Publish at September 06 2023 Updated September 06 2023
As the definition of words poses and illustrates realities, the first reflex is to look up the definition of the theme of this article, i.e. stability, only to realize that there is no single definition of stability: there are dozens, and practically one for each field.
Is stability a state of grace in the face of multiple other states? Or does it exist because its opposite exists? A bit like light and shadow. In this case, the shadow only exists because the light exists, otherwise it's nothingness, or non-consciousness of the light's reality. The definition of instability is almost the same as for stability, with even fewer solutions.
On the other hand, a related definition to both words is metastability. It's an interesting definition because it runs counter to the belief that instability in an unstable world multiplies instability. But metastability speaks of shocks that will freeze instability into a state of ultra-stability.
"Metastability is the property of a state that appears stable, but which a disturbance can cause to move rapidly towards an even more stable state. In the absence of any significant disturbance, the rate of transformation leading to the stable state may be very low, or even virtually zero. In response to a triggering disturbance, the transformation can be very rapid, even almost instantaneous."
Source : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tastabilit%C3%A9
What are we to think of words that have no real definition? Like reflections, mirrors of another reality or souls.
Further on in Wikipedia's definition of Metastability, the article offers the definition of existentialist ontology, which opens up an equally interesting exploratory field:
"In Being and Nothingness (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre seizes on the concept of metastability originally invented by the natural sciences to elaborate his ontology of man. The entire work is presented as an ontological investigation (questioning the meaning of being) conducted using the phenomenological method.
Right from the introduction, Sartre establishes that the philosophical apprehension of being necessarily leads to the duality of being-in-itself and being-for-itself, respectively being of things and being of consciousness or man. After discovering the nothingness at the heart of consciousness in the first section, he develops the concept of the metastability of consciousness. Using the example of the barista - the stereotypical waiter who is seen to occupy his profession almost excessively, displaying an affected ease and nonchalance - the philosopher discovers that the being of consciousness, i.e. the "for-itself", is characterized by the ontological paradox that it is what it is not, and that it is not what it is.
By this he means that consciousness is fundamentally the neantization of its past and the projection of its future. Metastability is at the root of Sartre's anthropology: human existence is defined by this condition of uncertainty, doubt, anguish and desire.
This concept opens the way to a phenomenology of freedom: man's identity is never stable, because he freely chooses his being.
Source : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tastabilit%C3%A9
What is man? Perhaps it's the definition of man that's at stake here. If we consider that we are made of energies, what could be more unstable than energies, especially when they meet between two beings? And what creates our bodily coherence? It's the spark of life. As soon as the spark is extinguished, the energy that holds the cells together is dispersed, leading to the chaos of cell death.
The observation of recurring states is one of the fundamental keys: the body will decay, but according to a chronology common to all deceased persons. The instability of the moment coexists with the stability of the pattern. The states of instability and stability can therefore be simultaneous in the same situation.
But isn't death another form of stability? In fact, stability and instability are not facts, but different states, even successive, contiguous or otherwise. Let's take water as an example. It can exist in several states: solid as ice, liquid at room temperature, gaseous as a cloud. What is the stable state of water? Are there unstable states of water? Is boiling water unstable?
It's just a decision, a point of view in fact, like on a thermometer, the zero state is defined as a standard, the basis of a scale for reading the stability or instability of the state of cold or heat. It's an arbitrary decision on the basis of which to stabilize the vision and reality of an ecosystem.
Choices are made, and reality presents us with the facet of reality that we have decided to structure through our choices. An identical world, in all this matter in motion? Perhaps it's a challenge beyond us. The butterfly effect is there to remind us that the simple flap of a butterfly's wing can alter the order of the world in all its dimensions, even though that same butterfly probably never thought it would have such an effect.
"The "butterfly effect" is a metaphor for the fundamental phenomenon of sensitivity to initial conditions in chaos theory. The exact formulation behind it was expressed by Edward Lorenz at a scientific conference in 1972, the title of which was:
"Can the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil cause a tornado in Texas?"."
Source : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effet_papillon
Chaos - that's twice we've heard that word!
