To be specific: does chaos theory relate to the study of consciousness (and if yes, how)?
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Two big ideas:
1. A sufficiently complex system will behave in unpredictable ways over a long enough time span.
2. All systems are sufficiently complex on a large enough scale.
So you have easy systems to think about. Weather and the stock market. Very complex, lots of moving parts. We can’t know enough of it precisely enough to make meaningful predictions into the future.
But then you have billard balls on a reasonably level pool table. A simple enough system. Weight of the ball, force applied, elasticity of the bumpers and balls, friction with the felt, etc. Simple enough, compared to predicting a hurricane. But small imperfections in the table and ball and exact way it’s struck by the player will eventually cause the ball to behave in an unexpected way, provided it could keep sliding forever without slowing down or falling into a hole.
Also I’m told it has a whole lot to do with dinosaurs reproducing.
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