“The laws of complexity,” says James Gleick, “hold universally, caring not at all for the details of a system’s constituent atoms.”
A chaotic system magnifies the effect of small perturbations: as a result, the way the system develops over time is highly sensitive to minute differences in initial conditions, just as Poincaré proposed at the turn of the last century. The further one tries to project the system’s behavior into the future, the harder accurate prediction becomes. But chaos should not be confused with randomness—that is, with events and behavior that have no specific cause. In chaotic systems, the basic processes of cause and effect still operate among the system’s components. But how the interactions of these components unfold over time and what kinds of large-scale behavior these interactions produce are nevertheless, in important respects, unpredictable.
Review in the works.
But the rationalist theory of causation, however valuable it may be as the manifesto of a particular scientific enterprise, cannot be regarded as an ‘analysis’ of the causal propositions asserted by natural science as it has existed for the last few centuries.
