An Object Lesson in Chaos

A couple day ago, Houston was in the bullseye, and the hurricane rated a Category 5.

A week ago, Rita did not exist, even as Tropical Depression 18.

And now, the Hurricane rates a Category 3 and it's hooking its way towards Texas/Louisiana Border. There are probably some news viewers who are tearing out their hair at the imprecision. They shouldn't actually. The Weather services are doing the best they can.

Some observant viewers will take note of those segments where the Weatherfolks show a "spaghetti tangle" of possible storm paths. These maybe the more intellectually honest of the storm prediction. But people ask, why so many different possible paths?

Prediction is a funky game with the weather, and even funkier for phenomena like hurricanes. The famed Butterfly Effect has its origins in a program meant to model the weather, and for good reason. I guess what we have here is what we could call dense history, and what matters and what doesn't is often unclear.

It's not a matter of direct causation, though. It's more like being in a crowd where everybody's jostling everybody else towards some threshold, and which gate or exit one ends up depends on who one bumped into, where, when, and in what order. If you could find that out, you could predict where the person would end up. What if, though, you were incapable of working out that complete of a history, or that history involved not individuals, but groups within that crowd? Your perspective would blur, and actions beyond the scope of your ability to observe would be able to throw monkey wrenches into your predictions.

It gets even more interesting when organization becomes involved. Let's say some people in that crowd were sent randomly in, and then given instructions to stay in sight of each other. In nature, intelligence is not necessarily needed for organization, just physics. Thunderstorms sustain themselves by drawing in most air from below, which augments their organization, The rules complicitly act together to take what's unlikely on the atomic level, and change the odds, allowing complex behavior to result from these simple rules.

Hurricanes are emergent phenomenas that the laws of physics conspire to make not only self sustaining, but also a strong influence on their environment, to the point that they seem to act with volition. Getting back to the crowd, those people given instructions, if clearly marked, might seemed to be acting by an external intelligence, somehow moving in one direction or another by a collectively made decision, even though they are only working from a simple, basic rule. It is in this way that bird flocks can be simulated with a few rules with astonishing realism.

Emergence is the key word. Life is a common form of emergent behavior. Despite all the talk of a unique animating force in this culture and others, we acknowledge in common sense one profound truth about man's existence: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Emergent phenomenon are a direct result of the combination and configuration of substances and energies whose presence cannot be reduced to the simple consequence of any one part.

The motion the crowd takes in it's flow, as far as the details are concerned are not spelled out in any one individual. However, the context of a crowd's movement (that is, each person's physical presence, their range of their stamina, their speed of travel, and their own sense of self preservation and purpose, among other things) all contribute to an overall behavior that seems organized by intelligence, rather than the traditional laws of physics.

I guess the point people should draw from what I write here is this: Our world, if it can be described mechanically, runs with great complexity, and though we are just beginning to understand these phenomena, in many ways, we will always have the disadvantage of imperfect observation and ability to process that information.

Will our ability to model these storms improve? Well, meteorologists and other scientists studying these phenomenon continue to discover the peculiarities and ideosyncrasies, and those can help us refine our models. But if there is any lesson to be drawn, it's that our perception has its limits, and that we should allow for that. What does that mean? We plan as if things won't necessarily go our way because the next time, we may be the unlucky ones. It is a gift not to be in the way of nature's wrath, and nature is not always that generous.