Philosophy

Ah, I think I wasn’t quite careful enough in the wording. Being able to predict a future state is different from being able to determine it. If time is discrete, and a chaotic system requires every state in between the current and some future to be calculated, then it is impossible to compute a future state sooner than that future time. This means that chaotic systems can’t be predicted.

What I meant to say is that if time is not continuous, then it is possible to determine the state of a chaotic system at some arbitrary time in the future. There is a lower bound on the time step required in the numerical simulation, so that means there is an upper bound on the amount of steps that would need to be computed for a perfect simulation. If there are a finite number of steps, then it can be calculated, and determined.