You might stick around and watch this whole episode, or you might decide not to.
But be aware that whatever you decide will impact the rest of your life
--and the entire future of the universe.
The Butterfly Effect is one of those concepts that’s made it into popular usage but mostly
without a proper discussion of what it really is and what its more impactful aspects are.
Just as an example, which we’ll get to later, it’s what prevents us from being ultimately
predictable by computers or resurrecting the long dead, no matter how good our computing
gets.
It arguably ties in a lot to free will and alternate futures in a very fundamental way,
though again that is arguable and we’ll get to that.
First though, what is it?
You’ll have heard the expression that the beating of a butterfly’s wings can cause
a hurricane on the other side of the planet, and that’s where the name derives from,
but it’s not an ideal one for illustrating the notion in my experience as people tend
to assume tiny little perturbations ought to dampen out over time – this comes up
a lot with discussion of time travel and the effects of changing just one little thing.
To the contrary, small perturbations tend to amplify and that butterfly example is from
a time travel short story, “A Sound of Thunder” written by scifi titan Ray Bradburry.
If you’ve seen any science fiction about jumping back in time to see or hunt dinosaurs,
particularly that Simpsons Halloween special “Time and Punishment”, that short story
was usually the influence, and in it one of the hunters accidentally crushes a butterfly
while hunting dinosaurs that would otherwise have died minutes later anyway, thus presumably
not altering the future in anyway, but killing that butterfly massively alters the future.
I don’t want to spoil the story further than needed to explain the reference, as it’s
a great story I’d recommend reading.
In some ways that story is itself a great example, I suspect if Bradburry had the character
squish a Mosquito, which would be functionally the same, we probably wouldn’t talk about
the Mosquito Effect instead, or at least differently, as the Butterfly makes for more interesting
imagery.
Memes for instance are very content-sensitive in terms of what spreads and why.
Same, when we played with quantum uncertainty and this concept in Infinite Improbability
Issues, the term ‘Quantum Cheeseburger” became a channel joke that many thousands
of people have heard and referenced since, and it was randomly selected from a short
list of regular lunch items.
I suspect had it come up as Quantum Caesar Salad it wouldn’t have caught on so much,
though perhaps the Quantum Chimichanga might have, if it had been selected.
But the concept was inevitable and predates Bradbury, and inevitably is sort of the reverse
idea of the Butterfly Effect and so also something we’ll want to get to later, but as I said
the scientific concept is from earlier, when we first started exploring chaos theory and
the three-body problem, where meteorology was essentially first identified as a very
chaotic and unpredictable system.
And the basic concept goes back further, probably to antiquity but a common earlier quote from
Johann Fichte at the end of the 18th Century in his “The Vocation of Man” is that "you
could not remove a single grain of sand from its place without thereby ... changing something
throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole".
Against this we have the notion of psychohistory, the science of predicting the future in Isaac
Asimov’s famous Foundation series.
That group behavior is predictable as statistical, though individual’s actions are not.
Even there the story recognizes that certain pivotal persons or anomalous events can scatter
those predictions but argues that for the most part, there is an inertia to events and
an inevitability to certain moments, essentially predestination or fate.
We know - or at least often believe - that there’s a certain truth to that.
This, I think, is part of what biases us toward assuming tiny changes don’t matter or dampen
out over time, rather than amplify, which is what the Butterfly Effect implies.
You’re inclined to think that it really doesn’t matter in the ultimate scheme of
things if you decide to have a sandwich or a salad for lunch, but it really does, and
not in some rare nexus-point kind of way.
We can all recognize that if a butterfly had landed on an assassin’s scope right before
he pulled the trigger on a major figure, like Kennedy or Hitler, the future would be irrevocably
changed.
But while both of those men are common time travel MacGuffins, indeed I suspect saving
JFK or taking out Hitler probably make up the bulk of time travel scenarios people discuss,
that sandwich and salad matters just as much in the long term.
And time is really long and human civilization really complex, so when we’re talking about
our history or future, yeah it matters.
A Sandwich can impact history, the assassin who shot Archduke Ferdinand and lit off World
War 1 stopped for a sandwich and that’s why he encountered the Archduke.
Let’s use a mundane example too.
Yesterday I made soup for lunch while preparing to write an episode script.
I’d had a sandwich with the previous day’s soup, so this time I had a salad – a tiny
past decision already having an impact.
