The Butterfly Effect - Superstition
The Butterfly Effect is a scientific(?) theory that states that small, even imperceptible, changes can have large consequences down the causal chain. It was discovered in the field of meteorolgy.
In short, does the flapping of a butterfly's wings cause a hurricane?
Superstition, in philosophy, has negative connotations and is classifed as a fallacy of false cause.
But then...
Read it (superstition) in the context of the Butterfly Effect.
Wearing your lucky T-shirt to a game does cause small changes in the air around you. These small changes get magnified down the causal chain and transforms into a favorable wind/rain that can help your team to win.
That's a very simple version of how superstition can be true. I think causality is very complex. For instance, the 9/11 attacks caused more deaths (242 a month) after it happened through traffic accidents because people preferred travelling by road to air.
So, what do you think?
In short, does the flapping of a butterfly's wings cause a hurricane?
Superstition, in philosophy, has negative connotations and is classifed as a fallacy of false cause.
But then...
Read it (superstition) in the context of the Butterfly Effect.
Wearing your lucky T-shirt to a game does cause small changes in the air around you. These small changes get magnified down the causal chain and transforms into a favorable wind/rain that can help your team to win.
That's a very simple version of how superstition can be true. I think causality is very complex. For instance, the 9/11 attacks caused more deaths (242 a month) after it happened through traffic accidents because people preferred travelling by road to air.
So, what do you think?
Comments (72)
So. "Small things can lead to big changes so me wearing a blue T shirt to make my team win is basically science" doesn't really work. It would be more like, "Maybe me wearing a blue T shirt will make my team win, but it could also make the other team win and a rattlesnake bite my ankle. I mean, every time I've worn it, my team has won, so maybe it works, but I can't prove anything."
And the fact that scientific theories lead up to superstition is very disturbing.
The butterfly-causing-a-hurricane is a figure of speech -- not to be taken literally.
Many small, and not so small, events cause -- and maintain -- hurricanes, everything from dust stirred up over the Sahara Desert to slight changes in the ocean currents.
Quoting Bitter CrankNot so for chaotic functions, and weather is very much such a function.
It is meant literally. One wave of a butterfly wing, sufficiently prior to said chaotic event, is the difference between a hurricane and not that hurricane. This is not to be confused with the wing being the sole cause, but for any storm in history, the storm would not have ever existed given any seeming trivial difference in the distant past. Instead, other storms would happen.
This is why weather cannot be predicted even given perfect information. Any trivial difference anywhere grows into a completely unpredictable difference. Planetary orbits are similarly chaotic, despite the appearance of stability mostly due to one of the objects being so much larger than the others. One planet orbiting a star is stable, but a third object makes the system chaotic, hence the three body problem. The perturbance from one slow sand-grain meteor can make the difference between a planet remaining in orbit or being ejected permanently into deep space.
I think the butterfly effect is a reductio ad absurdam, an unending infinite regress.
That's another way to look at it.
Quoting Cavacava
How so?
Quoting noAxioms
That's scary. Are you serious?
Quoting Bitter Crank
As noAxioms said, it's to be taken literally.
Quoting tim wood
I don't understand the math here.
A small event (gene mutation) that codes for an adaptive trait has effects that continue far into the future.
Trees and vegetation do influence the weather, so tiny accidental events do have far reaching casual effects via biological mechanisms.
Is the idea of the Butterfly Effect subject to its own effects (what are those effects objectively measured)? I mean this in the sense of memes passing from one mind to the next.
I have a screen saver that simulates three or more similar size bodies in perfect orbit, and it takes very little time for all but two of them to achieve escape velocity. A tiny difference in initial conditions (the sand grain) might result in two different remaining ones.
Weather is far more chaotic than that. Any difference at all (say one radioactive decay) is likely to utter alter the weather a few months hence compared to the weather without that decay.
I highly doubt that chaos theorists have the means to model the effect of flapping wings.
Quoting noAxioms
It's literally bullshit, because there is no means of showing that such a thing actually happens in the real world. There are far, far too many events happening at the same time that can not be adequately assessed in the context of all the other events.
