Still Haunted by Laplace’s ‘Demon’

In 1814 Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace, signaled the grandeur and misery of the modern human condition when, with the following words, he confidently presumed to assay the mind of Omniscience:

We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and the cause of the one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it — an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis — it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes … The curve described by a single molecule in air or vapour is regulated in a manner just as certain as the planetary orbits; the only difference between them is that which comes from our ignorance (Laplace 1951, p. 4.)

With these words the human imagination rose to a height where it dared to interrogate a god-like intelligence — an intelligence that easily posed as our jailor (and who, as it happens, is commonly referred to as “Laplace’s demon”). The specialty of this intelligence was calculation of the movements of qualitatively featureless bodies, whether minuscule particles (“atoms”) or massive collections of the same, and these movements have long been thought of as a reflection of an imprisoning chain of causes and effects against which the dream of human freedom and meaning is futile.

Since Laplace’s day, his picture of inescapable causal bonds has been criticized from various angles. But its central, all-encompassing failure has gone oddly unrecognized, and the oppressive weight of its false picture remains. As a result many are bound by an unshakable conviction that there are rigorous, “mechanistic” causes and effects that enslave us — somewhere, somehow, contrary to our immediate experience of the natural world — with the shackles of a cold and implacable necessity that negates our humanity.

Think, for example, of neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, who has written a bestselling book titled Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (reviewed in Talbott 2025a). He cites Laplace’s line of thought, and enthusiastically echoes it from the beginning to the end of his book, as when he writes, for example, that a human behavior happens “because something that preceded it caused it to happen”. Everything occurs “because of events one second before, one minute … one century … one hundred million years before”. The picture is of an unbroken chain of causes “over which we have no control” — a chain imposed on us by what we learn from all the sciences (Sapolsky 2023, pp. 2-3).

This illustrates how, still today, the spirit of Laplace’s argument can seep into the writing of an influential scientist. You can feel it again, for example, when Ferris Jabr, an editor of Scientific American, tries to show us “Why Nothing Is Truly Alive” — why there is no basic distinction between animate and inanimate things. It all has to do with our being “made of” particles — theoretical constructs from which all hints of the sense-perceptible world we live in have been evicted, leaving behind nothing but a kind of ghostly lawfulness without any substantive presence. That’s why Jabr’s seemingly straightforward statement —

All observable matter is, at its most fundamental level, an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles (Jabr 2014).

— can be felt so devastating to our normal conviction that animals are fundamentally different from rocks. “At bottom” there is nothing but sameness; one electron is indistinguishable from any other electron.

If Jabr’s statement truly captures what is “most fundamentally” true of us — if we are in fact “made of” atoms solely possessed of quantitatively characterizable features — then the world’s qualitative presentation of itself means nothing. If the movements of these particles in space are unceasingly lawful, then (so the usual thought seems to run) how does anyone ever intentionally and meaningfully transcend the mindless whirl of particles? Can we, with our minds and wills, cause a single one of those particles to swerve from its preordained path?

It turns out, as we will see, that freely entering into the meaning of our lives does not require us to cause a single particle to swerve from its lawful path. The essential problem we’re up against here may begin to dawn on us the moment we realize how very difficult it is, in the world we know, to find any two things that are exactly the same. It may be true that every movement in space, whether studied by the particle physicist or the expert in celestial mechanics, is ever faithful to equations possessing no qualitative terms. And it may be true that the movements of a professional dancer can be studied in the same way. But that’s not what we are usually interested in when watching a ballet or other form of dance. Then it is the expressive character of the dance that we care about. What it is saying to us in its own language is what matters.

But, with the right attention, we could say the same thing about every appearance in nature. A tree presents us with a very different “dance” depending on whether it is an oak, giant sequoia, or willow — a difference manifested not only in its growth from a seed, but also in its interaction with the wind, light, soil, and communities of life around it. Likewise, every mountain (Fujiyama, Everest, Matterhorn), every river, every flower presents a distinct character of its own. How else would we recognize every thing as the kind of thing it is?

