The Domino Effect as a model of Causality
The Domino Effect as a model of Causality+
The proverbial Domo Effect provides an interesting insight and poses questions about the nature of Causality in general and the definition of cause and effect in particular.
What is the cause of flooring a row of dominoes? The straightforward answer would be that it is an initial sideways impact on the first domino. But from the second domino’s point of view, it is the tipping over of the first domino. The same argument applies to the rest of the row of dominoes, whatever their number. The fall of each domino is both cause and effect. The Domino Effect is of course just a conveniently illustrative example of Chain Reaction.
Nuclear and chemical reactions are what most people associate with chain reactions. They are characterised by fast amplification of energy followed by fast attenuation. The point is that in a chain reaction process the attenuation never reaches zero levels of energy and in that sense, a chain reaction never ends. The last domino to fall does change the method of the energy transfer but is not the end of the chain. The way I see it every effect turns into a cause which in turn turns into effect ad infinitum. The domino effect is perhaps the best analogy for describing the nature of causality..
The proverbial Domo Effect provides an interesting insight and poses questions about the nature of Causality in general and the definition of cause and effect in particular.
What is the cause of flooring a row of dominoes? The straightforward answer would be that it is an initial sideways impact on the first domino. But from the second domino’s point of view, it is the tipping over of the first domino. The same argument applies to the rest of the row of dominoes, whatever their number. The fall of each domino is both cause and effect. The Domino Effect is of course just a conveniently illustrative example of Chain Reaction.
Nuclear and chemical reactions are what most people associate with chain reactions. They are characterised by fast amplification of energy followed by fast attenuation. The point is that in a chain reaction process the attenuation never reaches zero levels of energy and in that sense, a chain reaction never ends. The last domino to fall does change the method of the energy transfer but is not the end of the chain. The way I see it every effect turns into a cause which in turn turns into effect ad infinitum. The domino effect is perhaps the best analogy for describing the nature of causality..
Comments (11)
Also, what do you make of the slippery slope fallacy? I don't know how to explain this but I like to look at it as a causal web and one causal strand in this web may either assist or, more to the point, inhibit another causal strand thereby preventing all causation from being domino effects.
A puzzle I'm working on, when I have the time of course, is whether everything has an effect or not. The principle of sufficient reason is quite clear regarding how everything has a cause but nobody seems too worried about the flip side of this coin i.e. does everything have an effect?
In terms of physical strength I'm well below average and I'm sure if I tried to push a fully-loaded truck, I wouldn't be able to. So, in a sense, the causal chain, insofar as the fully-loaded truck and me are concerned, leads to a dead end. In other words, I'm not, can't be, a cause with respect to the fully-loaded truck's motion.
However, you can get amplification if you have a row of dominoes of increasing size,
Regarding your effort to move a truck, it might have not much effect on the truck but it would have an effect on you i.e shortness of breath or bruised palms. It all stems from Newtonian laws.
I cannot think of any application of force that doesn't have an effect.
"Cause" and "Effect" are not ontological categories. They don't describe any state of affairs. They're merely temporal categories to order events. Like all categories, they can be arbitrarily applied according to purpose. To call something a "cause" or an "effect" is really only to point out this or that property as important for the purpose of communication.
It gets harder to topple the next domino if the dominos increase in size until one doesn't fall over and the causal chain breaks.
A chain reaction will become stronger with every reaction in the chain and will continue to get stronger until every reactant is consumed.
Quoting Jacob-B
Yes, but no effect on the fully-loaded truck, right? I guess I should've been more specific - my pushing wouldn't have the intended effect.
I find this interesting. A massive 2-ton boulder perched atop a hill may need only the strength of a child to push it over and produce an incredible amount of energy.
If a small domino is able to topple a slightly larger domino (and so on and so on), doesn't the energy increase (not from nothing simply the potential energy stored [by whatever placed it there]) or, I suppose it doesn't "increase" the potential energy was simply there all along, rather, doesn't the kinetic energy amplify?
In the domino metaphor, it's as if there are many intersecting paths of dominos, some with small dominos, some big, and the exact course of the smaller dominos can ultimately influence which of the larger paths topples.
Perhaps this is too much of a stretch for the dominos metaphor?
Perhaps it's better to imagine, say, a pool table with various sizes of balls. If you run a computer simulation of such a setup, you would find that with precisely the same shots played, the effect of having a single extra ball, even one a couple millimetres in size, will ultimately lead to a different configuration of the big balls.
I took a look at the wikipedia page on the domino effect. The entire phenomenon is based on what they call meta-stable states and my hunch is, as the dominoes get larger the less meta-stable they'll be and the more kinetic energy that'll be needed to knock them off balance and, if my reasoning is correct, there's going to a cap on how large the kinetic energy of a falling domino can become. :chin:
At certain proportions and with no friction there might be translatory movement of the dominos rather than tipping over. There will not be amplification in that case.