Pierre Simon Laplace was one of the mathematicians who mostly influenced on Western thought. He was probably the supreme representative of scientific determinism.
I imagine that by now many of us have come to realize how deeply the deterministic thought - born within the calssic post-newtonian science - influenced our civilization, our way of thinking and feeling.
He wrote in 1812:
Looking back behind us it is not difficult to note that, starting from the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, the common perception of the future collective and individual has often been marked by an aura of inevitability, predetermination (scriptum est): the future seen as something that moves from starting state perfectly defined towards a destination just as perfectly determined a priori. The scientific causality has clashed with religious finality, overwhelming it.
Many scientific discoveries seemed to corroborate that conclusion (at least until the advent of quantum mechanics with its portfolio of probability and uncertainty), with the result that - if not consciously, at least subconsciously -- few have shown any skepticism.
It would be interesting to develop the theme of political, social and cultural relapses of this trend of the century just past, which still influences our way of thinking and acting.
The deterministic vision that leaves no escape to free will is broken up at the end of last century due to some simple and (moreover) deterministic systems - the chaotic ones - rushing into the scientific landscape: despite their determinism these systems show a behaviour entirely impredictable even for an Intelligence, such as the one imagined by Laplace, which had knowledge of all the physical data of universe at any given moment. This Intelligence, even if aware of these data with infinite precision, yet it could not have present all the future and all the past before its eyes, because it could not find the closed-form solution of the differential equations governing a chaotic system.
So there are namely deterministic systems that exhibit a behavior that is impredicibile or indeterminabile: what sounds an oxymoron is actually fully supported by mathematics.
I imagine that by now many of us have come to realize how deeply the deterministic thought - born within the calssic post-newtonian science - influenced our civilization, our way of thinking and feeling.
He wrote in 1812:
An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set
nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if
this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would
embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe
and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain
and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
Looking back behind us it is not difficult to note that, starting from the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, the common perception of the future collective and individual has often been marked by an aura of inevitability, predetermination (scriptum est): the future seen as something that moves from starting state perfectly defined towards a destination just as perfectly determined a priori. The scientific causality has clashed with religious finality, overwhelming it.
Many scientific discoveries seemed to corroborate that conclusion (at least until the advent of quantum mechanics with its portfolio of probability and uncertainty), with the result that - if not consciously, at least subconsciously -- few have shown any skepticism.
It would be interesting to develop the theme of political, social and cultural relapses of this trend of the century just past, which still influences our way of thinking and acting.
The deterministic vision that leaves no escape to free will is broken up at the end of last century due to some simple and (moreover) deterministic systems - the chaotic ones - rushing into the scientific landscape: despite their determinism these systems show a behaviour entirely impredictable even for an Intelligence, such as the one imagined by Laplace, which had knowledge of all the physical data of universe at any given moment. This Intelligence, even if aware of these data with infinite precision, yet it could not have present all the future and all the past before its eyes, because it could not find the closed-form solution of the differential equations governing a chaotic system.
So there are namely deterministic systems that exhibit a behavior that is impredicibile or indeterminabile: what sounds an oxymoron is actually fully supported by mathematics.
"Therefore, even God must let [the dynamics of] these chaotic systems evolve to
see what will happen in the future. There is no shortcut to the prediction for
chaotic systems."
Robert C. Hilborn - Chaos and Nonlinear Dynamics.
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