The word demon got a bad rep through history. In the original Greek meaning it denoted a spirit or divine power and was very closely related to the Latin word genius. But as things tend to erode through time the original meanings get muddied. Our demon here is one holding on to its original non-malicious meanings. It is an imaginary being or ,as the French scholar and polymath Pierre- Simon Laplace (1749–1827)called it initially (he did not say demon, it was added latter in subsequent interpretations to give it a bit more pop), it is a form of intelligence. In this though experiment Laplace posed a being/intelligence which would, for the sake of argument, be aware of the states, positions and all details about every single particle in the universe and their interactions and laws that govern them. By this knowledge past, present and future would all be revealed to it and highly predictable. This demon was posed deep within the era of understanding the world and universe as clockwork mechanisms which abides only by mechanical Newtonian laws , as demonstrations of causal and scientific determinism.

Although Laplace was not the first one to pose such an intelligence in his work “A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities”, and Nicolas de Condorcet, Baron D’Holbach and Roger Joseph Boscovich spoke of something similar, his one is the most often spoken about (it’s gotta be the demon part). So his description of this intelligence was this: “We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intelligence which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intelligence were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intelligence nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”

What a comforting idea that all things could be known if we could just access such posed intelligence or in our terms, gain enough computational power to have absolute knowledge about every single particle and physical law in existence (BTW Laplace thought we couldn’t ever do that, ergo the thought experiment part). Alas, it is not possible and rightfully so, because living in a deterministic loop in which things simply play out and any consciousness stuck within the loop is just going through the motions of inevitable certainty would imply predetermines aka be infinitely boring and predictable and leave us helpless to change what has already been set in motion and ned to unravel in just such way. We know it is not so due to a few things – first it is impossible to know every single factor to infinite decimal points, that is, it is not possible to have perfect knowledge of any phenomena. Secondly – even deterministic systems are prone to chaos and contain within themselves an unpredictability clause. This means (deterministic) chaos is present in all things (go read the post titled “Butterfly effect” speaking of chaos theory). Some simple closed systems can be predicted with certainty but most things cannot and chaos (not randomness, there are patterns in chaos as well) is our co-traveller in this universe.