how to exorcise laplace’s demon

For those of you who might not know, mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace proposed a little thought experiment about quantum physics long before Heisenberg was even born. Imagine knowing where everything in the universe is located and understand all the fundamental forces of nature. If you had the kind of intellect capable of processing this data, you should technically be able to know everything that will happen in the future, everything that went on in the past and essentially becoming omniscient. Or, according to a comic by cartoonist Aaron Diaz, you would be rendered completely mad and require an urgent pseudo-exorcism…

Funny thing is that the idea of calling Laplace’s hypothetical intellect demonic came long after he died, maybe because biographers and thinkers who considered his thought experiment didn’t like the idea of a real life omniscience. With what we know today about quantum mechanics, it seems that it would be impossible for anyone or anything to have the kind of knowledge Laplace proposed since it its most fundamental level, there needs to be an element of chance even if we seem to have several physical laws about causality. The key to this experiment is the differentiation between causality and determinism. Laplace thought the two were pretty much one and the same. In reality, determinism indicates a plan while causality doesn’t need one.