There are real, actual small events which have a massive outcome. One pair of emerald ash borers secreted away in a shipment from Asia could be ultimately responsible for the loss of all of the ash trees in North America. One pair of zebra mussels flushed out of a ships hold could eventually reek havoc on all fresh water bodies in the Western Hemisphere. These kinds of "butterfly" events have an explanation that can be understood (reproduction).
Quoting Bitter Crank
Consider this. Hitler was saved from drowning when he was about 4. A small insignificant event and look what happened.
(Y)
Also...I'm interested in the consequences of The Butterfly Effect in a broader context, especially religion, the supposed domain of superstition.
Gene mutations, spread of disease, a flame in a grain elevator. All examples of things whose effect can grow exponentially, but not really chaotic systems. Even the planet example I gave is a poor one since the imbalance of relative masses lends more stability to our solar system than a small meteor is likely to disrupt. But the effect is still strong enough that it is impossible to say where Earth will be in its orbit a million years from now,. Those chaotic effects are the same ones that occasionally dislodge comets into the inner solar system.
'Back to the Future' is an example of how it doesn't work. Marty working to restore his future existence after he disrupts the meeting of his parents. Nonsense. Alter one atom of the past and there is no future Marty
Hard to say with Hitler. Sure, the saving of the child resulted in the way WWII was played out, but I think it would probably have happened regardless. The world was playing a game of 'Risk', and needed to take its natural progression from isolated countries to superpowers. The war was inevitable, but it ending with a cold war was not. Despite USSR being as bad as Germany, I'm not sure what sort of hell hole the world would have become if the USA or anyone else had finished the war instead of letting it go cold.
Uttering a few magic words can and does alter the local airflow, humidity, temperature, pressure. Couldn't these small changes magnify into large scale weather systems? I know I'm straining the concept but what do you think?
While the escape velocity is unlikely, the subject has been of some interest since the Newtonian 'wobble' effect along the axis caused by possible changes to the internal motions of the crust relative to earth' spin from events like earthquakes, environmental depletion and even nuclear testing that all impacts on polar shifts. If you think of something like orbital resonance, gravitational interactions and any possible deceleration of earth there could possibly bump us into a higher or lower orbit, or at the very least would have some lunar impact that would devastate the internal planetary dynamics.
:-|
Does it? And double numbers on a clock have some celestial significance too, right? Wow, it is 22:22pm when you looked at your digital watch, it must make you special. It is probably because you are a capricorn. Let us meditate and release the bad energy back to the spirits all around us so that the airflow and humidity will return to normal.
Superstition is an epidemic. It is the outpouring of a weak mind inclined to illusions and so boring and repetitive and empty they are that their capacity to actually use their mind is limited to nothing more than making highly unlikely scenarios appear comprehensible to them. Just like celebrities with no skills, offering nothing to the world but their looks and yet they are adored and admired, so too is superstition attractive to morons.
While chaos theory uses conditional data to ascertain and predict climatic uncertainties, it is not actually about a butterfly. It is a figure of speech.
Orbital resonance is a gravitational interaction, and only a close passing object would alter the moon orbit more than (again) the tides. The moon is slated to eventually collide with Earth, but that is not a chaotic event. They can predict the time pretty accurately, and it turns out to be moot. The sun will swallow both first.
I did say I was stretching the theory to its limits. May be too much in your view.
Why such a dim view of superstition? Is it because you think it's not rational or is it because, like me, you fear the consequences if it were true?
In my reply to @Bitter Crank I gave the example of Hitler who was saved from drowning as a 4 year old. Look what happened? I think the world is too complex, causation not so simple, and our ignorance to vast, for us to so (over)confidently dismiss possibilities.
Also, the Butterfly Effect is a scientific theory. I just want to explore its logical implications, one of which seems to allow for superstitions to be true.
No it does not, not in the slightest. The so-called butterfly effect must be thought of in terms of the dynamic systems in which it comes to be an effect at all. The idea is that dynamic systems are defined by - among other things - certain thresholds or 'tipping points', beyond which the system will qualitatively change in behaviour (a weather system 'tips' from a fine day to a hurricane, for example). The 'butterfly effect' is what happens when a crucial variable (wind speed, temperature, air pressure, or something along those lines) 'tips' beyond the threshold required by that qualitative change to happen. This change in variable may be tiny, but it may be enough to set a whole train of events into motion.
