To be specific: does chaos theory relate to the study of consciousness (and if yes, how)?
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Chaos theory essentially says that the outcome of some choice is vastly disproportionate to the actual choice that is made.
Many choices you make lead to understandable changes in your outcome. For example: you throw a ball and it hits the target. If you throw it just a little harder, it lands a little further away. Even harder, it lands just a bit further away again.
A chaotic system would mean that a small change, like throwing the ball just 0.1 mph faster, could mean it goes a little further, or it could punch a hole through the target. Or zip off at an odd angle.
A classic example is orbits of objects when there are more than 2 objects involved. Lets say a red, and blue object. With these the orbits look like a simple overlapping pair of ovals. Red and blue going away, then back, and circling around eachother.
With a third Green object it starts to snarl into a mess. Green comes in disturbing first Blue then Red. It can send one flying away entirely lets say the Blue object.
This system is chaotic not because it gets messy and tangled. It’s chaotic because if you change the starting speed of any object (lets pick our interloper Green) by the tiniest fraction you can get a vastly different outcome. The original snarling mess will start the same, but very shortly you can get a vastly different outcome. Remember how Blue was sent off to never return? Blue stays around this time, and Redobject gets sent flying off entirely. A drastically different outcome.
Change the speed to be just a little bit higher again, and the result isn’t that blue is sent off earlier or faster. no, this Time Green gets flung back out never to return…. Go a little faster again, and maybe they all orbit for a long time, then Red and Blue collide….
The entire process is completely determined and can be simulated step by step. But there is no ‘formula’ that works ahead of time. And any simulation will have wildly different outcomes with only small tweaks to the starting conditions. The smaller the tweak the longer it looks similar, but it really isn’t that long before you get hugely different results.
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Weather is another chaotic system. Even with great measurements, having one of the many details off by a small amount means your predictions rapidly spin off into the “could do almost anything” territory rather quickly. We can predict weather well for a day, passably for about 3 days, barely after a week, and only the largest trends longer than that.
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Conciousness with the itneractions of neurons, chemistry, stimuli etc, is another such system. A small change of the inputs can create wildly different outputs.
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