On 10/1/07, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
So we fall back on the fact that the fact that we are here, may imply that highly chaotic planetary orbits are inimical to human existence. We now have the circular argument that the universe is understandable (partially decomposable/factorable) simply because that is the only universe that supports human life. Alternatively, of all of the chaos in our lives, only the pitifully small percentage that is amenable to simple patterns is actually visible/"understandable" to us.
I agree - in some cases, we live in the "regular" places because that's what makes those places hospitable to complex life forms evolving, and in other cases we theorize about the regular places because those are the places where it's easiest to develop theories. But in that latter case, our theories do keep extending in places (e.g. climate and weather) that were once thought to be entirely beyond the grasp of our theories: while we know there's chaos there, there's still a lot of predicting that can be done. I think neuroscience is another such field: we are learning about regularities in brain function in all kinds of new ways, where once the brain was thought to be just too complicated for that type of low-level interpretation. So I don't think it's vacuous entirely - the scope of our theory does keep increasing, uncovering regularities in what previously seemed to be chaos (in either or both of the colloquial or mathematical senses of that word). --Joshua Zucker