Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 5 days ago
The Illusion of Determinism.
The illusion of determinism has dominated classical thinking since Pierre-Simon Laplace.
In 1814, he imagined an all-knowing “intelligence” — later called Laplace’s demon — capable of predicting the entire future of the universe if it knew all particles’ positions and velocities at one moment.
This image became the metaphysical foundation of classical physics, merging with Newton’s mechanics to produce a worldview of absolute predictability and universal causality.
But what Laplace mistook for a metaphysical truth was only a feature of low-complexity, high-symmetry systems — the rare exception where the world behaves like a solvable equation.
#physics #determinism #reductionism #quantum #philosophy
The Illusion of Determinism.
The illusion of determinism has dominated classical thinking since Pierre-Simon Laplace.
In 1814, he imagined an all-knowing “intelligence” — later called Laplace’s demon — capable of predicting the entire future of the universe if it knew all particles’ positions and velocities at one moment.
This image became the metaphysical foundation of classical physics, merging with Newton’s mechanics to produce a worldview of absolute predictability and universal causality.
But what Laplace mistook for a metaphysical truth was only a feature of low-complexity, high-symmetry systems — the rare exception where the world behaves like a solvable equation.
#physics #determinism #reductionism #quantum #philosophy