If, at bottom, there is nothing but sameness, then there is a huge explanatory gap between the particles that everything is supposedly made of and the world’s vivid presentation of itself. How do we account for the qualitative richness, the infinite qualitative differentials, of the experienced world? Mere aggregations of qualityless particles tell us nothing of what it means — or how it could even be possible — for us to become conscious of a green, red, orange, or yellow leaf. What is it in the world that gives us this gift?

Equations governing movements tell us little about what it is that moves and nothing about what the movement is expressing. Qualityless particles do not inform us about the world we experience as the significant context of our lives. Something is missing in our understanding of what this world is.

At its most basic, this explanatory gap has to do with the difference between the world’s being there for us, or not. That is, the world’s existence, as far as we could ever know, depends on its qualitative presence. Subtract all its qualities, and nothing would be there for humans to experience, know about, or investigate. We would have no way to demonstrate, or even believe in, the existence of an external world. Yet nothing of this real presence shows up in the demon’s calculations.

Here, then is the almost wholly overlooked triviality of Laplace’s thought experiment: he was not yet talking about any knowable world, as opposed to a notional “particle world” not yet appearing as a real place in which we humans or any other beings might dwell. He was working with a science busily abstracting whatever mathematical regularities it could from the world while purposely excluding from consideration the qualitative features that alone enabled the world to be there for scientific investigation, that is, to be there in the only way a material reality can be there — as felt substance, and specific appearance (Talbott 2025b).

It was, for the demon, as if this substantial appearance with all its meanings, had no significance either for the world or for our lives. The play of meaning within all the world’s diverse manifestations signified nothing at all as far as it was concerned. All that counted were mathematical regularities applying to theoretical constructs conceived without real-world content.

Does it matter that the demon was applying its intelligence to a theoretical realm incapable of real appearance? Does it matter that Laplace was following in the footsteps of scientists who, ever since Galileo and the Scientific Revolution, had professed a disdain for everything qualitative and meaningful?

Even in referring to “the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe”, Laplace was not yet speaking of any perceivable material reality that a scientist (or anyone else) can actually experience. For the purpose of analyzing its movements in space, the earth is treated as a collection of particles or mathematical points — or a single point as a center of mass — all disburdened of the presentational (observable) reality from which they were abstracted.

This is a long way from the earth we know and care about — and also from the empirical (experience-based) discipline scientists once treasured. Why are we forbidden, by Laplace’s argument, from acknowledging the character of things actually there? Does the passage from a notional realm of mathematical regularity to real existence not matter for our understanding of the world and ourselves? Are we as human beings concerned solely with the sort of calculation that led to the perceptible world being supplanted in our imaginations by the imperceptible particle world in the first place?

So the first problem with Laplace’s calculational surmise is that he was not yet talking about our world, or any knowably real world at all. And he does nothing to explain how we might get from the realm of the demon’s calculations to any sort of real world. So we have every reason to ask: What in the world was Laplace talking about? What are we to make of his conclusions if they remain separated by an unbridgeable gap from the only world whose given nature and meanings we can even inquire about?

But it is time to say something about the play of meaning in the world we do live in.

In the constricted space under that ceiling, without the endless depth of a blue sky overhead, and without the remote and unreachable stars at night, would we ever have had anything but the meanest definition for the word “transcendent”? Or for many other words rooted in the ideas of height and depth, such as “exalted”, “superior”, “sublime”, “lofty”, “supernal”, and so on? Reflection upon such matters might easily lead one to wonder how many of our meanings have been bequeathed to us by the world we live in.

Or, coming down to earth, imagine the times you have sat, perhaps with a small group of friends, around a campfire. And then, in your imagination, extinguish the campfire; you and your friends are now conversing without the effect of those flames upon your mood and consciousness. Ask yourself: What is that effect? What are its qualities? Your experience would be quite different with the fire extinguished, but how?

The difficulty we have in answering such questions tells us how inattentive we have become to the world’s qualities. But we can still sense that the qualities are there, and that we could learn to pay more attention to them. Sitting around the flames of a campfire is not the same as sitting in a fireless space.

