[FRIAM] The entropy of thought

[steve smith]

On 5/29/25 9:24 AM, glen wrote:
> Why isn't Lorenz in there somewhere? Seems like an obvious candidate.

/“When the present determines the future, but the approximate present 
does not approximately determine the future.”/
— Edward Lorenz, /The Essence of Chaos/ (1993)

What George says when "reminded" of Lorenz:

  *

    *Edward Lorenz (1963 onward)* may be the /first person to
    demonstrate/ in precise mathematical terms a *deterministic system
    whose behavior could not be prestated* beyond a short horizon.

  *

    He /did not/ use the phrase *“deterministic but not prestateable”*,
    but *his work embodies it fully*, and later chaos theorists and
    philosophers often retroactively describe it that way.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

and here is George's (I don't call GPT George, but for continuity with 
Nick, et al I do here) response:

but first for brevity, I cherry picked from below and I like the help 
given in my nitpickery style:

  *

    /“Unpredictable” (Lorenz-style, chaos)/

  *

    /“Unprestatable” (Kauffman-style, adjacent possible)/

  *

    /“Undecidable” (Turing/Gödel-style, logic)/

------------------------------------------------------------------------


Me: can you explain perhaps why you might have omitted lorenz


            ChatGPT said:

Yes — and I appreciate the callout.


      Why Lorenz Might Have Been Omitted (Initially)

There are a few reasons, mostly contextual and framing-based, not due to 
oversight of his importance:

------------------------------------------------------------------------


      1. *Interpretive Framing Bias:*

Your original phrase, *“deterministic but not prestateable,”* carries a 
flavor that strongly suggests:

  *

    *Logical / epistemic limits* (e.g., undecidability, incompleteness),

  *

    *Unenumerable state spaces* (as in Kauffman or Rosen),

  *

    *Open-endedness* and *emergence* rather than sensitivity or chaos.

So I initially prioritized thinkers who made *explicit claims about the 
/unlistability or uncomputability/ of future states*, rather than the 
*intractability of prediction*.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


      2. *Domain-Specific Bias:*

Lorenz worked in *physics and meteorology*, and his contributions, while 
foundational to the idea of unpredictability, are *framed in terms of 
instability*, not *unprestatability due to logical structure*.

That is:

  *

    Lorenz’s system /is/ prestatable in theory (you can write the
    equations),

  *

    But *in practice*, you can’t predict far ahead without infinite
    precision.

Compare to Kauffman, who says:

    “We /cannot even write down/ the space of possibilities in advance.”

So the distinction was between:

*Type of barrier* 	*Lorenz* 	*Kauffman/Rosen*
Measurement precision limit 	Yes 	Sometimes
Computational or logical limit 	No (the system is computable) 	Yes (the 
phase space isn’t enumerable)

------------------------------------------------------------------------


      3. *Terminological Exactness:*

Lorenz didn't use the language of *prestateability*. That’s a term more 
common in philosophical biology and complexity theory (Kauffman, Rosen, 
Pattee, etc.).

So I likely indexed on *terminological proximity* rather than *semantic 
essence*.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


      4. *Scholarly Echo Chamber Effect:*

The phrase /“deterministic but not prestateable”/ has circulated more 
explicitly in Kauffman and Rosen’s circles — particularly in systems 
biology, philosophy of complexity, and theoretical evolution — than in 
physics/chaos literature.

There’s a subtle linguistic difference between:

  *

    “Unpredictable” (Lorenz-style, chaos)

  *

    “Unprestatable” (Kauffman-style, adjacent possible)

  *

    “Undecidable” (Turing/Gödel-style, logic)

------------------------------------------------------------------------


      🧭 Retrospective Correction

You were right to bring Lorenz in. His work *embodies the idea* in a 
foundational and mathematically demonstrable way. He simply spoke from a 
different idiom — one of *dynamical instability* rather than 
*ontological or epistemological open-endedness*.

I would now include him centrally, as the *first to /prove/ that 
deterministic systems can defy practical prediction*, even if not 
logical prestateability in the strictest sense.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Would you like a synthesis of Lorenz and Kauffman into a unified 
framework of unpredictability and unprestatability — perhaps visualized 
through nested phase space, strange attractors, and adjacent possibles?


Tools

ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.





>
> On 5/29/25 8:13 AM, steve smith wrote:
>>
>>> < The interesting question is where exactly does the deterministic 
>>> system turn into something nondeterministic, and how?>
>>>
>>> It doesn’t.  A deterministic system is a deterministic system.
>>>
>> who might have first made the distinction : "deterministic but not 
>> pre-stateable"?
>>
>> George offered:
>>
>> Year     Thinker     Conceptual Expression
>> 1931     Kurt Gödel     Incompleteness: truths not derivable
>> 1936     Alan Turing     Halting problem: uncomputable predictions
>> 1970s     Heinz von Foerster     Second-order cybernetics: 
>> unknowability of future
>> 1991     Robert Rosen     Closure to efficient causation; entailment 
>> limits
>> 1993     Stuart Kauffman     Adjacent possible; unprestatable evolution
>> 2005     Gregory Chaitin     Incompressible but defined numbers 
>> (e.g., Ω)
>>
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