I didn’t realize it, but that rather light lunch left me low on energy and not focused
on the keyboard.
I let my cat Prospero draw my attention away.
He was sitting on me so I didn’t immediately go investigate noises I heard outside.
But a few minutes later I was hungry so I grabbed an apple and got around to seeing
what the noise was.
Some gents were clearing the woods near my house, and one asked about a small sapling
that he was about to cut down at the edge of the project and was optional.
I said leave it to keep some shade but then changed my mind, thinking I might plant an
apple tree there later.
I’ve always wanted an apple tree, I thought, hungrily munching my apple.
Then I got back to work.
I’d already decided to write an episode either on the Butterfly Effect or on unemployment
concerns from robots in the near future.
Events got me thinking more about robots cutting trees and mowing lawns, so I went with that
one.
But I found it hard to discuss millions of people losing their jobs, even if it’s maybe
a long-term net positive, moments after chatting outside with some of the potential victims,
since tree clearance is the sort of thing we’d tend to roboticize.
I kept getting hung up on that part of the script, which either felt really cold or really
unobjective, depending on the draft.
I probably wouldn’t have had that problem, if only I’d had that sandwich and started
writing earlier.
Needless to say reviewing that while fixing lunch today got me thinking on the Butterfly
Effect.
So I wrote the entire sequence of events into an episode that many thousands of folks will
watch while having this concept explained.
That’s a pretty big impact for a choice of a sandwich for lunch.
Now the common, but mostly incorrect, rebuttal is that a lot of stuff is essentially inevitable.
That we tend to converge toward certain things.
That’s true enough, it’s going to rain next month and for most purposes it won’t
matter if that’s a few minutes earlier than predicted or a few extra liters of water fell.
Similarly, a technology obsessed culture like ours is going to keep pounding away at improving
computers and automation, but the specifics really do matter.
You can argue the ‘Great Man of History’ perspective with some legitimacy, but those
folks do not operate or grow to be who they are in a vacuum.
As an example, many a tycoon endowed this or that institute or University or patronized
a scholastic field they had a side interest in, such as Yerkes Observatory, where folks
like Edwin Hubble, Gerard Kuiper, Albert Michelson, and many others did a lot of work.
You probably recognize Hubble from the telescope and Hubble expansion of the Universe, and
Kuiper for the Kuiper Belt, that second icy asteroid belt out past Neptune.
Michelson is the same Michelson of the Michelson-Morley Experiment that opened the door for Einstein
to figure out Special and General Relativity.
All that would have been discovered eventually and we could argue that the names wouldn’t
matter much, but they do, and moreover, order matters a lot on discoveries, as does location.
Einstein famously wrote a letter to President Roosevelt recommending the development of
the Atom Bomb and the eventual Manhattan Project and its impact on history.
If someone else had discovered relativity, would they have been the famous genius with
the clout to get a letter hand-delivered to the President?
They might not have written the letter Einstein did, or written it to a different leader in
a different land.
That would have been a big change, not just on the course of World War 2 and the Cold
War that followed, but for all those scientists who were brought together for the Manhattan
Project, formed working collegial relationships, and worked on other projects later, like Richard
Feynmann, my biggest personal role model besides maybe Ben Franklin, or Feynmann’s student
Freeman Dyson, whose influence on topics for this channel, like the Dyson Sphere, is frankly
immeasurable.
It’s easy to note that your parents probably wouldn’t have ever met if even one tiny,
seemingly inconsequential change had occurred in history, or to note that you share common
ancestry with pretty much every major historical figure and neither you nor they would have
existed if one of those shared ancestors had not been born.
Taking this further, while upbringing is a major factor in our personality, your specific
combination of your parents genes, of which there are almost countless permutations, is
also a huge factor.
Of the thousands of sperm making their trek to make a new person, none contain identical
data, and your DNA will not identically match the DNA of a sibling conceived ten seconds
later.
You don’t even need to have an event sufficiently major as meeting and marrying a different
young lass or lad to have a different kid, it’s literally going to happen from something
as minor as being slightly delayed getting entangled in a garment in a hasty rush to
get undressed for a romantic interlude.
But that also means any such event occurring to any of your many, many ancestors would
have meant you did not exist, and neither would many major historical figures.
