I am unpersuaded as to the value of chaos. You talk about evolution, and mutation being valuable, and surely exploring the search space at random is better than not exploring it at all. But you can explore the search space non-randomly; I know a little about genetic algorithms, and some permute the genomes in a way that is clearly deterministic, while others use a programmatic random-number-generator, which it should be noted is only pseudorandom.
The idea of a pseudorandom number generator is important here. In a properly functioning deterministic system you can explore the search space in a way that has all the positive qualities of a chaotic search. The human brain may be broken enough that it can’t, and the solution to that may be to break it further, but that is a quirk of human psychology. You should not mistake it for an argument against the futility of chaos in general.
I would not consider a PRNG as “not chaos” is that context. The human brain is fully determined by the law of physics, forgetting the quantum effects, there is no “true random”. The randomness of a PRNG is very comparable to the randomness of thermodynamical noise, or the one induced by drug.
I am unpersuaded as to the value of chaos. You talk about evolution, and mutation being valuable, and surely exploring the search space at random is better than not exploring it at all. But you can explore the search space non-randomly; I know a little about genetic algorithms, and some permute the genomes in a way that is clearly deterministic, while others use a programmatic random-number-generator, which it should be noted is only pseudorandom.
The idea of a pseudorandom number generator is important here. In a properly functioning deterministic system you can explore the search space in a way that has all the positive qualities of a chaotic search. The human brain may be broken enough that it can’t, and the solution to that may be to break it further, but that is a quirk of human psychology. You should not mistake it for an argument against the futility of chaos in general.
I would not consider a PRNG as “not chaos” is that context. The human brain is fully determined by the law of physics, forgetting the quantum effects, there is no “true random”. The randomness of a PRNG is very comparable to the randomness of thermodynamical noise, or the one induced by drug.