Plotinus on the Butterfly Effect

[sdi]

I'm reading Enneads III 1, and came across this amusing paragraph:

[Let us suppose the universe is strictly material, being entirely composed by atoms.] These atoms are to move, one downwards—admitting a down and an up—another slant-wise, all at haphazard, in a confused conflict. Nothing here is orderly; order has not come into being, though the outcome, this Universe, when it achieves existence, is all order; and thus prediction and divination are utterly impossible, whether by the laws of the science—what science can operate where there is no order?—or by divine possession and inspiration, which no less require that the future be something regulated.

On the one hand, here is Plotinus anticipating Edward Lorenz by nearly two millennia.

But on the other, can you imagine any modern physicist using "divination appears to work in practice" as an axiom!?

Comments

[boccaderlupo]

Nothing like some "spooky action at a distance"...

[emmanuelg]

I wonder what Plotinus would think about fractals?

[sdi]

I too have been wondering that. The concept seems to dovetail very neatly with Neoplatonist cosmology!