Sandra Ingerman's Blog

The language is on the rude side, but this photo essay is pretty darn funny, and kind of scary, too. Put together by writer and blogger David Dietle, it showed up at Cracked.com with the title “6 Tiny Things That Have Mind-Blowing Global Impacts.” Those six things are termites, aircraft contrails, a dam in China, rats, lamps, and jellyfish. If you’ve ever had trouble conceptualizing the Butterfly Effect, these examples will help. Dietle, by the way, writes such pieces as “5 Scientific Ways To Make Water Do Magic” and “7 Awesome Acts of Nature (That Science Can’t Explain).” He also covers insanity, sea monsters, mushrooms, sword fights, and Cthulhu. Here, he tells us:

Every day, seemingly insignificant things can make changes on a global scale.

You bet they can! This is another way of expressing what Sandra says in Awakening to the Spirit World:

Shamans say that when people learn to see they are able to access almost limitless power because they realize they are intimately connected to the vast web of life.

That web is why a butterfly flapping its wings in one place can change the weather in another place, as explained by Edward Lorenz, who started this whole butterfly thing. A little tug on one of the unimaginably large number of threads is enough to start a chain reaction and lead to unpredictable changes. It happens in both the physical universe and in the invisible world of the spirit. There are very many ways of stating this idea. Martin Luther King Jr. said,

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

Chief Seattle put it like this:

Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

The writers at The Peaceful Revolution web site took that and expanded on it in an interesting way. In his novel Cyberia, Douglas Rushkoff wrote:

A tiny change anywhere in a fractal will lead to tremendous changes in the overall system. The force causing the change need not be very powerful. Tremendous effects can be wrought by the gentlest of feedbacks.

The ideas of Edward Lorenz are outlined by Peter Dizikes in The Boston Globe. In “The Meaning of the Butterfly,” he quotes Lorenz on what happens every time we make even the tiniest alteration to nature, disturbing one of its innumerable connections:

…[W]e shall never know what would have happened if we had not disturbed it, since subsequent changes are too complex and entangled to restore a previous state.

This matter of never knowing what would have happened is important. Most of us aren’t in touch with any alternate universe where we can see how things would have worked out if one little detail had been different. History is arguable, but only to a point. There’s no way we can know the outcome if the butterfly hadn’t flapped its wings. And there are so many things going on, always, that the direct path from the cause to the effect can’t be traced. In fact, Lorenz wanted it understood —  if the cause-and-effect chain is obvious — then maybe it’s not a butterfly effect after all.

This is where it gets all mixed up with the Theory of Unintended Consequences. The main thing about unintended consequences is that they’re also mostly unknown. Somebody who gets sick from living on top of a toxic waste dump may never know exactly which chemical caused the illness. And whoever dumped the toxic waste there may not have intended for anyone to get sick. But it happened all the same. And it’s the same no matter how many steps back you go.

At any rate, Dizikes says the common or public understanding of the butterfly effect is about “seemingly insignificant moments that alter history and shape destinies,” and, he seems to be saying, that’s okay as far as it goes. However, there is more meaning that could be extracted.

Source: “6 Tiny Things That Have Mind-Blowing Global Impacts,” Cracked.com, 02/04/10
Source: “Awakening to the Spirit World,” Sandra Ingerman, Amazon.com
Source: “Chief Seattle: The Web of Life,” The Peaceful Revolution, 11/22/09
Source: “The meaning of the butterfly,” The Boston Globe, 06/08/08
Image by John-Morgan, used under its Creative Commons license.