>
>
> > No, metereology is nothing but complicated physics and chemistry. It's a
> > totally deterministic system.
>
>My deterministic intuitions make me inclined to agree. But people way
>smarter than I am have told me that we can't know whether or not every
>physical event has a determinate cause.
I didn't say that determinism (that every event has a cause), was true. I said that physics and chemistry are determinsitic if we ignore quantum effects,w hich we do at the level of the weather.
By the way the sentence "every event has a determinate cause" is meaningless or false even if determinism is true. There is a sense in which any event might be said to be caused at least in part by everything in its backward facing light cone.
>
> > But like most such systems that involve more
> > than a few entities, it is too hopelessly complicated to calculate.
>
>Any more concise way of saying "too hopelessly complicated to calculate"?
Five word too many for you? You can leave out the "hopelessly" and get it down to four.
>The mathemeticians have already appropriated "chaos" (defined in the
>dictionary as
>"the inherent unpredictability in the behavior of a natural system") and
>given it a slightly different meaning.
My point has nothing to do with chaos theory. Chaos theory makes the weather _more_ predictable.
Btw, I wrote on this in my diss, you can look it up, it's in the final chapter, on Davidson.
jks
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