CONCEPT
Tychism
Peirce's cosmological doctrine that absolute chance — genuine ontological indeterminacy — is a real feature of the universe, and the metaphysical foundation for genuine novelty.
Tychism, from the Greek tyche (chance), is Peirce's thesis that chance is a real, irreducible feature of the universe. Not merely ignorance of hidden causes. Not merely the practical unpredictability of complex systems. Genuine indeterminacy, woven into the fabric of things, prior to any law and irreducible to any mechanism. The universe, Peirce argued, does not merely appear random at certain scales while being deterministic at bottom. It is, at bottom, partly random — and the laws that govern its behavior are themselves the products of an evolutionary process that began in chaos and has been progressively acquiring regularity through what Peirce called the tendency to take habits. The doctrine is remote-seeming from AI but bears directly on the question of whether the machine's outputs contain genuine novelty.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Tychism provides the cosmological grounding for Peirce's account of creativity. Abductive inference — the generation of new hypotheses — depends on a kind of mental variation that is not fully determined by prior states. There