Or take the wind. Once, during a great and exhilarating windstorm, my wife and I looked out our front windows and saw our two grandsons, then about four and six years old, running joyfully through the tall grass in front of our house — running with the wind, circling, dancing, whooping it up, laughing uncontrollably. They were exhilarated. This was a truly great wind, the trees were bending over before its force, and the energies of that wind, to which the boys were giving such energetic expression, had clearly come to vivid expression within their psyches. They had become one with the wind, a seemingly natural experience. They didn’t have to think about it; the forces without them gave immediate rise to the forces within.

Of course, if it had been a terribly destructive hurricane, ripping the roofs off homes, the children would have been frightened. Such are the powers and meanings of nature in human experience.

And again: we normally see the sun, not as a qualityless mass with a particular velocity of rotational and translational movement, or even as a ball of hot gas, but rather as (among many other things) an expressive sunrise followed by a differently expressive sunset. I suppose these might be thought more or less identical — they display the same mathematics of solar motion, only reversed. And yet, qualitatively, they could hardly be more different.

You can glimpse this difference by performing a simple exercise. Stand with your arms hanging by your sides, palms facing forward. Then, very slowly and keeping your arms approximately straight, raise your hands in front of you as you imagine the sun’s rising. Now turn your palms downward and slowly let your arms descend as if the sun were setting. Notice the different qualities of the two movements, ascending and descending.

This gives you an extremely minimal and one-dimensional experience of the differences in meaning of a sunrise and sunset, with primary reference to little more than the opposite directions of motion. But your experience is of real directions, not the directionless axes of a graph. And if you have truly paid attention to your own experience, you have gained a very real sense for how “up” and “down” relative to our position on the earth are freighted with meaning.

This exercise, of course, leaves out the different qualities of the atmosphere in the morning, compared to the usually more stirred-up and turbid air yielding the evening’s colors. It also leaves out the different temperatures of morning and evening; the daytime expansion and evening contraction of everything from sunlit rocks to storm systems; the opening and turning of some flowers and leaves toward the sun; the way so many birds, especially in the spring of the year, rousingly greet the sunrise with singing, and settle down in the evening; and the different meanings, for humans, of embarking upon a day’s work and resting after the day’s achievements.

The world is our interior

I have gestured above toward some of the ways in which our meanings are given to us from a world that is actually there. The more we attend to this, the more we come to realize that the entire mental and affective content of our lives derives from expressive contents of the world. In fact, as the philologist Owen Barfield has shown, even the language with which we describe and think about our inner lives of thought and feeling originates with what we now consider the “outer” world. This is true even of our dominant language of abstraction:

To what, precisely, does each one of them refer — the tens of thousands of abstract nouns which daily fill the columns of our newspapers, the debating chambers of our legislatures, the consulting rooms of our psychiatrists? Progress, tendency, culture, democracy, liberality, inhibition, motivation, responsibility — there was a time when each of them, either itself or its progenitor in another tongue, was a vehicle referring to the concrete world of sensuous experience with a tenor [immaterial meaning] of some sort peeping, or breathing, or bursting through (Barfield 1977, p. 38).

The manifest world, in other words, is an outer appearance capable of expressing an interior reality (a reality completely hidden and irrelevant to Laplace’s calculating demon). Ralph Waldo Emerson was pointing to this truth when he wrote in 1836:

Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from material appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious the raising of the eyebrows … thought and emotion are words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature (Emerson 1836, chapter 4).

Moreover, as Barfield stresses, high-sounding scientific terms “are not miraculously exempt” from the general rule. A great part of the explanatory apparatus of science consists of largely abstract and dematerialized words such as stimulus, cause, effect, reference, control, repress, information, code, and program, all of which can be shown to have been once inseparable from an “outer clothing.” Only with time did the inner meanings become detached from sense perception. By abstracting away from that clothing we gained the powers of abstract thought necessary for our current science.

The world we know is an exterior giving expression to an immaterial interior. This is true of every experience we have of nature, whether beautiful or ugly, arousing or serene, puzzling or routine, mysterious and sublime or bland and boring. It’s true whether we are encountering mountains, canyons, or caves, waves on the beach or a storm at sea, a cloudy or clear sky, a rainy, snowy, or sunny day. It’s just that, for the past several centuries, we have learned to be heedless of the real world — which is to say, heedless of its qualitative presentation of itself. After all, isn’t it really just a collection of qualityless particles? We hardly ask ourselves, “Why should we untruthfully deny qualities where we find them — especially given the fact that, without them, we would have no world from which to abstract our scientifically preferred quantities?”

