I know the very act of saying “chaos” denotes a scene of disorder and randomness. However, when we as humans look at our world, in our everyday lives we have to qualify, quantify and place into categories everything we experience. [it doesn’t matter if you are a nuclear and fluid engineer or crack head] everyone categorizes. There is growth, stagnation, cyclic behavior, irrational fluctuations of everyday events yet they all seem quite normal in everyday life. So the question is even though chaos denotes irregular and highly complex structures in space and time does it still follow deterministic laws?
I’d have a hard time saying that chaos follows deterministic laws. On the other hand, chaotic systems do tend to exhibit certain behaviors. For an excellent, non-technical treatment of the subject, read James Gleick’s Chaos.
From a physical standpoint, chaos can be (and frequently is) limited. I realize that “limited chaos” seems like an oxymoron, but the terms are relative. For example, a trickling stream of water from a faucet may be said to behave chaoticly, but it will not magically fly out your window and into space because it is limited by physical laws. Perhaps one individual molecule might have enough energy to escape earth’s gravity, but because of the total amount of energy contained by the system it would be highly improbable, maybe even impossible.
(Now’s where someone comes in and starts applying sub-atomic quantum physics to macro objects and messes with your mind…)
Anyway, IMHO the system is chaotic, but it is limited by the total energy. In other words, 6 billion people aren’t going to suddenly decide that they all need to be in New York at once unless there is some seriously potent driving force. (Free beer?) Instead, most will stick to their daily routines out of pure inertia until they collide with something that changes their world.
Economically, I think this is why we see cycles. To put it in very simplified form… The upper limit is that there are not enough resources to give every one what they want. The lower limit is that people will do what they have to to survive. If we go below the lower limit, people start dying off because there is not enough food to go around, and AFAIK, the upper limit has never been reached. Otherwise we fluctuate between wealth and poverty based on how many people there are, how productive they are, how many tornados hit Oklahoma last year, the spawning of the salmon, etc., etc…
What I’m saying (badly) is that yes, there are general deterministic laws to the chaos that we encounter in life, but each of our individual lives are only deterministic to a certain degree. Exactly how much is a matter of speculation and personal opinion. (And more of a GD topic.)
In a chaotic system it is usually is impossible to predict exactly what is going to happen. In fact it’s really only possible if you, for example, create a simple mathematical model and choose nice places to start from. You can, however, (if you have enough information) give bounds which you know it will be within for a certain time period.
They can be cyclic or be on a path which is uncyclic and will never reach exactly the same point ever again. It would often be hard to tell which you had as it could be cyclic over a very long period of time.
Yes, it’s rational. To think that any real physical phenomenon is irrational is to disbelieve that the physical world is real. Unless of course you spend the day creating tormented definitions of “chaos” and “rational” to show otherwise…
Chaos probably follows deterministic laws, at least with certain qualifications. The “laws” we describe are at best tentative and temporary versions of our limited understanding of what is going on. As far as anybody knows there is an infinite depth of complexity and subtlety to all aspects of physical reality, and humans will never plumb the bottom of this well - nor even would beings far more intellegent than we. And there are some bits of quantum mechanics that seem to be other than deterministic, at least as people understand them today, though significantly this is not the final word. Thus the “probably” hedge.
But you don’t need to invoke quantum mechanics to create chaos. For example, all sorts of arbitrarily deterministic and accurate mathematical formulae will create chaos. A better way to think of chaos might be to focus on the tremendous change in how things look to us - the universe doesn’t recognize order per se, and doesn’t get ruffled when it comes and goes; it’s people who give chaos its significance.