Reductionist challenge

[davewitley]

Tabouli wrote:

> I have to add one challenge, here.  As a psychologist, writer and 
linguist wordy-type, I challenge all you mathematicians and physical 
scientists out there to reduce human behaviour, and especially 
language, to applied mathematics!  

I think a difficult enough challenge is to reduce chemistry to 
physics, as I believe even that hasn't really been done.

The trouble is, even if you know the (presumed) simple set of rules 
that prescribes the system, you *still* don't know how the system 
behaves.  For the real world, you really also want to know what the 
starting state is, too.

It is a very seductive falsity that if you know something then you 
automatically know everything that can be logically deduced from it.  
Godel finally knocked that one on the head in principle in the 
thirties; since then chaos theory has shown that even when you have a 
way in principle to know the answer, you don't always have a way in 
practice.  And Heisenberg demolished any chance of knowing the start 
state.

On current form, I will reach your main list rant round about the 
weekend.

David - currently on digest 1545

If the human brain was simple enough to understand, we'd be too 
simple to understand it