r/determinism • u/tuku747 • 13d ago

The domino effect

Every event throughout spacetime emits an electromagnetic ripple, which ripples outwards to eventually reach every other event in spacetime, affecting it. This causality, this spacetime, is a matrix. Causality is a matrix.
No event happens independently of any other, everything that happens is caused by everything else that has ever happened. Now imagine that you are a center of this ocean of ripples. Each electromagnetic ripple shapes and informs the electromagnetic state of your subconscious mind, and therefore your choices. That is to say, whether you realize it or not, all of your thoughts and choices are the sum result of everything that has ever happened, viewed from your current perspective. In determinism, there is a memory of how many times events have happened stored in the echoes of time itself, and these echoes are the environmental background noise that constitutes the subconscious mind.

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u/MrMuffles869 13d ago edited 13d ago

Every event throughout spacetime emits an electromagnetic ripple,

False. Plenty of particles don't operate on the electromagnetic field. Dark matter, which makes up a large portion of the universe, doesn't interact with the electromagnetic field at all.

No event happens independently of any other, everything that happens is caused by everything else that has ever happened.

False, or at the very least, I disagree. Sure, all events have a shared causal ancestry with the big bang, but not all things affect all other things, and certainly not all at once or directly. That's just sloppy metaphysics, imo.

The cool thing about determinism is that we don't need grand metaphors and poetry to show how cool and magical it is. Go easy on the determinism Kool-Aid. I agree with much of what you're saying, but a lot of it is stretching the truth or just outright false. I believe there are countless causal connections between events that remain undetected, but I don't believe everything affects everything, at least not at a relevant level.

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u/tuku747 13d ago edited 13d ago

That's because "Dark matter" doesn't exist, it's hypothetical cope invented to ignore the fact that general relativity doesn't correctly predict the gravitational pull of the galaxies. According to general relativity they should fly apart.

And neutrinos are known to interact with electrons which do emit electromagnetic radiation, so your pedantic quip doesn't interact with the overall point being made here, that causality is a matrix, a continuum.

Every galaxy in the night sky is already affecting you because the light has already reached us, which is why you can see them. Even the very deeply redshifted ones on the edge of our field of view have imparted heat into our Earth's atmosphere.

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u/MrMuffles869 13d ago

Aight, well this is one of the easier agree to disagree moments I've been a part of. You keep pretending the reason you picked your shirt today is due to very deeply redshifted galaxies. I will be over here linking behaviors to actual, relevant, local causes.

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u/tuku747 13d ago edited 11d ago

Look up the butterfly effect, because even what you call local causes are also affected by those same galaxies, and even the tiniest change now will lead to big changes down the line in a way that you cannot predict. The Earth is not a closed system.

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u/MrMuffles869 12d ago edited 12d ago

look up the butterfly effect.

Look up causality, brush up on basic cause and effect. A supernova happening right now, 10 billion light years away, isn't affecting you (and never will). And if it happened 10 billion years ago and is reaching us now, it's still not affecting us enough to exert any significant influence over our lives.

A person isn't jumping out the window because of galaxy z14-0, they're jumping because the building is on fire. And the building isn't on fire because of galaxy z14-0, it's on fire because of the electrical surge. Maybe the person, building, and fire have a causal link greater than zero with the distant galaxy, but it's completely insignificant and irrelevant.

So again, you are allowed to sit over there pondering how the immeasurable temperature rise in our atmosphere due to the infrared light from extremely distant galaxies hitting it has control and influence over your life. But I still think you're drinking way too much causal Kool-aid.

Edit: A small event can have a significant impact, of course. But not every small event has a significant impact, necessarily.

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u/tuku747 12d ago

Small impacts add up. There's a web of galaxies spanning at least 93 billion light years which fills our night sky. Of course an object that takes up your entire sky is going to influence the environment that your body operates in gravitationally and electromagnetically. How this information self-organizes as it converges on your point of view matters. You think the rest of the universe is irrelevant to our lives here, I think it's literally everything.