So Dei's killing anybody thread got me thinking. I thought about how I felt like I had a hand in a friend's death due to causality. I usually think about how decisions have affected my life, but rarely come across small decisions having major consequences. Here's the example. In 2008, I helped a friend drive across country from the East Coast to San Diego where we would be stationed together. At the time Hooters was having a promotion in honor of their 25th anniversary. Basically, if you went to 25 different Hooters in the year you got a free 250 wing party and entered to win $25,000. Given the road trip, it was a realistic goal and made for a twist on the drive. We stopped in Houston for a couple of days and I spent time at home. While there, I told my brother about the promotion and brought him to eat with us. He otherwise would never have heard about it as it wasn't promoted too heavy and he didn't go to Hooters that often. Well he thought the idea was cool and got a promotional passport to get stamped. Anyway, about a month or two after I left I found out his best friend from childhood had been killed. It turns out the guy was arguing with his girl after a night out and ended up pulling the car over on the freeway to get out and continue arguing. When he did this, a car ended up hitting him and killing him. Causality comes into play because he was out with my brother before leaving the club. The club they went to was on a side of town they rarely went out in. The only reason they went there is because it was across the freeway from a Hooters my brother wanted a stamp from. After eating they decided to hit the club up since they were in the area and the above took place nearby leading to my brother's friend's death. Obviously there were actions that brought his death, but I wonder if I hadn't told my brother about that promotion how things would have turned out. You can get into fate vs choice, but I know that an action I took had a ripple on the events playing out. On that note, does anyone have another example of causality that lead to a significant event?
Interesting topic. I will have to think on it. I am interested in what this thread may bring. Rocket River
I pay taxes. Taxes pay for needless wars, and the killing of innocents in those wars. Taxes pay for the propping up of foreign dictators, who subjugate their peoples. Unless I'm willing to follow Thoreau to jail, outside of my participation in the democratic process there's not much I can do about it. It's not quite the A to B to C as in the OP, but unmistakably that blood is on my hands.
A friend of mine was going to go to take his girlfriend out for breakfast - but I told him he should come over and play xbox... so he did. Him and his girlfriend would have died in a tragic car accident had they gone out for breakfast. Good thing we had fun playing xbox instead!
Choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without. ....this is the nature of the universe. We struggle against it. We fight to deny it, but it is, of course, pretense. It is a lie. Beneath our poised appearance, the truth is we are completely out of control. Causality, there is no escape from it. We are forever slaves to it. Our only hope, our only peace is to understand it, to understand the 'why'. 'Why' is what separates us from them, you from me. 'Why' is the only real source of power.
I didnt want to pay for a family member's plane ticket to a family event. I reluctantly gave in. During that family event, that person got hit by a car and was in a coma for weeks. Never the same person coming out of it. That family member died years later as a result of the car accident. I also made the decision to take the person off life support, basically contributing the indirect cause leading to death and the death itself Should I have stood my ground and not paid for the ticket, which led to events contributing to that person's accelerated death? Life itself is a RISK. You can try to predict but you just don't know exactly what the future holds. Some chances you just HAVE to take. The only way to live without risk and chance of pain is to do NOTHING. I don't regret the decisions at all. I regret not spending more TIME with the person BEFORE the events occurred.
I agree. Its just crazy when you think of an action and the path it creates. The movie Benjamin Button hit on it briefly. While I didn't think the movie was too good, I did like the scene on causality.
I made a thread asking if anybody in the board has killed another human being which made Wakko67 reflect and make a thread about causality and now I'm posting in it. On a rather serious note, science deals a lot about the concept. Einstein believed in causality. He was a vehement opposer of the probability approach being popularized by other prominent physicists in his day like Schrodinger. Einstein was an absolutist - he believed that everything that happened in the past had a part in what is now and what will be. It doesn't really come as a surprise. The physics Einstein's generation grew up on, mostly by Newton, was absolutist. Newton described the motions of macro-scale objects: planets, stars, etc. to great success.
i think about **** like this all the time, just not necessarily in the context of death. mainly with my current wife and how if my ex hadn't have left me when she did, i probably wouldn't be with my current wife, expecting a baby with her and be the happiest i've ever been in my life.
I brought this up in another thread. A few years ago a car jumped a median and spun out about 40 ft in front of me. Luckily I braked in time or else I would've collided with it but if I had been just a bit further down the road I would've been blindsided by the car or not been able to break in time to avoid it. It had been snowing that day and before I left the house I got out to shovel my walk and the snow had been packed down into ice on the walk and I had to put some effort scraping that off. The thing that occurred to me after that incident was that if I didn't have to scrape that ice off of the walk I would've left my house earlier and everything else being equal the car might've blindsided me. So if I draw a change of causality if the weather had just been a bit different I might've been dead or seriously injured. For that matter if I had gotten up a bit earlier or maybe ate breakfast faster or any number of minor things and the outcome of that event might be totally different. Any event that happens is given the whole course of the time is a miracle that it happens given the chain of causality. If you think about how you came to be how many happenstances happened so that your parents would meet or your grandparents or great grandparents? Dwelling on those things could drive you crazy so its best just to accept that we live in this reality that has occurred because of the chain of events that we know.
Thanks to quantum mechanics though we can split the difference with the alternate reality theory that every single quantum event creates an alternate reality that follows its own causality but determining what quantum event happens we have to rely on probability.
had I never met the first girl I fell in love with....and fallen for her big time...I would have ended up at University Tower at UT instead of BU where my future wife had 3 classes with me my first semester of my freshman year.
About 7 years ago I was a young and party going 20 year old. I used to go out to raves and parties about 4 times a week. About 10 of us in our crew. I had a friend at the time that was kind of depressed because his girlfriend left him. We still went out but he seemed down once the booze stopped flowing. I remember the night of his birthday; He seems out of it and really didn't want to do anything. About a week later I'm heading off to work and I see his car pass me by. I said Hi and continued on to my job at a refinery. I get to work, leave my phone and all my stuff in my locker and after about 4 hours I go check my phone. I have 2 missed calls from that same friend and I try calling him back. No answer. About 1 hour later I get a call from his phone but it's not him; It's a police detective asking me for his mother's phone number. I ask him what the problem was and he told me he'd have to call his mother first. I call the phone about 30 minutes after that and the officer answers and I ask very angry and he tells me that my friend shot himself and was dead. What if I had answered his calls...
I think my story is more fate/final destination than anything. I was born in lousiana. When we lived there, we lived in a trailer park. Well one night my sister (10 at the time) wanted her friend to sleep over. Her friends parents kept on saying no, and my parents said it was ok. Well after my sister practically came over begging, she was allowed to sleep over. Well during the night, her trailer caught fire and her family all passed away. Thanks to my sisters constant begging her friend was still alive. But, she eventually died 6 yrs later when she got into a wreck, got trapped inside, and her car caught on fire. Scary when I think about it.
I don't want to turn this into a physics thread but I'd welcome if you could explain or, at least, point to a respectable reference about what, specifically, in QM gives rise to the many-world theory.
had i gone to ut instead of swt, i would've probably never met major, who went to ut. then i probably would've been unemployed for a long time. :grin:
I know what you mean. I would never have this sweet empty briefcase if my friend Charlie, a bunch of p*rn stars, an elephant, a butler, three construction workers, my dog a boa constrictor and I hadn't snorted all of the coke out of it.
