Butterflies with toenails

Do you believe in chaos theory? Is everything completely random, or does fate determine everything? Could a butterfly flapping its wing(z) in Kansas affect your chances of pulling Cindy, the bleached-blonde travel agent in Surrey?

Basically, no.

Let's hope the butterflies never cotton onto this theory. Think of the chaos they'd cause if they started doing organised wing flap events together. It'd be IRL trolling.

Reply 3

cpj1987

I'm a very strong believer in the butterfly effect, yes. I really do believe that every single little action and choice shapes our lives and the world around us massively.

Reply 4

Bagration

The butterfly example is rather a bad analogy to determinism. The butterfly flapping its wings in Kansas bears no relation over whether I pull the travel agent (at least, not in the way the common butterfly analogy is phrased, anyway.) Some things do, i.e. the price of alcohol, which is related to a million things which are related to a million other things, but this just seems relatively logical... things are not determined by fate, I'm quite certain of that. And I'm fairly certain they're not caused by chance.

Reply 5

cpj1987

Bagration

The butterfly example is rather a bad analogy to determinism.

Agreed. The butterfly effect and determinism are two different things.

Reply 6

Bagration

As for chaos theory, I am not a mathematician and do not want to be. I have no opinion on chaos theory.

Reply 7

OneEyedYellowIdol

There is no such thing as fate as commonly understood. It's just like the fact nothing is random doesn't mean that everything is predetermined.

Randomness and random are merely terms used to describe outcomes upon which a vast amount of unmeasurable variables have acted. Take for instance a coin toss; if one could measure the exact amount of forces acting upon the coin and measure their extent to the minutest of detail, one could say with certainty which side it will come down on.

If you expand this to human decision making and free will then one can see it doesn't exist in the strictest sense of the word because if we could measure the near infitesmal past experiences and innate brain structure of the person making the decision then their exact choices and movement become 100% predictable.

The butterfly analogy as I understand it, is just highlighting the endless causative factors that result in an outcome and how those factors are inevitably reliant on a near infinite amount of other variables which in the end, connect all events past and present, together and thus every event has an effect on every other event either immediately, or in the future. That is why the clothes you wear today will minutely effect a declaration of war 10,000 years from now, though the fact the war started will be predetermined by the sum of all the influencing factors (both positively and negatively considered).

Reply 8

Stomm

Apparently everything is so random that there is a predictable pattern to it. Fancy that eh?

Reply 9

Trigger

I hate the word random. I read Arcadia by Tom Stoppard and it explained these theories a little to me.

Reply 10

cpj1987

G8D

Is the butterfly effect not more to do with a long term effect? Like a change to the evolutionary pathway instead of the instantaneous effect OP is referring to?

I do know that the OP isn't talking about the butterfly effect, but I seen some people mentioning it...

I do not believe in what OP is talking about.

It can be long-term and short-term. It certainly has a role in the long-term, but can be applied to almost anything. Our smallest choices can have a big impact on our own lives and the lives of others (for example, a woman choosing to go back and brush through her hair a second time before driving to the shops could (without knowing) therefore avoid causing a crash, which leaves people alive who otherwise wouldn't be. A small baby in another car could survive because of the choice of that woman, and end up growing up healthy, marrying, having children of his own and making what would eventually be a huge change to the world). Thus, there is a short-term and a long-term effect.
Similarly (though more extreme), a young boy could scratch a line into the soil using a stick. Thousands/millions of years later, that 'scratch' (if left alone long enough) could have eroded to form a huge gorge that has changed the face of the planet. Obviously, that's much more of a long-term impact.

That's the basic premise of it, anyway; that every tiny choice or action has a huge effect (whether or not we're aware of it). I find it very interesting to spend some time thinking back over my own life, and know that a decision I made when I was 15 to be in a TV programme could've affected my university course choice, and thus determined the university I chose to go to. Attending the university I did meant that I (most likely) saved the life of the person who is now my boyfriend, and so it continues...

It's kind of a weaker form of fate. Fate would say (going back to my initial example) that the woman would certainly, in all cases, have gone back to brush her hair again, and that there was no chance of the baby being killed (and this is true, I suppose, nothing is entirely our own choice when everything is based on our past experiences), but the butterfly effect faces the notion that she made that choice, and that it may have had a much bigger impact than she'd ever know about.

Apologies for carrying on so much!