"Chaos theory is a scientific theory related to mathematics and physics that studies the behavior of dynamic systems sensitive to initial conditions, a phenomenon generally illustrated by the butterfly effect.
In many dynamic systems, minute changes in initial conditions lead to rapidly divergent evolutions, making long-term prediction impossible. Although these are deterministic systems, whose future behavior is determined by the initial conditions, without any intervention of chance, they are unpredictable (at least in detail) because the initial conditions cannot be known with infinite precision.
This paradoxical behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos.
Chaotic behavior is at the root of many natural systems, such as weather and climate. This behavior can be studied through analysis by chaotic mathematical models, or by analytical recurrence techniques and Poincaré applications. Chaos theory has applications in meteorology, climatology, sociology, physics, computer science, engineering, economics, biology and philosophy".
Source: Chaos Theory - https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9orie_du_chaos
The notion of instability is close to that of chaos, except that chaos theory is built from a stabilized state that can be called zero, but which, like the thermometer, is a choice, an image capture of a state at an instant T in the midst of an infinite number of other choices. Mega-complexity comes into play here, because this instant T is unique and non-duplicable, drowned in the mass like a needle in a haystack.
If you look at a needle through a microscope, you'll see a needle that resembles other needles at a stable angle. Mixed in a millstone of needles, the millstone will appear unstable because it is mixed in all its dimensions, whereas one millstone among others may exist in a field which, by its very nature as a territory, will be stable.
The theory of relativity, based on the position of objects, could serve as a model for a theory of stability. A state is evaluated by comparison with another state, but also in relation to a scale of observation. The example of climate is an interesting one. Climate is constantly evolving, so it's unstable, but it's made up of stable elements that are well defined in their models: thunderstorms, typhoons, rain...
And depending on whether you're an ant, a man or in an airplane, your experience of rain will seem stable or unstable. The ant may be crushed by a drop that generates a catastrophe, the human being, depending on his clothing, may be dry or wet, with a contextual stable or unstable alternative, and the airplane may have multiple positions facing the rain cloud.
Actually, that's the wrong question to ask about a state. Here, the basis is reality. A reality that's multiple, shifting, superimposed or not. Water, climate and needles are not unique; these situations are found in human functioning, for example, and in the functioning of students, in the functioning of ecosystems, in the functioning of crowds, in the functioning of data.
This dimension is perhaps the most complex key to integrate for those who make digital doubles of humans or those who try to make links of understanding between humans and machines. Machines are very factual and stable, which is why today they cannot claim to match the capacity of living beings to integrate the complexity of instability that coexists with stability.
Attention is both a quality and a flaw. A few months ago, I carried out a study dedicated to the automotive industry, with an in-depth analysis of how to prevent car accidents. The conclusion was that the major risk factor is the driver himself, whose behavior can quickly become random, depending on a number of factors.
I'm a human being, so I put things into perspective, but a machine is objective and factual. If you give the study to a machine, it can easily come to the same conclusion as myself. And, if you give the power of decision to that same machine, it might conclude that to avoid 80% of car accidents, human beings should be forbidden to drive.
But let's not look all gloom and doom, let's take a look into the future through a great classic of science fiction: Isaac Asimov's "Foundation".
"Psychohistory is a fictional science imagined by the science-fiction author Nat Schachner and then developed more widely by Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), whose aim is to predict history based on knowledge of human psychology and social phenomena, applying statistical analysis in the image of statistical physics".
Source : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistoire_(Asimov)
Psychohistory is about the history of the world, which, contrary to popular belief, is not the sum of vast individual chaos, but the result of mathematical behavioral structures. In fact, the destiny of mankind in this theory is not the result of multiple butterfly wingbeats, but the result of mathematical logical sequences that lead the world to a precise outcome, regardless of the paths chosen.
Wouldn't the algorithms of the data being modeled be the inverted formalization of this famous psychohistory? Algorithms could be the logical formatting of the result of observing the result, and thus the first stone that might one day lead to an understanding of the genesis of that same result. Wouldn't predictive policing, for example, be an embryo in the making towards this new science, in search of stable principles for ever-improving predictability?
Illustration: Pixabay - Maike und Björn Bröskamp
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