What Are the New Implications of Chaos for Unpredictability?

DOI10.1093/BJPS/AXN053MaRDI QIDQ3638862zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Charlotte Werndl

Publication date 28 October 2009

Published in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.1576, http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/31098/1/What%20are%20the%20new%20implications%28lsero%29.pdf

zbMATH Keywords

chaosmixingprobabilityunpredictability

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Ergodicity, mixing, rates of mixing (37A25) Stability theory for smooth dynamical systems (37C75)

Abstract: 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 not 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.

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