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Notes on software and processes for collecting, analyzing and acting on data |
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There should be some deep connection between uncertainty at the quantum level and uncertainty at the macro systems level. There should be, but I've never seen or felt it. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle affects knowledge about elementary particles, not stock prices. Complexity can explain stock price uncertainty without recourse to the level of the electron or photon. The randomness in the world doesn't have to arise because elementary particles are described by probabilistic wave distributions. Physicists struggle with the relationship between the observer and the system. The experimentalist wonders whether their is order in the larger world without mental models and experience. Physicists and philosophers know that they do not directly experience the reality of world, only the results of their measurements and sensory experiences. Physicists, presented with the weird, unintuitive world of the quantum, see granularity in the world. At some level, our everyday experience does not provide the right mental model for predictions. In every experimental science, the same granularity exists. For example, my observation of human behavior would never predict that behind it was a massively parallel system of neurons, none of which had experienced anything but a tiny bit of the whole. Is the commonality merely one of emergence? Once parts interact as a system, that system has characteristics that are wholly different from the components? Are meaning and uncertainty always a result of systemic interactions? |
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Copyright 2003 by James J. Vornov |