This post is the text of a video essay (posted on YouTube here):
The eight-billion butterfly effect
The butterfly effect is the concept that small changes in one part of a system can lead to significant and unpredictable consequences in another part of the system. The associated image is a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world which theoretically sets off a chain of events that ultimately contributes to a tornado in another part of the world.
The Butterfly Effect is also a movie that I remember enjoying and that conveys how altering a single seemingly small choice point in life could, in theory, change the course of that person’s life dramatically.
The butterfly effect is essentially a super complex, positive feedback loop with initial conditions that “spirals” a system into a continuous state change. It’s technically more than circular causality, because the effect grows larger over time, more like a spiral, whereas a repeating circle would imply that the system’s state is maintained. I plan to talk about state changes to systems in a different video, but here I’m going to mostly cover what circles and spirals have in common, which is that they involve “feedback”. They’re not like lines which progress unaffected by the past, but rather, their present progression is inextricably linked to their past unfolding, whether it unfolds in large discrete steps or in a continuous manner.
Let’s move away from abstraction and consider the social system of a high school – that quintessential microcosm of “real life”.
Freshman year, hundreds of unique individuals assemble on day one of a four year journey, coming together from numerous junior high schools of various regions. Some students already know each other and some don’t, so from minute one, this complex ecosystem already has some memory and momentum to it. Even most of the students who never previously met each other in person were brought up in a common society, so in a sense they do know one another as archetypes of their shared culture.
At an orientation assembly on the first day, a student pulls off a loud and successful joke, beginning to define his social identity as the class comedian. Later when a first test is handed back, another student begins becoming known as an academic whiz due to a perfect score. A girl with a bold outfit decides where a group will have lunch, demonstrating alpha female confidence. Someone brands himself as an athletic hero with a game-saving hail mary, while another starts chiseling the self-image of a bully by teasing a sensitive artist.
These relatively small interactions and events are the first butterfly wing flaps that establish initial conditions within their new system, conditions that act as blueprints from which a robust web of relational experience will grow.
For the rest of their time in high school, these students will elicit expectations from their thousand peers, and those expectations will feed back into their efforts to live up to their evolving reputational narratives and carved out social niches. A thousand students will assemble over the course of a thousand days, and every day many thousands of transactions will collectively take place, each one modifying the cumulative memory and understanding of the giant social system in the minds of every student. Each of those thousand overlapping but unique mental maps and somatic memory sets will influence in some way, large or imperceptible, the actions and words of every other student, which in turn will feed back into the fluid and ever-evolving collection of instinct and loyalty to social roles. And every night each student will go to sleep and update their psychological software, integrating their memories from the previous day into an alive and up-to-date understanding of their social ecosystem and their place in it.
Rather than a giant linear row of dominoes, this superorganism of adolescents is more like a three dimensional vessel containing atoms that are continuously bouncing off of each other and off the walls that enclose them in a common space and time. Every collision and ricochet has the potential to alter the speed and direction of every other colliding atom, which will in turn alter the speed and direction of other atoms in future collisions – a stochastic system that continuously feeds back into itself, rending every particle inside it equal part actor and equal part acted upon. The system of myriad parts probabilistically morphs from one shape to the next, and its form becomes increasingly removed from its initial state, like a constructed building becomes a different entity than the piece of paper on which its blueprints were copied, or an animal’s body eventually becomes almost nothing like the zygote it started as.
As each class of students graduates, the individuals will move from the high school system to some some other system. But the implicit and explicit memory of high school is now a part of their neural architecture, and will therefore have some non-zero impact on their behavior in whichever new social systems they become a part of and on every person that they come into contact with for the rest of their life.
The circular causality between the departing graduates and the underclassmen they leave behind ends, like the metaphorical atom collisions if we were to remove a quarter of them from the vessel. But if we zoom out our sociological window from the high school to the broader world, we can see how the circular causality continues, only this time as the graduates enter universities and businesses and communities and interact with much larger systems and pools of people. The size and functions of these systems will be different from high school, but the phenomenon of relational circular causality works the same way.
