Title: Causal Determinism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Headings: Causal Determinism
Causal Determinism
1. Introduction
2. Conceptual Issues in Determinism
2.1 The World
2.2 The way things are at a time t
2.3 Thereafter
2.4 Laws of nature
2.5 Fixed
3. The Epistemology of Determinism
3.1 Laws again
3.2 Experience
3.3 Determinism and Chaos
3.4 Metaphysical arguments
4. The Status of Determinism in Physical Theories
4.1 Classical mechanics
4.2 Special Relativistic physics
4.3 General Relativity (GTR)
4.3.1 Determinism and manifold points
4.3.2 Singularities
4.4 Quantum mechanics
5. Chance and Determinism
6. Determinism and Human Action
Bibliography
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources
Acknowledgments

Content: The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence. ( Laplace 1820)
In this century, Karl Popper (1982) defined determinism in terms of predictability also, in his book The Open Universe. Laplace probably had God in mind as the powerful intelligence to whose gaze the whole future is open. If not, he should have: 19 th and 20 th century mathematical studies showed convincingly that neither a finite, nor an infinite but embedded-in-the-world intelligence can have the computing power necessary to predict the actual future, in any world remotely like ours. But even if our aim is only to predict a well-defined subsystem of the world, for a limited period of time, this may be impossible for any reasonable finite agent embedded in the world, as many studies of chaos (sensitive dependence on initial conditions) show. Conversely, certain parts of the world could be highly predictable, in some senses, without the world being deterministic. When it comes to predictability of future events by humans or other finite agents in the world, then, predictability and determinism are simply not logically connected at all. The equation of “determinism”with “predictability” is therefore a façon de parler that at best makes vivid what is at stake in determinism: our fears about our own status as free agents in the world.