Subject: (urth) Butterfly crush

From: Tony Ellis <littlesense at necronomicon.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 03 Aug 2001 08:43:51 +0000

Michael Straight wrote:

> Well, if you're willing to admit it's illogical, I can't argue with you,

Sorry, but I admitted no such thing. The 'logic' I said I wouldn't mind
giving a miss was very deliberately placed in inverted commas.

> but I think dismissing objections as "just the Crushed Butterfly theory"
> is ridiculous.  All of human history and society would be very, very, very
> different if men died immediately after having intercourse.

Different, certainly. "Very, very, very different" is conjecture. Would the
changes you describe necessarily all work in the same direction, and shift
history onto a completely different track, or would half of them cancel out
the other half, and the overall shape of history remain more or less the
same?

And that's just the Time Is A River theory. How about the Many Universes
theory, where every quantum event since the big bang may have created
another reality, or a potential reality? In that case, all Wolfe is doing is
showing us one of the more interesting, lower probability worlds.

I don't see how dismissing two of these theories in favour of a third, when
in fact no one knows what happens when human history is altered, has
anything to do with logic at all.

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

---

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Date: Fri, 03 Aug 2001 14:15:39 +0000

Dan'l said most of what I wanted to say except for this:

> showing us one of the more interesting, lower probability worlds.

Many Universes means all possible universes exist.  I can't belive this is
a possible universe.

> in fact no one knows what happens when human history is altered

This is actually a radically sceptical view of history: you're saying that
we can never know anything about the causes of events.  Because to say
that x is the cause of an event is to say that if x were absent the event
would not have happened.  Every time we try to determine why something
happened in history we are making statements about what would have
happened if history were altered.

And, as Dan'l pointed out, there's an awful lot of history we ascribe to
causes related to fatherhood and sexuality (I'll add how different the
relationship between church/clergy and western civilization would have
been if all men were celibate up until they mated and died).

-Rostrum