From that recognition, it not too much of a stretch to notice that our entire planet is in a way like a giant high school, which is in way like a giant family. Eight billion butterflies (and counting) flapping their wings and influencing the world and each other through billions of interwoven feedback loops that mathematically resemble stable circles and dynamic state-changing spirals.
The compound effect of butterfly wings
In 2016, I solo backpacked for 60 days during the summer, and was out of cellular data range for days at a time. When I would come to a road or town where I found internet access, I’d check my email and the news, and be struck each time by how little seemed to have happened that affected my life, and how my life seemed to have no effect on what did happen in the world. Being a US presidential election year, a lot of emotions and contention were happening somewhere – somewhere that felt distant and unrelated to me. The news cycle churned on without me, and seemed to always return to the same point when I checked my phone. A lot of feels had been felt by a lot of people, but my car and apartment were still waiting for me several hundred miles ahead, or at least that seemed likely from the headlines. The happenings that were happening out there felt separate from what I was doing. I felt like one of the squirrels or ants that I encountered every day, just going about its business, carrying nuts or grains of sand in some tiny corner of a valley, unaware of and unconcerned with the ways that I interfaced with the real world.
But when I returned to work in the fall, coworkers remarked about how I seemed different after my thru-hike “retreat” – lighter, funnier, and more present – and I felt those things too. The circular causality between the fruits of my spiritual labor and my little work subsystem of society became more apparent. The two or three million steps I took in solitude, over rocky passes, and through forested rolling hills, did have some impact after all. Those million breaths and thousands of beautiful scenes that entered my retinas helped to rewire and recalibrate my nervous system that much more, such that my way of being with others and with life had changed just a bit for the better. Every encounter I’d have with people was slightly more likely to be mutually beneficial and enriching. The experiences that I had and that my coworkers and clients had with me were a shade better than they would have been without my two-month wilderness adventure.
What ripple effects did each of those interactions, or the cumulative sum of those interactions, have on the world? How did the higher energy I was able to give people affect the way that that they responded to me and to others later? It’s impossible to know the answers to such questions about how a single input like one guy’s thru-hike impacts a system as infinitely complex as a planet comprised of a hundred-thousand interrelated societies. The counterfactual guesses exist only in the imagination. The countless micro exchanges that aggregate and compound into a giant collective superorganism are all trivial on their own, like the wing flaps of a single butterfly are trivial compared to the planetary weather system. But it stands to reason and faith that circular causality is at play every time we play a role somewhere in the world.
Circular causality is ubiquitous
Even with simple and brief interactions with no prior experience between parties, circular causality begins to form the moment that behavior is expressed.
To see this, imagine a social experiment in which strangers smile and wave at other strangers. Those being waved at will generally orient attention toward the wavers, but some will ignore it, some might smile and wave back, some might scowl, some might not notice, and some might look behind themselves, confused. Some of that variation in response won’t be personal, and will result from the personalities, moods, and contexts of those being waved at. But another part of the variation will result from the different moods, appearances, and energy of those waving. And the responses that the wavers receive will feed back into their mood and motivation, influencing their next greeting somewhat. So even with no prior experience, people create dynamic causal circles of mutual influence right away, like whirlpools in a river as water flows around unique rock structures.
It looks to me that all human interactions involve circular causality to an extent, albeit often an imperceptible one. Even as a lone audience member in a theater, your degree of applause or lack thereof will subtly impact the performers on stage as they subconsciously feel the energy of the collective audience in the darkened rows in front of them, and this will subtly act as feedback that will affect the performance, which will again feed back into the audience’s reactions. It may be small, but we always have some non-zero influence over how another person feels and acts toward us, as long as we can speak and behave.
An axiom of human communication is that we are always communicating. In other words, one cannot not communicate. When we speak we convey a message, and when we don’t speak we also convey a message. The absence of a facial expression says something. If we receive a text message, we inevitably respond, since even ghosting communicates something. Humans are communication machines that continuously send and receive messages between one another in bidirectional feedback loops. As long as we exist and have life in us, our responses will vary according to our surroundings, including the ways that other people show up in our presence. And there’s every reason to believe that others also personalize their interactions with us to an extent – small or large – conscious or subconscious – that depends on the depth of our shared experience with them.