Still Haunted by Laplace’s ‘Demon’

Hidden in plain sight:
The shape of a world
excluded by Laplace

Stand sometime under a blue sky, extending from horizon to horizon, and try as best you can to comprehend it. I am amazed at how late in life I came to even notice this sky, let alone to contemplate it for a few moments. When one does contemplate it, one might almost say “It can be a life-changing experience”. One thing you can do, if you know anything about the life of native Americans, is to imagine how they might have experienced the sky over the Great Plains. Or you can try to think of the rather hellish difference in your life if you had never known anything except a ten-foot ceiling.

In the constricted space under that ceiling, without the boundless 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?

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 now, 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. 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 descending. Notice the different qualities of the two movements, ascending and descending.

Now you have 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 the 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 contents of the world. In fact, as the philologist Owen Barfield has shown, virtually all our language, with which we describe and think about our lives, originates with the world. This is true even of our dominant immaterial 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 world, in other words, is an outer appearance expressing an interior reality. Ralph Waldo Emerson was pointing to a similar 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 abstract or inner meanings become detached from sense perception. By abstracting away from that clothing we gained the powers of thought necessary for our current science.¹

What I said above about particular experiences of nature is actually true of every experience, whether beautiful or ugly, arousing or serene, puzzling or routine, mysterious and sublime or 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 hardly notice the world itself — which is to say, its qualitative presentation of itself. After all, isn’t it really just a collection of qualityless particles?

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 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 their sharp contours.

It’s worth pausing here to note that when we are talking about the qualitative and meaningful aspect of phenomena, we are not claiming there is some sort of unambiguous or neatly coded scheme governing qualities. 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 images safety, as shelter from a storm or a place of 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, entirely different from the lawfulness of “mechanistic” interaction, is expressed through a power of interpenetration.

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 a thing or phenomenon is saying. To remove the saying is to efface the material phenomenon.

The beauty and significance of a sunset is not in any way compromised by the regularity of the sun’s motions. Why would we ever imagine that it is so? And no one I have ever heard of would claim that, when we speak meaningfully, we somehow seize our physical vocal apparatus and force it by an act of supernatural violence into a miraculous violation of the world’s physical lawfulness. And yet we all take each other’s speech to be meaningful and, at least at times (as in making a marriage proposal or applying for the job of our dreams), we choose our words carefully, with our hearts hanging in the balance.

We are free in the realm of meanings, and in this the real world serves us well.

If, as is evidently the case, a line of thought more or less like that of Laplace has convinced millions of educated Westerners that they are critically shackled by natural law, with their humanity sadly compromised, there must be a reason. That reason, as it happens, is not hard to find. It lies in a science that has resolved to strip itself of all qualities and to discover truths about the world that are, as far as possible, both quantitative and replicable — mathematical and predictable.

One might prefer not to make a big deal about the obvious, but in this case drawing attention to the obvious seems the most important thing: if we have long striven one-sidedly toward an understanding of the world’s lawful regularities while ignoring all meaningful presentation, then our understanding will mainly consist of lawful regularities without meaningful presentation.

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 enchained itself with theoretical constructs reflecting a superficial quest for inescapable logic and mathematical certainty. This requires the scientist to overlook the world we actually live in. This willingness to overlook the world 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 things, which we have therefore had to invent.² And it is far easier for us to feel imprisoned by our own theoretical constructs than by the actual world, which never has the feel of a jailor.

Some of our best scientists and philosophers have at least hinted at the problem here. Einstein, for instance:

The skeptic will say: "It may well be true that this system of equations is reasonable from a logical standpoint. But this does not prove that it corresponds to nature". You are right, dear skeptic. Experience alone can decide on truth. (Einstein 1954, p. 355).

Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it. Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality. (Einstein 1954, p. 271).

Then there was the brilliant logician, Bertrand Russell, who, understanding mathematics as a part of logic, once remarked that logic “may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about” (Russell 1981, pp. 59-60). That’s why logicians and mathematicians prefer to speak of the inherent validity rather than the experiential truth of their formulations. But it’s the truth and meaning of the manifest world we have to enquire about when we want to understand the crippling blindness of Laplace’s calculating demon. To the degree we find ourselves caught up in mathematically and logically precise calculation, we have abstracted ourselves entirely away from the world’s incalculable meaning.

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 superficiality 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.

That the world is word-like and that all our own language and meanings have been bequeathed to us from that world is an inescapable truth we have learned to ignore. But its implications are profound. We need to reckon with the fact that, since the Scientific Revolution we have been abandoning the phenomenal world for theoretical constructs stripped as far as possible of qualities and meaning. Short of that reckoning, we will fail to understand that we are not “made of” particles; that particles do not belong to the perceptible world, being illusions that once bedeviled physicists; that unbroken 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 might have inquired about the chasm between his calculable quantities and a real world. In purely physical terms as we have those terms today, it is an unbridgeable chasm, since meanings (as we see in human speech), cannot at all be explained by the physical lawfulness of the manner of expressing the meanings. If Laplace had explored this explanatory gap between lawfulness and meaning, we might now be enjoying a science very different from the one we have (Talbott 2025c).

But he didn’t. So now, belatedly, we are the ones facing that task. 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 can put the matter, as the Romantic philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling once did, by saying that “mind is invisible nature, while nature is visible mind” Schelling 1988, p. 42).

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. We humans, working freely with meaning, respond meaningfully to the world’s meanings. 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. After all, we would not be able to act meaningfully if our physical environment were capricious and unpredictable.

Notes

1. It’s worth reflecting on the fact that we have gained our material understanding of the world only with the aid of a massive linguistic superstructure consisting of words with immaterial meaning. In order to gain our material meanings, we have had to purge the world of its interior aspects, but those aspects have “hung around” as a dominant (and often distorting) language of abstraction. The distortions occur because we are inclined to treat many of our abstractions as if they were material (perceivable) things, which they are not. (Just consider the word, “particle,” as we have it from particle physics. The effort to conceive particles as if they were perceivable things rather than high abstractions has caused no end of trouble for physicists.)

2. We have no experience at all of “things” in the realm of particles. The supposed pictures of atoms we often see are actually graphs of forces at a minuscule scale — graphs designed to convey the impression of conventional photographs, which they definitely are not. Forces are not yet appearing things.

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