What are the new implications of chaos for unpredictability?
From the beginning of chaos research until today, the unpredictability of chaos has been a central theme. It is widely believed and claimed by philosophers, mathematicians and physicists alike that chaos has a new implication for unpredictability, meaning that chaotic systems are unpredictable in a way that other deterministic systems are not. Hence, one might expect that the question ‘What are the new implications of chaos for unpredictability?’ has already been answered in a satisfactory way. However, this is not the case. I will critically evaluate the existing answers and argue that they do not fit the bill. Then I will approach this question by showing that chaos can be defined via mixing, which has never before been explicitly argued for. Based on this insight, I will propose that the sought-after new implication of chaos for unpredictability is the following: for predicting any event, all sufficiently past events are approximately probabilistically irrelevant.
| Item Type | Article |
|---|---|
| Departments | Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method |
| DOI | 10.1093/bjps/axn053 |
| Date Deposited | 04 Jan 2011 13:51 |
| URI | https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/31098 |