the puzzling gap...

........some find the subject a little hard going

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(occasionally I add to this and other pages without checking older stuff for quality) 3/00 ph

It's nature...

Nature can be interpreted as globally deterministic because sufficiently narrow circumstances seem to completely determine every effect. There are also important gaps in this finding.

Deterministic rules allow exceedingly small differences to sometimes be multiplied and have large effects,

It is readily observable that nature is locally, not remotely, organized.

For nature to be globally deterministic and local organized at the same time may seem incompatible, but it's only our minds that are lacking. The way it works it that first things need to get organized and then they can be controlled. If controlling one part determines the behavior of all the others, it is because they are organized that way. Without the organization, there's no special influence to be had. The old tools and concepts were (and are still) good at uncovering how things are organized and how we can take advantage of it, but tell us very little about how things get organized in the first place. It's a separate problem. To some degree, it means learning how to be interested in, and to watch things, that are a little out of control, and then to identify the locally opportunistic mechanisms that develop to bring about some order. Once those have taken place things can then potentially be predicted and controlled.

It's science...

Scientific writing makes difficult reading. It's not just that science involves special terminology and complicated methods, its also that scientists have highly enriched sets of images that originate from direct observation of their physical subjects, things no one else may observe as closely, so it's can be hard to know what's being talked about.

One of the keys to good science is a scientist's personal immersion in the details of the physical subject. That's the intuitive basis of science. Scientists have extensive collections of images in their minds that they are referring to, that they didn't get from just reading.
The physical subject here is the pattern of little accelerations of change found at the beginning and end of most events. That includes the way a muscle tenses and relaxes, in a microscopically seamless way, or how a storm develops and subsides, or how current flow in a spark grows and decays as seen on an oscilloscope. Any regular measure of virtually any natural event shows leading and following trails, with a peak of some shape in the middle, as if following a continuous path. Looked at closely, of course, one always finds that these smooth transitions to coming and going are not really continuous. Nothing in nature is. All nature can be broken down into a cascade of ever smaller inner workings.
What this is about, instead of looking for how things can be taken apart, is the opposite, looking for the telltale patterns of change that show local organizational processes, and how the inner workings become to be connected. You may have never thought of that before. The attempt here is to make that inquiry into a disciplined and useful scientific tool.

Dots

Finding continuous patterns of change over time is the main subject, and this means drawing curves. One of the most curious features of nature is that all apparent curves, when looked at closely, are made of 'dots', the ink on the page as well as the data and the physical subject it refers to, presenting a total discontinuity! Yet there is continuity, but not seamless like in mathematics, and whether there are connections in nature or not, only the connections between the dots, that we make, allow us to see it.

This connected and disjointed character of nature and information can be genuinely confusing. It would appear that the full appreciation of this fact is not even quite dawning on the scientific community, still uncomfortable, after a hundred years, about the failure of classical determinism. We still rely on it heavily, and find it difficult if not impossible to emulate the order in events that nature so amply demonstrates using random variables in nonlinear mathematical models. The position taken here is that continuity is not violated by discontinuity, that nature is not math. It's different.
This is a little like the confusion physicists have about the wave-particle nature of light. It doesn't seem to make any sense, and part of the fun is that the concept encourages you to think 'forbidden' thoughts, like that the connections exist only when you make them. (Homework: figure that out...). Its a tricky subject and there's much to pay attention to.... What one can always go back to for reassurance is some subject for which you can see both sides, the evident continuity, composed of separate events (the dots). This work is based on reading patterns of dots that display sequential proportional change.
'Connecting the dots', to find useful patterns, is a subject of literally every task and discipline. In science it is conventionally done with mathematics, substituting equations for data and building a larger theory of interconnected equations. Here it is done with a kind of constructed near-mathematics which does not have specific equations. It's a form of imaging with mathematical rules. Good images, though, make for good questions, and that is the object.

the 'language'

Speaking about a complicated scientific subject, to a broad interdisciplinary scientific audience, requires speaking quite precisely, but with fewer specialized terms than usual. On many of the subjects I address I don't know many of the technical terms myself, and would not help anyone by creating a number of my own to make the reading more difficult. Some parts of this subject would still benefit from developing specialized terminology but that is largely avoided in favor of using generalized terms and references to physical subjects. A simple glossary is perhaps becoming needed.