Life would go on, same as the rain will come down whether that butterfly flaps its wings
or not, but it snowballs, it doesn’t dampen, and stuff only converges because there’s
a pushing factor for it too.
The computer will get invented because being able to add up numbers very quickly and accurately
is handy, so there is a drive to make it happen, no mystic inertia of time involved.
I will have lunch because I get twitchy if I don’t.
These can also give us statistical effects which is how we can make predictions about
the future.
But there’s no precision to these and they decay in accuracy over time unless there is
something driving it overwhelmingly.
For instance, our planet is so massive and has so much inertia that it takes a lot for
any effect to snowball in regard to its motion, so even though it contains every crazy and
chaotic human and our mercurial weather, we can still predict its position a hundred thousand
years both in the future and in the past with high precision.
There aren’t really analogues for that within chaotic systems themselves.
Once there was a monkey-ape-like thing with the first opposable thumb, that was an advantage
but had it been conceived by the same parents even a minute earlier or later, it might not
have had that mutation or it might have been born a day earlier and got a cold from another
member of the pack who was still infectious that day but not the next, and infected that
proto-human-baby with an affectionate brush of a hand to welcome it into the world, and
caused it to exit earlier and now that mutation doesn’t occur for another thousand years,
and that pack dies off before then when its basic tool use would have saved it, and a
million years from now the world is instead dominated by raccoons.
These are not ‘nexus points’ or rare occurrences, they are every little thing, and they amplify.
You can identify that one snowflake that began the snowball that led to the avalanche, but
that does not mean an avalanche would not have occurred if it had never fallen, nor
that the final avalanche would be identical if started by another snowflake instead.
And one little grain of dust not being in a dirt pile not only can change the world,
but will.
It’s easy enough to concoct an example where that speck of dirt affected which plant grew
and prospered into an apple tree instead of an oak sapling whose seed landed next to it.
Or that a generation from now some young man offers an apple from that tree to some young
lady he later marries and a century from now their descendant is the next JFK or Hitler.
But that’s not the point, ALL of our actions do that, not just a few lucky ones...
every little grain of dust and flap of a butterfly or mosquito’s wing.
Now, as to free will, this gets arguable.
Why it’s arguable if that means we have free will or not, is that just because something
is unpredictable doesn’t mean it’s actions didn’t proceed mechanistically through cause
and effect.
A storm is not conscious and capable of free will just because it can’t be predicted,
so while it comes up in free will debates a lot, it doesn’t actually have any meaning
or logic for or against.
Just that those actions cannot be predicted.
It’s easy to demonstrate that quantum effects, which we believe to be genuinely random but
at least are utterly unpredictable in outcome, can snowball to major ones.
We literally proved that with the Quantum Cheeseburger, letting a quantum randomizer
select the menu option for discussion in that episode.
But even in a totally non-quantum and non-random universe, you can demonstrate that you need
a computer far bigger than the Universe to actually track every particle.
And in chaotic systems like human civilization, that’s going to make a model breakdown very
quickly if it aims for more than statistical accuracy, which will inevitably go off the
rails anyway.
Again that’s the notion of psychohistory, group behavior is predictable as statistical,
individual is not.
But chaotic systems, mathematically, don’t permit that, we’re not some homogenous gas
in a container where all we care about is the pressure and temperature or a bunch of
coins being flipped to produce a normal curve distribution.
No computer, no matter how big, could predict human civilization very far out because it
can’t predict an individual human and all those little deviations by individual people
stack up and amplify, not average out, in most things.
The flip-side is that you can’t accurately backtrack things either, so no resurrecting
long dead people by digging up their decomposed corpse, much of the material for which is
now occupying various insects or things which ate those insects second or third or thousandth
hand.
That’s the key idea behind a thought experiment called Roko’s Basilisk, or rather it’s
fatal flaw, but we’ll save that for another day.
You’ve probably heard that every breath you take has on average at least a molecule
of Julius Caesar’s last, betrayed gasp.
But some of his blood and flesh and brain atoms will also have migrated to that Caesar
Salad that betrayed you and left you too hungry to focus on your work.
So no, no mega-computer is ever going to predict your exact actions before you were even born
or be able to resurrect Julius Caesar, even in a non-quantum Universe, and we live in
one such and those microscopic quantum events do percolate up to the macroscopic scale even
without using a quantum randomizer to pick your lunch.
Every little decision, every single action, truly does matter.