Sometimes it takes a poet to awaken us to the qualities of things. Take, for example, this from Wordsworth, as he begins his poem, “Resolution and Independence”:

There was a roaring in the wind all night;
The rain came heavily and fell in floods;
But now the sun is rising, calm and bright …

I suspect we can all sense rather vividly some of the qualities of this particular new day, simply from the image of the sun “rising, calm and bright”, colored as this rising is by the wild character of one specific night.

And then there are these lines from Langston Hughes:

The sun sets quietly,
Casting shadows like memories,
A moment of peace amidst the chaos,
A fleeting glimpse of eternity.

Would we be nearly as likely to speak, not of a sunset, but of a sunrise, as offering “a fleeting glimpse of eternity”? Surely we might do so, given the right context. But, at least as it seems to me, a sunrise speaks more readily of here and now — of our particular place on an earth now clearly (or perhaps, in some situations, “mercilessly”) limned in the light of day. Talk of eternity comes more naturally as the dusky earth (and the labors of the day) are losing, rather than gaining, their sharp contours.

It’s worth pausing here to note that, in recognizing the qualitative and meaningful aspect of phenomena, we are not claiming there is some sort of unambiguous or neatly coded scheme governing qualities. Quite the opposite. Every material reality is multivalent and context-sensitive in its meaningfulness. That’s just the way of meanings, all of which can enter into endless relations with other meanings.

Think of a cave in the mountains. Of what, in our own experience, do we find it an image? Perhaps it signifies safety, as shelter from a storm, or a place of badly needed rest. Perhaps darkness. Perhaps receptivity and welcome (“taking in”); or secure enclosure; or hidden danger, as from a sleeping beast or concealed villain; or the unknown generally; or a Jungian treasure of the soul, lying in the depths; or a “door” to the earth’s or psyche’s interior; or any number of other things that might occur to you.

But this is not to suggest that material realities lack specific character. We will not often find a cave likened to an open, flat meadow, let alone to a flower. It’s just that every material reality is partly shaped by its context, so it’s possible that one might find occasion to liken a cave to a flower, just as it’s possible for almost any word in a text to color and enter into a special relationship with just about any other word. Meanings are not discrete things spatially excluded from each other. Their lawfulness, in contrast to the way we usually think of “mechanistic” interactions, is expressed through a power of interpenetration and mutual influence.

So, then, the expression or meaning of the material world lies in what a particular thing or phenomenon may say to us under a given set of circumstances. Things may not be rigidly univocal as opposed to multivalent in this regard, much like the words of a human language, which can usually be employed in widely different ways, with different meanings. Yet we would not therefore say that the words are meaningless. Our dictionaries show that we have no great difficulty distinguishing one word from another.

The expressive aspect of material reality is not itself material, nor is it fixed and coercive, like the world of Laplace’s demon. Every material phenomenon has this same character: its outer form is that of an interior expression, or meaning. Expression or meaning is the “spirit” or “substance” of materiality. It is what the outer surface or “face” of a thing or phenomenon is saying — trying to get across to us.

Laplace’s thought experiment is not about this manifest world; he speaks, not of the eloquent qualities of existence, but only of a kind of knowledge that was intended from the first (by the pioneers of the Scientific Revolution) to remove qualities from view. But he does give us a question we might usefully re-frame this way: “Is our free, intentional, and meaningful pursuit of our own lives somehow constrained or blocked by the consistently lawful movement of matter through space? Do we live in a world where we are bound by relentless physical law, or do we rather live in a world of speech from which our own speech derives, a world whose lawfulness yields itself to be governed and directed toward the revelation of meaning of all sorts, whether beautiful or ugly, good or evil — a world receptive to our own freely offered expressions of meaning?”

The relation between the world’s lawfulness and its meanings: that is now our question. It’s a question Laplace could not yet ask, because he didn’t have a present world at which to direct the question. But we can now ask it. And the answer is right in front of our faces — or, as I will say in a moment, in our own speaking throats.