A nice concrete example of this is given by Mark Granovetter when he asks us to imagine "100 people milling around in a square - a potential riot situation. Suppose their riot thresholds are distributed as follows: there is one individual with threshold 0, one with threshold 1, one with threshold 2, and so on up the last individual with threshold 99. There is a uniform distribution of thresholds. The outcome is clear and could be described as a 'domino' effect: the person with threshold 0, the 'instigator,' engages in riot behaviour - breaks a window, say. This activates the person with threshold 1; the activity of these two people then activates the person with threshold 2, and so on, until all 100 people have joined. ... Now perturb this distribution as follows. Remove the individual with threshold 1 and replace him by one with threshold 2. By all of our usual ways of describing groups of people, the two crowds are essentially identical. But the outcome in the second case is quite different - the instigator riots, but there is now no one with threshold 1, so the riot ends at that point, with one rioter." (Granovetter, Threshold models of Collective Behaviour).
The idea is that a tiny change may result not only in radically different outcomes, but also in dramatically disproportionate ones. This 'disproportionality' speaks to fact that the causality at work here is 'non-linear' ('1 unit' of cause may result in '10 units' of effect - an exponential, rather than linear or geometric rate of growth), which is one thing that the term 'butterfly effect' is meant to capture. In any case, there's nothing 'superstitious' about any of this, and it's a awful, silly mistake to think there is.
But...
For want of a Nail
It's an older version of the butterfly effect but the message is the same.
I was just wondering if I could change the future of the universe itself by simply blinking an eye.
Maybe. The point is that you can't decide exactly what happens as a result of blinking your eye.
Just wondering...
Anyway, to make my point clearer, do you realize that top grossing movies are about science fiction and fantasy and these hold appeal even among philosophers like yourself. Doesn't that reveal something? I find philosophy to be more abstract than any other field - thinking, meta-thinking and all - thereby making you more open-minded about these kinda things. Even then, I tried to ground my idea on a scientific theory that allows for such possibilities (superstition, magic, sorcery).
Note, I don't believe in magic and sorcery but finding a scientific theory that admits of such possibilities is interesting.
The simple possibility that I could change the future of the universe is amazing by itself.
I don't know if it's that superstition works... just some of the stuff we associate with superstition works for reasons we might know or speculate about.
That brings another question to mind. Perhaps later...
And who has the credentials to judge when one's ''brain rolls out.''? No one!
Where did you study? I was working on my rolloutcheckology PhD at Oxbridge, but I took some time out to travel Europe and just couldn't get back into it.
The placebo effect is a powerful one that accounts, for instance, for much of the apparent 'effect' of antidepressants, including drugs not intended for depression that are prescribed for depression, if Irving Kirsch and Marcia Angell are to be believed (NrB article from 2011). To me there isn't exactly a gap here: our beliefs influence outcomes, or at least our reports of outcomes (for studies of placebo rely of course on reports). That's the finding, reproduced widely.
There is a gap for some sorts of physicalism, in that 'belief' here seems an irreducible factor. And this is belief on all sides, including the beliefs of professional practitioners, which certainly influence such outcomes.
Socially and indeed even in academe there are many cases in which belief, if shared by sufficient numbers of people, has effects, for the very belief shifts the way we think. An unpopular revolution today that brings cheap bread tomorrow will soon found itself high in the ratings.
Psychology is itself susceptible to problems with its own beliefs. There's some interesting work by a man called Schwitzgebel on over 100 years of surveys of whether we dream in black and white or in colour, which strongly suggests that our beliefs, at least as recorded by mainstream psychological studies, have varied with the rise and fall of black and white movies and television, without psychologists noticing the historical variations. He's refined the paper but here's an early version of it.
Yes, that's what I'm referring to. We just don't know how, for example, the placebo effect works. Yet, we know it's real. Thanks. This is a very good example of when people close the gap between doubt and belief without knowledge of the causal process. In my favor, it shows how superstitions may be believed despite people objecting on the grounds that there's no known causal process that can explain them. Thanks again
People from the "everything is determined by physics since the Big Bang" lobby have the same problem. Successfully tracing all the chains of causation requires an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent god whose will moved all the events of the cosmos since it's very beginning.
