The Leaf A event is exactly repeating your scenario, yes. I wanted to begin with a scenario analogous to what you were saying to then have something to contrast with it (Leaf B).
The disagreement is the rest of what I said that you’ve chosen not to respond to.
You were earlier saying things like this:
This is a very fundamental misunderstanding of what a chaotic system is.
In a chaotic system, all parts of the system could be considered “keystones”. So they are not rare at all.
The butterfly is not special: you could look at any butterfly in a field and the statement “The effect of that butterfly flapping its wings will eventually have a huge effect on the weather” would be true.
You cannot really say that the leaf caused the accident, per se. That song ended and the station went to commercial, changing your focus to the yellow light, which you decided not to blaze, meaning the wait at that intersection back there increased the pressure you felt to drive faster. Because, you hit the snooze that crucial third time. Because you just had to finish chapter 16 last night, being so engrossed by it.
But if you had eaten something different the evening before, maybe you would have slept better; or if that writer had not done such awesome work on that chapter, you might have been able to put the book down earlier; or if you had gotten that job on the other side of town last year, you would have taken a different route; or if you had not been musing on 9th grade poetry analysis with respect to what you were reading last night, you might have been better prepared when the leaf smacked in front of your face; or if the cat had not killed the sparrow last spring, maybe it would have knocked that leaf off the tree while perching; or if you have won that Jenga game (he bumped the table, honestly) and not had to be the one to pick up the blocks, you might have got to bed and finished that chapter sooner; or …
Causality is manifold. Tying an event to a single prominent cause is naïve. And if I had a better education, I might be able to present a more interesting case for indeterminacy. A determinist reality must have some sort of precision threshold for causality: if causal vectors become too blurry and imprecise at a distance, determinism becomes unsupportable. But by how can we, ahem, determine what the threshold should be and whether our reality is above or below it?
One problem with the word “cause” is that it breaks down (a little) in unique cases.
If “causation” is defined as the single event that, when present, is followed by another event, and when absent, is not followed by that other event, then things that only happen once are hard to identify with causes. Most scientific causation is tested in multiple instances; you give the drug to 100 patients, and don’t give the drug to 100 patients, and see if this appears to be the sole distinction between improvement of symptoms.
But when the dog barks, startling me, so I drop the vase and it breaks into a million pieces, we don’t have any way to compare that to an alternate universe where the dog didn’t bark. We aren’t able to test to find out if the barking was the sole distinction between vase-droppage and not-vase-droppage.
Personally, I’m fine with a commonplace, non-scientific usage of “cause” to allow for apparent sole distinctions. If the dog hadn’t barked, is there any reason to believe I would have dropped the vase anyway? If the leaf hadn’t dropped, startling the squirrel (etc.) do we have any reason to believe the auto accident would have happened anyway?
(With the hurricane…yeah, probably. Hurricanes do “just happen anyway,” with or without butterfly wing-flaps. The linkage is less intuitive.)
It sounds like you are looking to point to chaos theory as an example of Determinism - we can track causes back to the Ultimate Butterfly, therefore Reality can be figured out, therefore Determinism.
But you also point out that there appears to be an “irreducible randomness” in a chaotic system - a butterfly may have started that hurricane, but following a chaotic path influenced by randomness.
In my eyes, here is your problem - determinism has nothing to do with whether humans can predict anything. At all. It’s completely irrelevant. No relevance whatsoever. Zero. Zip. None.
Determinism is about whether the state of the universe in one moment is completely determined by the state of the universe in the prior moment. It’s about the mechanics of the universe under the hood, at each precise instant. If there are two different possible outcomes of a situation, after everything -everything- is accounted for, then the universe is not deterministic. If there is only one inevitable outcome, once all molecular motion and such is accounted for, then the universe is deterministic.
Whether or not humans are able to determine these causes has precisely nothing to do with it. Humanity’s ability to guess at causes becoming too blurry and imprecise at a distance is exactly 100% completely unimportant. It doesn’t matter.
Think about it like object permanence. Supposing there is a baseball inside a box. Suppose I close the box. Suddenly you have no ability to detect the baseball! People walking into the room later wouldn’t even know it was there. And your ignorance and theirs do nothing at all to the baseball. It exists, whether you know it or not.
If the universe is deterministic, or if it’s not deterministic, it’s the same way. The universe works the way the universe works. Your difficulty in determining causes of things that happened 50000 years ago affects that not one whit.
Not sure who this is addressed to, but if it’s me, no, I don’t hold with determinism. My examples are of large amounts of potential energy, held back by small barriers. (Think of a hand grenade and a cotter pin.) The “butterfly” metaphor is akin to saying, “Jeepers, all I have to do is pull this tiny little cotter pin, and next thing you know there’s a big dangerous loud scary explosion!”
In one sense of the word, pulling the pin “caused” the explosion. In another sense, it kinda didn’t.
My whole point is that the OP is simply reframing the standard arguments for FW vs D. Totally worth a try, but I don’t think that chaos theory helps crack he FW vs D question.
Is he really? I haven’t heard any arguments about free will that sound anything like his position.
For what it’s worth, I think that if you consider free will to be incompatible with determinism, I suspect you have a poorly formed definition of free will. With a considered definition of free will, I consider it wholly compatible with determinism. The opposite of determinism is randomity.