[MD] cause and effect

[Case]

[Kevin]
You can't find it be_cause_ it's not there (in the second paragraph above).
But
it (the word "cause") is in the third paragraph above (mine) and in the
paragraph immediately preceding this one (yours).  I won't speak for your
instance of the word but the word appears in my paragraph be_cause_ I did
something.  I pressed the keys c, a, u, s and e and the word "cause" appeard
on my monitor.  Pressing the keys was the cause.  The word appearing on
the monitor was the effect.
 
How did your instance of the word get there?
 
[Case]
Oh yeah, sorry about that. Edward Lorenz discovered that butterfly effect
while running very primitive weather model in the 60's. His model did a
string of calculation that produced a string of numbers. This process took a
very long time and produced a long set of numbers. 

One day the while the model was running something caused it to shut down and
rather than restart it from the beginning Lorenz plugged in the last number
it generated and let it run again. Later he discovered that the figures
generated after the restart varied from the series produced if the model ran
all the way through.

At the point where he plugged in the number, the numbers started out about
the same then began to vary wildly. Lorenz eventually realized that the
divergence stemmed the fact the computer calculated number to say 4 decimal
places but printed them out to two decimal places. 

It was not that the rounding error "caused' the divergence it was that in
order for any model to be able to predict the weather it would need to have
infinite precision. Laplace's vision of perfect determinism would require
such infinite precision on a cosmic scale.

What Lorenz showed was that it is only possible to develop short term
models. He showed that the world can be purely deterministic and yet purely
unpredictable at the same time. So the rounding error does not "cause" the
butterfly effect but the butterfly effect is the result of rounding error.

As for irrational numbers, the square root of 2 was among the first
discovered by the Greeks. I have not hand calculated a square root since the
invention of the calculator but as I recall the process involved guessing
and calculating and guessing again and calculating until you either get it
exactly or close enough.

With irrational numbers you never get it, you just get closer and closer.
The irrational numbers can only be expressed approximately. What this
suggests to me is that the future is "in principle" unpredictable. It is not
just that our knowledge of the present state of every particle in the
universe is limited in fact, which it is. We can not ever know the position
and momentum of every particle in the universe because of the uncertainty
principle. Even God can not know the position of every particle in the
universe. I conclude that even God can not know the future. As I suggested
in another thread God must watch the process unfold through what Whitehead
called his Consequent Nature.

I have also suggested a couple of times that this process also works in
reverse. So that you could never go back in time to the same place as to get
there you would have to rewind every particle in the universe with infinite
precision. Some have said, using old school ideas, that the past somehow
calcifies out of present and is fixed and unchanging in our wake. I maintain
that the past is as unknowable as the future. In fact I maintain that for an
omniscient being able to transcend time and space and move backwards and
forwards in time it would be like watching a movie that ends differently
every time you rewind and replay it.