essay
Laplace's Demon Revisited
If you knew every state, could you predict the ethics of an AI? Determinism, free will, and compute braided into one attractor.
Laplace imagined a demon that could observe the position and momentum of every particle, and thus predict the future. The demon spoke in coordinates, not values. In 2025 we gave the demon GPUs and called it inference.
Yet as the models scale, another constraint appears: the moral latency between intention and action. We can predict what the system will output, but not what the operator will do with the output. That gap is where ethics lives.
Deterministic Scripting
In chaology’s interface, Laplace Mode collapses motion into pure stillness. We flip a switch: no noise, no gradients, no cursor trails. The demon’s universe is perfectly legible and catastrophically boring.
if ($ui.laplace) {
canvas.fill('#f6f6f3');
return;
}This single conditional is the fulcrum between chaos and determinism. Engineering is full of these switches—feature flags, circuit breakers, governance policies. What matters is not that we can render a static state, but that we choose not to live there.
Entropy As Moral Bandwidth
Entropy is the system’s declaration of freedom. When entropy falls to zero, every user journey collapses into predictability, and invention suffocates. When entropy spikes uncontrolled, the experience dissolves into white noise. We do not optimise entropy; we tune it.
| variable | interpretation |
|---|---|
entropy | live fluctuation of the accent hue; a proxy for creative slack |
signature | hash of the route, seeding every shader and motion curve |
status | narrative description of stability: Stable Orbit, Quasi-stable, Chaotic Basin |
The essay you are reading was composed in markdown, rendered through mdsvex, and executed as a Svelte component. The medium remains deterministic even when the message critiques determinism. Laplace’s demon would approve.
Compatibilism In Practice
Compatibilism suggests that free will can coexist with determinism if the agent understands the rules of the system. Chaology takes that literally. We expose the parameters: entropy values in the footer, attractor names in the metadata, source code for the hero field. If you can see the equations, you can improvise within them.
The demon is not vanquished; it is given an API. We let it predict the next accent shift while we decide what to do with the colour. Determinism provides the rail; creativity chooses the destination.