We can track gross causes: Cheaper, inferior material caused an apartment fire to get out of control and kill many people in London. Sloppy sanitation in a food plant can be identified as the cause of a large food poisoning event. Compulsive gambling can be identified as the cause of a personal bankruptcy. These are discreet, short-run, events.
But even here, there are limitations. On Sunday I left my bike on a bus. I didn't think about the bike as I got off and went about my errands in the shopping center until two hours later when I headed back to the bus stop. Suddenly I remembered--way way way too late. I can not account for this lapse of attention. Some chain of events left me in a distracted fuzzy-minded state--but what? Don't know, can't tell, too many possible factors. (I picked up the bike yesterday at bus system's Lost and Found office.)
Good for you but I'll need to cross-check your certificate.:)
I don't want to believe in superstition. I'm quite comfortable in materialism. However, I've been troubled by the total lack of any spark in such a worldview. It's too dull and boring being a materialist.
So, I did some web surfing and there's a lot of stuff on the net about the supernatural. I don't know what their credibility ratings are but it intrigues me that there's so much supernatural stuff going on in the world.
I just wanted to link my materialism to the spiritual in the most reasonable way I could think of.
It's written in chalk on the pavement near that grocery store you frequent. I'm surprised you didn't see it.
This thread will be the cause of me planting a Calotropis in the lower garden, so I can attract Monarch butterflies. Any butterfly may spark a vision of the chaos of indeterminable casual chains, crisscrossing like neurons in a network.
To be scientific using a Popperian meme: this thread will not be the actual cause (nor will it won't be) of me planting a Calotropis in the lower garden because the hypothesis (that it did) is unfalsifiable.
That's a reasonable desire, me thinks. I won't suggest any books about it, but I've wanted to do the same thing, in a way. Let's avoid spooky stuff.
The thing is, the purely material world of early earth was lifeless. In time life came about -- how is a whole nuther discussion. But it did. And it appears to have come about out of the purely material. Early life was not, presumably "spiritual". One doesn't usually think of the spirituality of blue-green algae. Eventually (billions of years) life evolved into animals that had an interest in the "spiritual". This spiritual being is the offspring of the purely material--though the distance between parentage and offspring is very long.
You can suppose that life has striven to reach for the spiritual from the very beginning--the teleological approach. It's a nice spiritual approach. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ is the man you want to go to for this approach. He was a Jesuit priest, French idealist philosopher trained as a paleontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of Peking Man (not to be confused with the discovery of Peking Duck).
"Nothing is mere" Feynman said.
Rather than expressing it as"a butterfly flapping its wings at X could cause a hurricane at Y"
I think this would be better
"it is impossible to calculate the long term effect on the weather of a butterfly flapping its wings".
Thanks for the reply.
But is science the sole guardian of truth?
Falsifiability is naturally built into our thinking. We don't need science to judge our thinking. I think you've put the cart before the horse. For example:
1) If my lucky shirt is any good then we should win this game
2) We didn't win this game
Therefore,
3) My lucky shirt isn't any good
See? Falsifiability is part of any hypothesis. Science is a subset of our hypotheses.
Maybe your lucky shirt just increases the probability you will win by 1%. Could you scientifically verify that your lucky shirt increases the probability that you will win by 1%?
Maybe your lucky shirt is solar powered and the sun went behind the clouds at the most crucial moment.
Maybe your lucky shirt is paired with unlucky shoes but you were ignorant about all the unlucky variables.
I agree the problem is complex but to say the hypothesis is non-falsifiable would require stronger support than just ''the problem is too complex''. There has to be a sense of real impossibility in it. For example, take the following hypothesis:
[B]There's an invisible, undetectable elf dancing on your head.[/b]
This is an unfalsifiable hypothesis because it's impossible to detect the undetectable.
:D Yes, anything's possible when we're superstitious. I didn't think of that LOL
A more precise statement can be made. It is that under a deterministic iterated system, points (or states) that start out very close together may end up with radically different fates. One point might remain bounded, while a nearby point spirals off to infinity.