Derivative The term 'derivative' is used for the slopes and accelerations of a curve. This is usually reserved for the very specific meaning it has in calculus, for curves having mathematical continuity. It is most frequently used here to refer to the successive differences between points in a sequence, the slopes and accelerations of a series. Behind its use for that purpose is also an expanded theoretical meaning. Using special rules a sequence of points can represent a 'constructible' mathematical continuity, one that could be made to satisfy the strict rules of mathematical continuity by iteration. These are wonderfully complex theoretical subjects, that are not yet fully developed, and will most often be referred to by using 'derivatives' and other terms in their broadest possible sense.
Proportional walk The technical term for finite sequences associated with such a rule for becoming differentiable is a 'proportional walk'. Such rules also concern the means of distinguishing and connecting mathematical continuity and physical continuity. Physical continuity can only be partly observed, usually indicated by proportional change being displayed in physical measures.
System Innovation in science is often a matter of different people looking at the same thing in different ways and developing incompatible terminology for it, to be resolved later. The term 'system', for one, has a tortuous history, like the blind wise men all trying to describe an elephant from feeling different parts, it has come to have many incompatible meanings. A possible unified meaning of the term is that it refers to something (anything) that 'connects the dots'. Then those who insist that 'a system' is an equation, and those who insist it is an object and others who insist it is a physical process, or that it is a set of rules of organization, or a polarity of environmental interaction, etc. could all be talking about the same thing.

Seems to depart from the scientific method?

Yes, and no. This approach does not seek to impose equations on physical events to represent them.
The practical necessity of raising this issue comes from the conventional regimented application of the statistical method to time series, uniformly treating data as representing equations, particularly containing random variables. The main trouble with rigidly following that approach is that an equation is a constant structure, and in imposing one you first have to assume the subject has a constant structure. It could often be a sampling of a complex of processes having changing structure. The more fundamental problem as I see it is that the conventional method takes a 'top-up' approach, starting from the theoretical and refining toward the theoretical. It has worked great on a lot of things, but it is inherently flawed when dealing with complex processes, when any number of layers of continuing and transient processes could be (and usually are) expressed in the available data.
What is offered here is more of a 'bottom-up' approach, starting from the data and distilling organic patterns of theoretical interest. When mathematically suggestive patterns appear, they are much more directly rooted in the phenomena themselves. What you tend to find also then includes what you would least expect, and facilitates discovery.
Roughly speaking this approach fits within the scientific method as a precursor to conventional analysis. It is a tool designed to enhance direct observation and facilitate the necessary development of informed scientific intuition before applying conventional techniques.
It may be quite difficult for scientists to imagine what kind of order is there if you take out the equations, but that's the purpose, and just what you find out.

Just Sounds fictional?

The central part of this work is a disciplined method of suggesting new hypotheses, displaying the patterns of nature clearly enough for us to form better questions about them. As a hypothesis generator the product is inherently a kind of fiction, something to stimulate the imagination.

Because it is a method of distilling patterns, rather than of testing preconceived ideas, this tends to expose the fictional character of some of the conclusions others have reached. Under the conventional method only the theories an investigator has thought of are tested, and that leaves a lot of room for error.

Still just sounds nuts?

Then there's the more basic problem of the author's own occasional inconsistencies, errors in method and interpretation, and sometimes inappropriate characterization. The author is somewhat, but not fully, conversant in the fields addressed, and is inevitably prone to misusing some of the terms and glossing over some of the details to fill in the gaps.

Still the fact remains, and is no illusion, that there are beginning and ending trails of data for virtually all observable events, and we don't know what they are there for. What those little wisps of data seem to be are the tell-tale evidence of the physical mechanism of causation, the physical steps of building connecting events. It becomes apparent that these are processes are part of every process. (....And it is just a little nuts to imagine that this has somehow been just overlooked.)
There is then, more order to be found in data, and complex order in nature, than much of anyone is able to venture. The intent here is to press the limits, using the current direction, to make a little more of it clearly visible for study.

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