I suppose the compatibility of meaning with physical law is immediately evident in the way, concordant with our intentions and purposes, we direct our feet this way or that. In doing so, we redirect uncounted trillions of “particles” in our legs toward our intended destinations without requiring them to deviate from physical law. That seems clear enough in terms of everyone’s routine experience. However, I do not wish to lean on this particular experience, since there are philosophers and neuroscientists who have earnestly twisted themselves into knots trying to make us doubt such experience, and since there is in any case a more direct pathway to the answer we seek.

I will preface the answer with a simple question. Do we find the beauty and significance of a sunset at all compromised or contradicted by the regularity of the sun’s predictable motions? What reason could we possibly have for thinking this? If the sun had to move erratically in order to present us with the beauty of the evening, we would rightly be far too concerned about the unpredictable goings-on to pay much attention to the beauty of the sunset.

But the best illustration of the compatibility between lawfulness and the expression of meaning comes from our speaking ability, the whole purpose of which is, indisputably, to express meaning.

No one I have ever heard of would claim that, in order freely to express whatever we have to say, we must somehow seize the “particles” of our physical vocal apparatus and, by an act of supernatural intrusion into the natural world, force them to swerve miraculously out of their lawful paths so as to follow the rules of meaning rather than the laws of physical movement. And yet, in the absence of such an intrusion, we all take each other’s speech to be meaningful rather than merely lawful in physical terms. And no one, regardless of his intellectual convictions, dismisses the meaning of another person’s speech (such as a cry for help) on the ground that it is “really” just the result of the inescapably lawful motions of particles in the throat. This despite the fact that the mathematized laws of physics contain no terms making sense of the expression of meaning.

In reality, virtually all human activity — our ways of walking, our gesturings, our conscious choices of all sorts — are meaningful expressions of who we are, and are therefore, we might want to say, forms of speech. Here, too, the same truth holds: the expression of meaning never requires a violation of physical law. This includes the professional dancing I mentioned in the opening section of this article, and, indeed, all the manifestations of nature cited in the foregoing, as well as the ability of every animal to give qualitative expression, under all sorts of exigencies, to the qualitative character of its own species (Talbott 2025c).

The lesson we can take away from our own speech, as well as all the other examples, is that neither the creation nor the existence of expressive meaning is contradicted by the physical lawfulness of the means of expression — a truth that is not only exemplified in human speech, but that also disposes of the Laplacian fantasy. Our ability to mean something with our words (and our lives) is superimposed upon the physical substrate of our existence with apparent freedom and ease.

It’s as if the meaning of things arises at the very root of physical manifestation, so that the physical lawfulness and the meaning arise harmoniously together. The meaning does not have to be somehow imposed on the physical substrate of expression from outside or after the physical determination of the substrate’s manifestation. Given our experience as speakers, why should we not take this conjunction as perfectly natural, rather than as an inherent contradiction between physical law and meaning?

This merits emphasis. No one has ever shown how physical lawfulness stands in essential conflict with the expressive meaning of things. Why, then, do so many assume there is a conflict? I wonder whether anyone has even attempted to demonstrate such a conflict. The usual stratagem depends on simply ignoring meaning altogether. In other words, having soaked up science (and particularly the imagery of atomism) through the naive medium of primary school teachers, and having developed a habit of not attending to the meaning of things, we learn to take for granted the materialistic claim that mindless and meaningless particles moving in the void are all we have. But the fact is that we do not “have” such particles at all, as opposed to mountains and seas, deserts and forests.

Certainly we do have many mathematical formulations bearing, for example, on mass and motion. But such concepts hardly begin to be adequate for any description of the world’s qualitative manifestation of itself in human experience (or, presumably, in the different experience of other beings) — manifestations without which, so far as we can know, there would be no substantive world at all. And without which we would be deprived of all our terms of scientific description as well as virtually all the content of our own lives. Scientific words such as “mass” and “motion” could not conceivably have any meaning for us in the absence of a qualitatively expressive and sense-perceptible world.

