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Article 6663 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: stgprao@st.unocal.COM (Richard Ottolini)
Subject: Re: Freewill, chaos and digital systems
Message-ID: <1992Aug20.153539.1603@unocal.com>
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References: <Bt4xt1.MA0.1@cs.cmu.edu> <1992Aug19.210204.29868@mp.cs.niu.edu> <Bt9Kq2.CLy.1@cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1992 15:35:39 GMT
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Quasi-deterministic systems are possible based on underlying random phenomena.
Two examples:

There is a branch of mathematics called "cellular automata" where there is
an interesting mix of random and determinism.  One type of CA simulation
divides events into microscopic (cell-to-cell interactions) and macroscopic
(averages over large numbers of cells).  The microscopic is give random
initial conditions and random outcome of actions, but objects obey various
convervation laws, e.g. conservation of number, momentum, etc. Amazingly,
on the macroscopic scale, this can be shown to model deterministic physics
such as acoustic wave propagation and fluid flow.

Another mixed random-deterministic system is Kaneva's Sparse Distributed
Memory (Stanford PhD thesis @1984).  It successfully claims one can store and
retrieve items from a memory of which only infinitesmal fraction of the
addresses actually exist, given the addresses are very large (10,000+ bits)
and one guesses at addresses.  At some point the law of large numbers and
the central limit theorem takes effect with interesting consequences.

The physical brain is a larger system than these two examples.
I see no problem with semi-randomness at the neuron and sub-neuron level
leading to non-random behavior in the large.


