Chaos
Chaotic systems have a sensitivity to initial conditions. Butterflies flap their proverbial wings and storms do or do not happen weeks later on the other side of the Atlantic.
Cellular automata are very simple systems which can be chaotic.
Play with one HERE
Try this. Put a single black square on the top row and enjoy the patterns. Now go along the top row adding and removing an additional black square, so there are only ever two black squares on the top row. Sometime you can add a black square and there are no large changes in the pattern of triangles you see. Sometimes you add a black square and a massive white triangle appears ‘from nowhere’. That is a sensitivity to initial conditions, your added black square is the butterfly flapping its wings.
But for us the important thing about chaotic systems is that a complete deterministic universe can still generate endless and unpredictable novel forms.
Even a simple deterministic system can be unpredictable, in all useful senses of that word. These simple systems generate behaviour due to their internal logic (the rules, the initial state), and the resulting behaviour can’t be dissected in any easy way externally - to predict it you need to build a complete replica of the system.
Think of the possibilities for our real physical universe - likely to have rules more complex and a vastly more variable state space. Should we really fear sphexishness in such a world?
We may be deterministic machines in a deterministic universe, but we are complex systems which carry an non-reducible nexus of causes with us - in our unique history, and in our unique position in the buzzing-blooming confusion of the environment. Our actions may be compelled, but they are in part compelled by personal causes. Causes which, for convenience, I will call “our selves”.
So when I feel the encroaching fear of determinism, I remind myself that “That it’s you and no one else that owns / That spot that yer standing, that space that you’re sitting”.
I may be caused, but those causes are mine uniquely. No one, not even me, can predict their outcome.
☐ ☐
But neuroscientists can predict what we’ll do from looking at our brains, can’t they? BRAIN; direct link libet1
How this connects to our beliefs about why we act: REASONS; direct link reasons