When I first read about the butterfly effect, it was explained to me with quite a lot of focus on the fact that the outcomes are unpredictable. If you had a machine that could predict the future perfectly, measuring every variable now except the fluttering of one butterfly's wings, then over time the predictions would get more and more wrong due to that tiny inaccuracy snowballing into something huge. For example, a hurricane. You seem to be focusing on the idea that the butterfly caused the hurricane, but as I see it, the whole point is that the hurricane could not have been predicted. So sure, butterflies exist and hurricanes exist, but you can't link them. If you could, people would. So don't go blaming yourself for any butterfly-induced hurricanes; almost by definition, you couldn't have known they were going to happen any more than anyone else could have.

Here's the thing, even if it is real, there's quite literally no way to control it or plan for it. You can't just not have a cup of tea because you think it might make Yellowstone erupt, because there is absolutely no way to know what the 'right' action might be.

Equally, the effect would have as much influence on your life as you have on others - again no point worrying about your actions when we know they have been indirectly influenced by thousands of other's actions before it.

And don't forget that every decision, trillions of actions a day, would all apply to this effect. So really whatever you do is going to be completely insignificant, or drowned out by the trillions of other actions also committed.

Just remember the theory is about chaotic changes in weather systems.

It might give you some peace of mind to think about the implications of certain conceptions of quantum physics. We don't yet fully understand the science of how that stuff works so even laymen like ourselves are permitted to speculate freely without some boff telling us we're wrong.

There's a timeline out there where your MSN messenger crush didn't kill herself, in fact she ended up married to you. There's a timeline out there where you died in that near-miss car accident you had a few years ago. There's conceivably a timeline out there where you, by some immensely improbable series of arbitrary and convoluted coincidences, haven't ever used the word "butterfly".

Every decision you make doesn't just set off a butterfly effect in "our" timeline, but a series of quantum junctions where a whole multitude of slightly different parallel universes branch off and diverge. We are talking to one another from a brief convergence, but tomorrow I might be off on a new one and we'll never genuinely interact again. You will only ever speak to the parallel version of me who chose to have hoi sin duck instead of chicken and mixed pepper stir fry, and consequently ended up getting nuked by Robo-Putin.

How do you link your choices to these outcomes? Simply existing has an impact on something, be it as little as the flow of air molecules around your body. The logical conclusion, if you wanted to eliminate your impact on the future, would be to cease existing. Are you going to restore the order of nonexistance?

I guess it can help relieve the mind to consider ourselves not as single billiard balls knocking each other about, but as the game entirely, including the players, the spectators and I guess the space they do (and don't) inhabit. Wake of the ship, tailing of the cat sort of thing. In essence you are both the cause and consequence, not either or the other.

It's really quite interesting, and very scary, when you bring solopsism into it. On occasion I've fostered the panicked idea that I'm the effector of the evils in the world, primarily because I have cause to notice them. What I mean is that my insistant believe that the world is as, or should be so, has itself manifest reality with all the unintended consequences of my wilfully ingorant morals.

I don't know, I only attended 2 weeks of sixth form philosophy. Take the piss out of me, please - i's the only way I will learn.

I sometimes think back to catastrophic events that happened where I was in one way or another close to the action or where me acting in a certain way could have led to a different outcome.

One of my friends at uni got himself killed on a motorbike one afternoon after lectures. We were standing outside the building talking for a bit with a few people and then we all went our separate ways home. My friend got on his motorbike and rode it down the road back to his flat like he always did, but according to eyewitnesses, he appeared distracted and failed to spot a maintenance van behind a bend where the council were doing some treework, and crashed into the back of it head-on at speed. His neck snapped and he was dead instantly.

It kind of left me wondering all those years, what if we'd stood there just a few minutes longer? Would that somehow not have caused him to be distracted by whatever it was that was distracting him on that road?

It's just really eerie when you know you were talking to somebody just five minutes earlier when he was just a completely normal healthy person with his whole life ahead of him, and then suddenly his life got snuffed out in an instant. It just felt like such a horrible waste.