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From: hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu (H. M. Hubey)
Subject: Re: Predicting the Future
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jimmyb@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (James B. Milner) writes:

>I wasn't interested in a spiritual reply.  My post concerned the
>effects of future events on the brain (not consciousness), and I was
>attempting to argue that, just as past events, they shape and are
>shaped by the activity of the brain.

>Jimmy


Is it really the future or the past?  Extrapolation (i.e. attempting to predict the future) is drawn from past experience. It's the past that shapes the future. If 
you're thinking of wants/desires etc then we'll be getting into the problem of 
free will vs determinism again.

But there is a nice analogy from thermodynamics, stochastic processes, or a
more physical example of the same. ONe person struggling to achieve his/her
ends among multitudes is like a particle/point/molecule in a heat bath(thermo)
a point in n-dimensional space (described by some say stochastic diff. eqs) or
a molecule (say of water) in turbulent flow.  A single particle does add to
and affect the behavior of the whole (of course it has to) but looked at from 
another perspective, it is still like being driven in the direction of the 
average behavior of the ensemble. In more modern and fashionable terms one may 
substitute (possibly more correctly) chaotic flow for stochastic one. The
determinism is there to a degree because the averaged behavior of the 
ensemble will determine the general flow of things. The free will component is 
there because the averaged behavior does not microscopically determine the
path of every molecule. It's possible for a single molecule to be moving
opposite the general direction during turbulent flow.


--
						-- Mark---
....we must realize that the infinite in the sense of an infinite totality, 
where we still find it used in deductive methods, is an illusion. Hilbert,1925
