ilya_prigogine_isabelle_stengers_alvin_tofflerbookfi-org

77 THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE REAL
ists at all, that we find a convergence between nature and the
human mind. Similarly, when, at the end of the nineteenth
century, du Bois Reymond made Laplace's demon the very
incarnation of the logic of modern science, he added, "Ignoramus,
ignorabimus": we shall always be totally ignorant of
the relationship between the world of science and the mind
which knows, perceives, and creates this science.I6
Nature speaks with a thousand voices, and we have only begun
to listen. Nevertheless, for nearly two centuries Laplace's
demon has plagued our imagination, bringing a nightmare in
which all things are insignificant. If it were really true that the
world is such that a demon-a being that is, after all, like us,
possessing the same science, but endowed with sharper
senses and greater powers of calculation-could, starting from
the observation of an instantaneous state, calculate its future
and past, if nothing qualitatively differentiates the simple systems
we can describe from the more complex ones for which a
demon is needed, then the world is nothing but an immense
tautology. This is the challenge of the science we have inherited
from our predecessors, the spell we have to exorcise today.