However much one might prefer not to make a big deal about the obvious, it nevertheless needs saying: if we strive long enough toward an understanding of the world’s lawful regularities while ignoring all meaningful presentation, we will eventually believe the world to consist of lawful regularities without meaningful presentation.

But it is not nature herself, as she presents herself to us daily, who hands us the feeling of being imprisoned. This feeling, rather, is given us by a science that has eagerly bound itself with theoretical constructs in its insistent quest for inescapable logic and mathematical certainty. This has required the practitioners of our most fundamental science to overlook the world we actually live in. Why? Because the very terms of their quality-free scientific ideal drives them more and more toward concepts emptied of experiential content.

This willingness to ignore the world and take explanatory refuge in mental constructs that are blank screens upon which we can project (Talbott 2025d) our deepest insecurities goes a long way back in history: the “atoms” of Democritus (who lived in the fifth and fourth centuries before the current era) were imperceptible, as have been all the “particles” of physics ever since. The actual world gives us no such faceless (expressionless) things, which we therefore have to invent.¹ It is far easier for us to feel imprisoned by our own theoretical constructs than by the actual world.

We can rightly be amazed that Laplace’s thought experiment still in our day has so firm a grip on the materialist mind. It tells us a great deal about the naive character of that mind. A line of thought that never descends from abstract, theoretical constructs to the perceptible phenomena of our actual earth has been enough to convince countless otherwise thoughtful people that we humans are chained aliens imprisoned in a world that is not our home.

Once we see what has been going on, we can begin to understand that we are not “made of” particles; that particles — even when falsely imagined in the manner of sense-perceptible things — are incapable of giving us the world we inhabit; that unviolated physical lawfulness is perfectly compatible with the meanings to which this lawfulness is subservient, including the meanings of our own lives and speech; that a science striving to be quantitative while strictly ruling out qualities is a science that, almost by definition, can have nothing to say about the meaning of the world’s phenomena.

Laplace ought to have inquired about the explanatory chasm between his notion of lawful, quantified, quality-free “events” and a real world. The chasm is unbridgeable in the usual fashion, since meanings (such as those of human speech) cannot at all be explained from the bottom up by a physical lawfulness that has been abstracted away from the real world precisely in order to remove from view all expression of meaning. If Laplace had explored this explanatory gap between lawfulness and meaning — a gap requiring us to see that (as with human speech) meaning governs lawfulness rather than the other way around — we might now be enjoying a science very different from the one we have (Talbott 2025c).

But he didn’t. So now we are the ones who must fill in the explanatory gap. To address the gap, I believe, is to recognize that the world is most essentially its speaking. It is surely a higher speaking than that of human language, but our speaking is akin to, derives from, and ever aspires to, that higher expressiveness. There is no mute, mindless stuff “out there”. There are only words, only significant expression.

We conclude, then, that the Laplacian line of thought is empty — wholly vacuous. It doesn’t even begin to touch the reality of our lives or of the world. We humans, working freely with meaning, respond meaningfully to each other’s meanings and to the world’s meanings. Our powers of free expression were first given us from a nurturing natural environment.

The truth is the opposite of Laplace’s deterministic contention. His argument, as so many “feel it in their bones” today, is horribly twisted. Lawful regularity, such as we encounter it in the real world, is not opposed to our meaningful lives, but serves us as a matter of grace. We ought, in our freedom, to give thanks for the world’s regularities. After all, we would not be able to act meaningfully if our physical environment were capricious and unpredictable.

Notes

1. We have no experience at all of “things” in the realm of particles. The supposed pictures of atoms we often see are typically graphs of forces at a minuscule scale — graphs designed to convey the impression of conventional photographs, which they definitely are not. The forces being graphed — and forces in general — are not appearing things. I suspect that many physicists would happily excuse themselves from the task if asked to say with any rigor what a force is. My further suspicion is that, whatever a force may be, it has something to do with will. And, most certainly, we would have no ability to grasp the concept of force, as scientists use the term, if we did not have direct experience of exerting pushes and pulls on objects or of feeling pushes and pulls exerted on us.

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Steve Talbott :: Still Haunted by Laplace’s ‘Demon’