Mathematics? It's all just life.

[Beestie]

What I tried to say is that I have a hard time establishing any cause-and-effect relationship between an independent (air movement from a butterfly flapping its wings) and a dependent variable (weather in Japan) in a chaotic system.

Let me put it another way: is anyone saying that had the butterfly not flapped its wings that it would not have rained in Japan? It sounds to me like that is what the example is suggesting and I'm saying that the idea is ridiculous.

I was saying that a scenario whereby the butterfly is the straw that broke the camel's back is (to put it mildly) not plausible because of the number and frequency of interactions that occur between the butterfly and the rainstorm. To adopt the butterfly theory is to ascribe an equal liklihood to each of the variables which is to render each of them essentially negligible.

To assume that one variable out of a trillion can propogate through the entire system - reinforcing everything in its path or its successor's path so as to rival the magnitude of a weather pattern defies any application of common sense.

The 3-body problem, imho is a different problem - the variables are discreet in number and, therefore, traceable. In a chaotic system, the variables are not traceable therefore, the notion of cause and effect has no application. While the butterfly may have flapped its wings and it may have rained in Japan, wether the two events are dependent or independent is unknowable.

In Zen, we can speak about chaos but never of chaos.