@mattybax I was gonna tack this on as a reblog to the post, but I think having it separately makes more sense.
That’s a really interesting question, and I will answer it, but let me give a bit of background information first.
In math, whenever we are given a statement, we want to do one of two things: either prove it’s true, or prove that it’s false. You’ll be asked things like “prove or disprove the square root of 2 is irrational” or “if m is an even number, prove or disprove that m squared is even as well”.
For the sake of this post, I’m only going to talk about disproving statements, and specifically about proofs by contradiction.
A proof by contradiction is basically what it says on the tin. You can disprove a statement by proving the existence of something that contradicts that statement.
I’ll give an example so you know what I’m talking about:
Let’s say I ask you to prove or disprove the following statement: “All humans have a head. Therefore, if something has a head, it must be a human.”
This is obviously false, because lots of things have heads that are not human. All you’d have to do in this case is show me a picture of a cat and say “look, this has a head and isn’t a human, so therefore, your statement is false.”
Pretty simple, right? So let’s look back to Laplace’s demon, and why it broke down.
“An intellect 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 intellect 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 intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”
What I bolded is the heart of what makes the Laplace demon work. Something that knows everything. If we think back to proofs by contradiction, and if we wanted to disprove it, what would the contradiction be? What would cause the Laplace mail to break down?
If it didn’t know everything.
Naoya intended for Kazuya and the others to use the Laplace emails as a guide to their actions, so we can assume that people using its own predictions was already accounted for in the program.
The thing is, the program can only predict one outcome.
Sure, the program can predict that Kazuya would find the Devil’s Fuge and use that to fight Beldr. But Beldr is one hell of a demon (and that’s reinforced through how tough his fight is from a gameplay perspective). What are the odds that Kazuya would survive? It had to place its bets on something, it’s still far more likely that Beldr would kill Kazuya even if he had the Devil’s Fuge. let’s be honest, how many times have we died to that boss fight? i don’t blame the system for betting against me
But Kazuya beat the odds and defeated Beldr anyway, introducing a contradiction into the Laplace mail’s system. And this wasn’t a one time thing. Kazuya was constantly throwing in contradictions. Midori wasn’t murdered. Over 50 people were saved in Toyoshima-ku Ikebukuro. Throughout the entire week, Kazuya was disproving the assumption that the Laplace mail is all-knowing.
As early as the second day (the first time you get the Laplace mail after changing your death clock, ie. the first time you get the Laplace mail after introducting a contradiction), you already see that it’s caused a strain on the program
Not horribly noticeable, but the font is definitely wonky.
We all know that the program breaks down considerably more over each day, and the reason is that Kazuya keeps introducing contradictions as the week goes on.
The first time that Kazuya proved that the Laplace mail isn’t all knowing, that was fine. Naoya knew that would happen, so he made sure that the program continues as if nothing happened. There may be a few contradictions in the system now, but Naoya can paper over that smoothly enough, just enough to guide Kazuya through the week.
But Kazuya continues to disprove the underlying theorem the Laplace mail relies on every single day (as Naoya expected, but that’s for a different post).
After it’s been disproved so many times, it simply can’t work anymore. It’s now an unequivocal fact that the Laplace mail isn’t all knowing. It’s riddled with more holes than a block of swiss cheese. That thing is dead. The Laplace mail ran on the assumption that its program was all-knowing, but that’s just not the case anymore. Kazuya has disproved it one too many times, and it just breaks down entirely:
tldr: Yes, the Laplace mail would have considered the use of its own predictions into its predictions, but because it had to choose a single outcome, it just chose the more likely of the two outcomes. Kazuya had to fight like hell to change those outcomes, but he did, and doing so repeatedly was what killed off the Laplace mail.
I hope this answers your question!! ｡ﾟ( ﾟ^∀^ﾟ)ﾟ｡
