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22.6. Cause and effect

Most people think very primitively about cause and effect. Something causes something else – in a linear way, directly, easy to observe and understand.

For decades, we have drilled this simplistic view into our kids at school, not always explicitly, but for example, by placing great emphasis on Newton's laws, without explaining that they describe isolated parts of what are, in fact, complex systems.

The same is true in virtually all sciences. We seek simple explanations. Instead of taking on the complexity, we choose to stick to simplification. We stick our heads in the sand, you could also say.

An example is Bohr's atomic model from 1913, which was presented to generations of children and may still be used in school, for all I know.

The model says that the atom consists of electrons that revolve around a nucleus, as the planets orbit the Sun. That is not true, and it was already known in 1923 when Erwin Schrödinger came up with his equation, which tells a whole different story, but is far more challenging to understand.

Normalisation, masking, and ideas as attractors are obvious reasons for this stupidity. However, the result is still that children of all ages think that the world consists of simple mechanisms.

The complexity as such is not considered, even though it – in my opinion – is the primary mechanism that drives ... everything.

We blind ourselves while, simultaneously, complexity is entirely understandable if we only study the complexity itself.

Newton got an apple in his head.

That's three hundred and fifty years ago. We know the effect. The world never became the same after Newton looked at this fallen apple and suddenly understood the mechanics.

But what was the reason for the apple fall?

Now I try to play around a bit by looking at the complexity of the apple falling – instead of looking in isolation at the mechanics of the fall. I try to exemplify what I just said, using Newton's apple as a case.

Do you know when an apple falls to the ground?

When should Newton preferably not sit under the apple tree, even though he fortunately did?

If we include the whole system the apple is a part of, we can find that the apple falls when a light gust of wind from a butterfly in the Amazon, via a tornado in Texas and an early autumn storm in England, makes the twig swing a little too much.

A single small impulse can change the world. The butterfly's flapping led to a theory of Newtonian mechanics.

Newton was well prepared. He had pondered for years over the unsolved riddles of mechanics. He was intensely occupied with these questions day and night. Nothing helped!

Before suddenly ... the apple.

This tiny incident, which was actually due to a butterfly on the other side of the Earth, changed world history. Newton's readiness was part of it. The butterfly was the visible cause.

Or not really.

Why did the butterfly have to flutter its wings right there and then? Let's drop some trillions of intermediate steps and instead go straight all the way back to the absolute beginning.

The butterfly is an emergent effect of the firstmost event, the «tiny mad idea» of a «point».

Every new notion with its associated qualia-experience is somehow connected to every other event in the entire universe up to the relevant point in time and space.

Think of the Sahara desert. Displacing a single grain of sand on the westernmost side only a fraction of a millimetre could theoretically result in a landslide somewhere on the east. It's unlikely beyond calculability, but it's still possible.

Therefore, even something microscopic can potentially change the world to the unrecognisable. Without the first tiny point, there would be no universe! That's how important even the most minuscule dots are.

Therefore, every little bit of creation is just as important, just as valuable, and crucial to everything that follows. You can become the one who saves the world right now through a seemingly insignificant act. History is full of examples.

Where there is a lack, it is filled up. Where it is too much, it overflows. But where there is a lot, it can also attract more – if we're talking about gravity or ideas. Something small can become very powerful. Something powerful can also suddenly break down and become chaos.

The laws of chaos are active whether they control electricity, air pressure, temperatures, density, movements, growth, distribution or any physical quantities and phenomena.

They also steer our Ego's notions and, through that, the collective notions.

Sometimes it takes billions of years, so we do not see it. Other times it takes picoseconds, so we do not see it. Sometimes the changes are so small that we do not understand they are significant. Other times they are so large that we do not understand where they came from, or we do not recognise that the power is present at all because it is everywhere, normalised, ignored.

Here it is appropriate to say a few words about astrology.

The gravity of Mount Everest does not «pull» on you to any noticeable extent, while the Moon does. We see it in the form of the tide that ebb and flow every single day in step with the Moon's cycling around the Earth.

The planets around us, and not least the Sun, also pull on all material things on Earth. The pull of the Moon and the Sun is strong, while the influence of the other planets is less so. Nevertheless, these forces affect us physically, and they are cyclical.

We usually neglect them, normalise them away, except in astrology. Wise people of all times have understood that these forces play a role. They constitute a complex, dynamic system studied, refined and described over the centuries.

In this system, there are people, animals and nature in all forms. How could they not be affected by these gravitational forces – when only a grain of sand or the weak flutter of a butterfly can change everything?

The effects are real and have been studied for millennia by astrologers.

They have examined the planets' positions and correlated that to events on Earth and psychological factors in the human mind.

!

Again, I want to insert a small exclamation mark because, in my eyes, it looks like the astrologers have grasped it. They have a profound insight into dynamics and complexity. They have understood normalisation and masking, attractors and how small changes can have great significance through the butterfly effect.

They have also understood the connection between the subjective and the seemingly objective.

I know ... I have crawled into a wasp nest and must get out as soon as possible, before all the square robot people I see all around me, the sheep – those who think the way everyone does but are not aware of it – deny this and me, again.

They deny that the Moon could have anything to do with emotions.

They do not understand the mechanisms.

I usually get extremely moon sick at the full moon and correspondingly light and relieved at the new moon.

I assume I do not normalise quite as much as most others but take in the forces. It's been like this my whole life. Similarly, I have countless other psychological-dynamic experiences related to planets and constellations. Still, I dare not talk about it because most people do not understand its reality and mechanisms.

Now say, however, that I only imagine these things – that they do not exist or are negligible in the physical sense.

It does not matter because my experience is still affected. My conviction is my reality. To distinguish physics and subjective experiences is impossible, according to my theory.

The causal connection between the physical background carpet and the psychological end result is extremely long and complex. Still, some sunny day – in a few hundred years, perhaps – we will hopefully know to understand it.

The laws of chaos are science 2.0. It is Newton's old classical mechanics gone bananas.

The laws of chaos are also relativity 2.0. Einstein formulated version 1.0 by uncovering the dynamic connection between space, time and gravity.

Now it's time to incorporate everything else, both the abstract, the subjective and the material, which constitutes a unified game.

For what is nature?

Where is the distinction between nature and non-nature?

In our world, which I have said is mental, where matter, time and space are a notion of thought, there are no differences.

Everything is thought.

Everything is nature.

What we observe in the nature around us is also valid in the mental – and vice versa.

We have to take the laws of complexity seriously.