Counterfactual Thinking, The Butterfly Effect, and the Difficulty of Predicting Outcomes
When we discussed counterfactual thinking in class, I thought in great detail about its presence in both my life and the lives of my friends and family. From a philosophical standpoint, I also thought about its relationship to Lorenz’ chaos theory, encompassing the well-known “butterfly effect.”
Counterfactual thinking is, according to the textbook, “considerations of what might have, could have, or should have happened, ‘if only’ a few minor things were done differently” (166). We discussed in class the emotional amplification that can occur when an outcome was just “so close” to turning out differently.
But therein lies the fallacious and consequently problematic component of counterfactual thinking: we think we are equipped to predict “what could have happened” if circumstances were slightly different, when in reality, making these predictions is close to impossible. Edward Lorenz coined the term “butterfly effect” when runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. As an example, he described a butterfly whose wings flapping caused a significant change in the path of a tornado taking shape weeks later. This example illustrates the way in which minute details of an event (and, by extension, changes in an event) can impact future outcomes in unexpected ways.
I shared in class the example of my emotionally-amplified counterfactual thinking: when my brother almost got in the car of his friends who would, on the way to the restaurant they were meeting at, get into a life-threatening car accident. I think about what would have happened if he had chosen to get into his friend’s car instead of driving his own as if I know what the outcome would have been. I think that he would have been hurt in the crash, when in reality, I have no idea what would have happened had he gotten into that car. The accident was caused by his friend, the driver, speeding on a major road, losing control of the car (some speculate because the car’s axel needed repair), and colliding head-first with a vehicle driving on the opposite side of the road. If my brother had decided to come with them, he could have delayed their drive a few seconds longer by having trouble putting on his seatbelt and they could have avoided the oncoming car altogether. My brother could have been talking to the driver about something important causing him to focus more and drive slower, avoiding the accident. The point is, the circumstances would have been different, and while I can keep postulating these scenarios, there is an infinite number of factors that produce an outcome. We, as humans, are unable to calculate all these factors and thus I don’t know and can never know what would have happened.
This is all to say that the universe is strange in that an infinite number of factors collide and interact with each other to comprise what we know as reality, and to think that we can predict what would have happened if not for a few details is fallacious. I, personally, find relief in this. If we accept what happens and understand that negative events will, by the phenomenon of regression to the mean, be balanced eventually by positive ones, we can live our lives knowing that we can’t make any mistakes. What we think of as mistakes only lead to a new set of circumstances that will make new positive events possible.
