yeah exactly. like the other commenter said, if you accept quantum physics the laplace demon is outdated because the thought experiment points out a problem/possibility in classical mechanics, but not in quantum, where it's not even about atoms anymore, and knowing things becomes very problematic. even the concept of time becomes different, non-linerar, where idk if you can even talk about past-present-future.
from a very pragmatic position: can a human brain know itself, even disregarding quantum states, just down to an atom? not even that. because to "know" anything a brain requires so many synapses, and those are made of i don't even know how many infinities of atoms
Well I can assure you that that's impossible. For example, there probably were entire cultures whose artifacts were primarily wood or clay-based. We'll never know enough about them because these materials have long decomposed, there's just nothing to compute or extrapolate, yet they existed and influenced future developments. We can know a lot and computers can help too, but it will never be a full picture.
this is Shannon territory, where in some way maximum information is just maximum chaos, insofar as the 2nd law is concerned
then Laplace’s demon can be both impossible and determinism can be real
again, this is out of my depth, what i know is philosophy, but this is the right take imo. the demon is impossible, but determinism can be real in some sense (that certain events produce further events in a systematizable manner), but even if the universe is deterministic it is too complex for us to reliably predict it, simply because the complexity of our brains or algorithms can never match the complexity of the universe
bc you have to observe it again after changing it to know about its new state, thereby never attaining total omniscience
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yeah exactly. like the other commenter said, if you accept quantum physics the laplace demon is outdated because the thought experiment points out a problem/possibility in classical mechanics, but not in quantum, where it's not even about atoms anymore, and knowing things becomes very problematic. even the concept of time becomes different, non-linerar, where idk if you can even talk about past-present-future.
from a very pragmatic position: can a human brain know itself, even disregarding quantum states, just down to an atom? not even that. because to "know" anything a brain requires so many synapses, and those are made of i don't even know how many infinities of atoms
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This is out of my depth. Is that what people in archaeology say these days, that they just need to do better mathematical models?
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Well I can assure you that that's impossible. For example, there probably were entire cultures whose artifacts were primarily wood or clay-based. We'll never know enough about them because these materials have long decomposed, there's just nothing to compute or extrapolate, yet they existed and influenced future developments. We can know a lot and computers can help too, but it will never be a full picture.
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this is Shannon territory, where in some way maximum information is just maximum chaos, insofar as the 2nd law is concerned
again, this is out of my depth, what i know is philosophy, but this is the right take imo. the demon is impossible, but determinism can be real in some sense (that certain events produce further events in a systematizable manner), but even if the universe is deterministic it is too complex for us to reliably predict it, simply because the complexity of our brains or algorithms can never match the complexity of the universe
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we'd all kill ourselves if the world was fully computable/predictable anyway