not susceptible to power series, and thus nonanalytic.]
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/ Towards the conversion of data into information....
/
/ Kenneth Boyd
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