With respect to the butterfly:
If you have two universes that are exactly the same; but in one the butterfly flaps its wings, and in the other it doesn't; then when you let your deterministic world run according to its rules and equations, those two universes may have vastly different fates. One may be coherent and stable and the other may disolve into randomness. One may support life and the other not.
It's not about causation. It's about the behavior of nearby points under iterated deterministic systems.
It's counterintuitive. We think that if we have some deterministic system and two points (or states) start out close together, their behavior can't be too different under iteration of the rules. But this turns out to be false. Nearby points can have vastly different futures.
We think that "a tiny difference will dissipate or smooth out over time." But the opposite is true. The tiniest difference in the initial conditions can lead to dramatically different futures.
The classic example is the Mandelbrot set. We've all seen those beautiful pictures. Here's a nice specimen. Hopefully this will post the link and not the image, which is fairly large and worth clicking on.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Mandel_zoom_11_satellite_double_spiral.jpg
Without going into detail, the Mandelbrot set (the part traditionally rendered in black) is the set of points that remain bounded under a given iteration. All the other points eventually wander off to infinity. [That just means they are unbounded, there's nothing mystical or actually infinite going on here, it's just an expression meaning unbounded].
The part of the plane that isn't black, the complement of the Mandelbrot set, can be colored like this: You color each point according to how many iterations (within some range) it takes to get a distance of 2 from the origin. And that assignment of colors results in the wild Mandelbrot pictures we see, which have all this crazy fractal detail at every possible zoom level.
Wikipedia has an excellent writeup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set
And the point is that you have a perfectly deterministic and actually very simple rule that lets you trace out the evolution of a point under continued iteration of the rule. But points that are very close together can end up with wildly different fates. Some remain forever within a circle of radius 2. And others wander off to infinity. [Once an iteration goes outside the circle of radius 2, it will eventually go to infinity].
That's what the butterfly story is illustrating. The universe in which the butterfly flaps its wings; and the universe in which the butterfly doesn't flap its wings; may have wildly and qualitatively different evolutions.
Yet if you step back you can see much deeper patterns in the apparent randomness. That's chaos.
As a historical note, all of this was anticipated and visualized in the mind of Henri Poincaré. He discovered chaos in the 1880's, a century before anyone dreamed of graphical software that could render images of these kinds of sets.
I accept your distinction about unfalsifiable claims.
mmm not very snappy though is it :). Also a bit misleading because what does "end up" actually mean? There is no "end" as such, just a flow of states, and the "young" states of two systems that start off nearly identical are likely to be very broadly similar. For example, the butterfly will have no effect upon whether that thunderstorm brewing above it will break or not.
Yuh. That is a full-on stretch. :(
Quoting TheMadFool
The only thing I fear is stupidity. It is just profound to see how people delude themselves, even when facts are staring right at them, for instance the concept of 'individuality' when people follow en-masse as they fall victim to marketing stratagems that enable them to think that they represent someone unique, and so people go on injecting shit into their faces or buying hundreds or even thousands of followers on social networking sites to pretend to popularity and the worst part is that everyone is the same, doing the same shit, thinking the same shit but working really hard to present themselves as "special" or different from the other same shit. Take a selfie and write some bollocks and everyone will congratulate you for being... the same shit as them.
The world feeds on this 'fear' you have, it drives multibillion dollar businesses as it ensures people continue to remain stupid enough to think that they are 'special'.
We are a fucking spec of dust. Accept it.
Yes, perspective changes everything. I once lived in a small world - everything looked so daunting and so big. I still feel that way but this ''speck of dust'' really shakes up my world. I feel smaller of course but there's so many bigger things to appreciate. Does that sound odd?
So, can I change the fate of the universe by blinking my eye?
Wouldn't be fate if you could.
You are part of the causal chain of local events, blink of eye or not. What you are labeling 'change' is not change by any usual definition. Change is what happens to a candle over an hour once it has been lit. Change is not what happens to the candle given the alternate choice to leave it on the dash of your car instead.
Why are you quoting words I didn't say in my post?
Quoting fishfry
Isn't that the gist of your post?
If you quote you should quote literally. If you are paraphrasing someone, you should not make it look like you're quoting them. A stylistic nitpick, to be sure. Something professional journalists do ... when you put something in quotes it should be the exact words the person said. Not the reporter's paraphrase, which is bound to include the reporter's own worldview and spin.
