What do you think of the butterfly effect?

If you are not familiar with it, it says that every thing you do will ripple through the world causing greater things to happen as it goes.





The example normally used is that a butterfly flapping it's wings causes the tiniest puffs of air that builds and joins other puffs of air until way later it could be causing a tsunami some time and place way later.





Do you agree with this idea? I'd have to say I do.|||It is not UNtrue, but it is not metaphysically important to consider because the ultimate cause, the "butterfly", can never be found or proved, so we might as well just accept that all things are caused.





The butterfly effect is the combination of two schools of thought: determinism, and chaos theory. The determinists deny free will, and the butterfly effect is supposed to make us believe that all our actions are determined by causes we cannot know about. Therefore it "leads to an ethics of compassion and understanding, both toward ourselves and others. We see that there but for circumstances go I." http://www.centerfornaturalism.org/descr鈥?/a>





This is the opposite of "rugged individualism", free will, and the belief that our actions do morally matter.|||I think we have no free will. It's all based on determinism. So therefore anything that happens can't happen anyother way. But thinkgs as small as a butterfly flapping it's wings does take part in everything else around it.|||I think moths are


equally to blame.


They do it in the night.


Results are still the same.|||I believe it to an extent, just because, I don't that 1 tiny little flap of air could create a tornado. But I do think that it effects the world in smaller ways. Such as, it could create a gust of wind, or if you gave someone a job that they were not qualified for, then they became a CEO.|||yes i do believe in it. your decisions affect people around the world daily. everything we do can have an affect on so many people we dont even realize it. just think about all the people you affect when you buy something, you affect the guy who dug the raw materials out of the ground, the guy that sold the raw materials, the guy that turned the raw materials into a good, the guy who took the goods and sold them to you. then the money you used will circulate for a long time traveling all over. lets say you had a coke. the can will be thrown away, picked up by someone, then someone will put it in a land fill, then eventually it will decompose, ect.... the coke you drank you will piss out, it will go through water treatment, sewers, then maybe find its way back into nature where it will evaporate and become a cloud then fall back to the earth as rain in asia. they are endless cycles, all caused by you buying a coke.|||If everything just reacted the butterfly effect could be true. Intelligence makes it untrue. When you feel a puff of air how do you react is it the same all the time. Most people can react differently to the same stimulus due to them thinking or feeling differently at the time and may not react at all. This is true of all Intelligent species making to many ends or changes to the effect for it to be real.|||More specifically, it is the idea that minor variances in the initial conditions of a system can create significant differences in the conditions of the outcome.





Those wing beats could just as likely cancel out a hurricane as cause one. Otherwise we'd be having planet-wide life-threatening storms every 20 minutes. It is dramatic to go from butterfly wings to major storm systems, but it should be made clear that the effect does not predict inevitable disasters and dangers. Just significantly different outcomes, many of which may well be neutral or even beneficial.





In some systems, it does seem pretty apparent, but in most, I think the natural state of the objects tamper any such large-scale changes--especially in systems with outside influences. No matter how many fish you have swimming in the sea for how long, the moon will still control the shape, speed, and direction of the tides, for example. No matter how many magnets you pile on your kitchen table, you will not create any lasting effect on the magnetic sphere of the earth itself. And no matter how many butterflies flap their wings, the differential heating of the atmosphere caused by external solar and internal geothermic heating will control the basic wind patterns.





However, in certain dynamic computer or technological systems, one small effect can cause catastrophic, cascading system failures. Likewise, in living systems, one small effect can cause body failure or even disease epidemics. One small discovery in intellectual pursuits could result in wide-spread changes in thinking and directly result in knowledge and advances far greater than the initial discovery itself--for example, someone put two pieces of curved glass in a tube and invented the microscope...in itself and its time more of a curiosity than anything else. But because of that small little advance, entire fields of medicine, chemistry, biology, and forensics opened up. Maybe not the whole of modern medicine, but a significant part of it is a direct result of that one little invention, something the inventor never dreamed of or meant at the time.|||Yes. Everything effects everything else, at least in a subtle way. On the scale of the universe, perhaps imperceptible, but it is the sum total of every event that has created the past, present, and future.