In this case I also feel that you misconstrued my words. Your paraphrase changed my meaning.
You attributed to me the claim that "Small changes making big differences."
But this is absolutely false. There is no "making" involved. There is no causal relation. It's just that nearby points in the plane have qualitatively different behavior under iteration. Likewise similar states of the universe may nevertheless evolve in profoundly different ways.
Nothing is "making" anything change; and if this is what you took from what I wrote, then I did not express myself with sufficient clarity.
Nearby points may have huge differences in their evolution.
That is what I said, that is all I said. That's what chaos is about, that's what the Mandelbrot set is about and that's what this butterfly story is about. The butterfly story is only a simplification for the public. It's not to be taken as meaning that anything causes anything. It represents a more subtle truth that isn't always understood by thinking the butterfly causes anything.
I did my best to explain this in my post but perhaps I can do better if you tell me why you think anything "makes" anything here. Nearby points may have radically different fates under iteration. That's all.
The difference magnifies only if in a chaotic dynamic system not tuned to a strange attractor, and the weather for the most part doesn't have strange attractors, but orbiting things can. So difference yes, but certain storms are predicable well in advance. It will rain on Colorado Springs at 3:30 PM on Sept 7, 2018. You heard it here first folks.
Sorry, didn't want to misrepresent your view. My question is simple...
What is the connection between ''nearby points'' and ''different fates''?
I see. So, you do agree that a blink of an eye can cause weather changes.
No, it sounds wonderful. There are things greater than you and you are no longer trapped in your own egotism, that all your social environment taught you to believe is reality no longer influences your decisions and where you get to thoroughly experience reality as it is. Superstition reverses this prospect and it is attractive because you shut reason and submit to irrational and nonsensical fears that merely amplify the prospect of ignoring the responsibility you have to make choices for yourself. A raw and fearless life is stunning and the only way to happiness.
Thanks.
Quoting noAxioms
I think I understand now. Small differences in initial states have vastly different outcomes. For example, the temperature may differ by 0.000007 degrees but this tiny difference can mean the difference between fair weather and storms. The butterfly is simply a metaphor for this small difference in a variable.
Now I'm confused. Let me restate my understanding. See if I got it right this time.
The butterfly flapping its tiny wings represents the small changes in weather variables. It doesn't mean that a butterfly can actually affect the weather.
Any small difference amplifies, which is characteristic of a chaotic system.
Unless the butterfly is outside the light cone of some event, or in Schrodinger's box (yes, these exist but not ones that hold a butterfly), the butterfly affects that event. But many dynamic systems are not chaotic. Some small meteor slated to hit Earth in 2 years is going to do that no matter what the butterfly or the weather is like. The Earth's rotational orientation will not be significantly different in a century.
One example they used a lot to develop chaos theory is that of a dripping faucet. The drips are completely predictable at low flow, but become unpredictable at a fixed pace, but then become predicable again at a slightly higher pace, but with more complex drip patterns with different size drops.
Yes exactly.
Our intuition is that a tiny change in the input conditions will smooth out over time and make no difference to the future evolution of the system. But it turns out that our intuition is wrong. Even a tiny change in the initial conditions can lead to a hugely different outcome in the future.
The butterfly story is misleading in that respect. It makes people think that the flapping wings "cause" a storm. That is not true. What is true is that the universe in which the butterfly flaps its wings, and the universe in which the butterfly does not flap its wings, may be profoundly different after a number of iterations of deterministic rules.
Getting back to the butterfly effect in relation to superstition, I think Efram had it right from the beginning:
Quoting Efram
A superstition relies on a certain event having a certain impact, like expecting to experience bad luck if a black cat crosses your path. While the cat may cause you to pause, which later makes the difference in whether or not you step onto the street and get struck by a vehicle, you don't know if the cat's interference will improve the outcome or make it worse.
Ok but that still leaves the door wide open for personal bias to creep in, shaping the uncertainty that you mention into well-formed beliefs.
Right, but believing something to be true doesn't make it true. Personal bias will affect belief, but it won't change the ultimate truth of the matter.