Just think...
 

you would be a completely different person than you are today if you had been born with 11 toes.

Or would you?

I watch baseball a lot, and seeing as my favorite team is the hapless Dodgers, I hear a lot of "If so-and-so had not hit into that double play, the-other-so-and-so would have 3 RBIs right now" - obviously, to me, that's just speculation. I always assume that life would not be exactly how it is now if anything in the past were to have turned out a slight bit different than they had.

I've thought about this a lot in the past. The slightest variation could completely change the outcome of a day, or someone's life. Someone goes to a corner store to get a pack of cigarettes and is hit by a car and killed. Had they chosen not to go out at that time, or at all, they'd still be alive. Granted, that's an extreme scenario, but similar scenarios have happened. Pondering the countless possible outcomes to changing one event is mind numbing.

I always think about things like that... like what if I made a right turn instead of a left. Could the littliest change make a big difference in your life? It's like the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series of books... thats how life feels sometimes...

We would probably use a base-11 number system for one thing!

And yeah, a butterfly flaping its wings etc.

I wish i had 11 fingers it owuld help me play bass

And you wouldnt have to reach as far for that "w" key!

I can definitely conceive of a number of ways my life could have been different had I possessed 11 toes at birth. Most of these are social in nature, but there may also be other consequences if the same defective genes that caused the extra toe would also inflict upon my personality certain dysfunctional proclivities.

A related question: 11 toes are rare and their repercussions difficult to name and quantify, so consider this- what if you were born with a different gender? How would your personality, beliefs and paradigms change?

I used to think about the significance of all the little things people do - from what color socks you wear (maybe someone notices and says, huh, green, maybe I should paint my walls that color, and gets into a fight with their spouse over it and they get divorced) or whether you run a red light so you're not late for work or whatever. (Seen "Sliding Doors"?) Eventually, the conclusions I came to were:

1. you can't predict what effect small actions are going to have so why bother trying?
2. the bulk of things in life really don't make much difference. There are a few significant things but overall not much of it truly matters enough to alter fates.

I guess I think that not much would be much different at all even if pretty large phenomena would or wouldn't have happened in the past.

*shrug* Well, in either case, you wouldn't know the difference, would you?

my favorite "what if" is the fire to the library of alexandria back around 50 BC. if i remember my history right it was set ablaze while the great JC (Julius Ceaser) was attacking Cleopatra and Marc Antony. now, most people would think that burning a building, even a library, would be a rather minor event in the grand scheme of history, but it has be speculated that the destruction of all of the knowledge that it contained set the world back as much as 1500 years. if it hadn't burned, it's possible that some dude around 500 AD would have been walking on the moon instead of Neal Armstrong. what if indeed...

All changes make a difference in the future. Nothing is too small to make a difference.

Thats why u are always supposed to wear clean underwear.

I think (believe) that everything we do is perfect. In other words, all choices, decisions, turns, EVERYTHING that we do could not have happened any other way. I don't believe in fate mind you, that usually infers some other hand involved and we're just 'playing along'. Of course its easy for us to look back and say 'what if?' - even more so if we feel we've made a "wrong" decision. In my view, there are no "wrong" decisions. There's no right or wrong for that matter. Its much easier to live life without any expectations of a specific result or outcome of your decisions. Just BE. You can CREATE any reality for yourself that you choose once you learn to LET GO of the fear of failure...

I just got that the other day.

While going through old paperwork, I found an unsealed card from an old flame from years ago.
It was expressing her feelings for me
about the time we were breaking up despite our love for each other.

What would have happened if I had read that then?
It was a little twist in the heart when I read that.

Fate can be cruel at times,
even years down the road.

There's the flipside - you could have done exactly what you did and things could have ended up totally differently because of somebody else. That winning lotto ticket you bought? What if the guy that checked out just before you had decided to buy a ticket?

When you compound everyone else's variables, it pretty much squashes the whole equation. Or does it?

I would always die in those. :D

It kinda reminds me of the seinfeld episode where george acts completely opposite of how he normally does, and gets a job for the NY Yankees. What would happen if everyone went home from work different way one day, what differences would there be in the world.

no way to know.

I think you are getting confused, the first part of your post appeals to determinism, ie that there is no free will, that everything will turn out the way it always was going to turn out. This does imply that there is no such thing as morality so we can't really judge anyones actions.

I don't agree with this view, but anyway, you go on to say that we can create any reality for ourselves that we choose. You can't have it both ways, either everything is determined and we have no choice, or we can choose our future, and there is such a thing as right and wrong. You can't have both.

As for the original subject, my feeling is that small differences can change things, but they don't have to. Obviously if Hitler's parents hadn't met each other, we wouldn't have had Hitler, but maybe we would have had someone similar fill his place. We can't know, and worrying about it doesn't seem to get us anywhere.

It is interesting to think about, but I don't think that we can learn to shape our futures better from it. I might be wrong though, does anyone think that we can learn from this contemplation?

i think like this: if my parents had had sex thirty seconds later, i would be completely different, or maybe not be here at all.
If it had been any other of the 2 billion sperm, i would be completely different. Would my mind be the same? my outlook, my reasoning?

As lurkette said, why bother?

I used to get hung-up over what the ramifications of a given action would be, often to the point of allowing the opportunity slip by.

No more, I will not miss opportunities because of irational thoughts. What happens happens and there is nothing I can do to change that.

I wish I had opposable thumbs on my feet like an ape. I have a good feeling i would be a diffrent person if I had those. I would be able to lay back in my lazy boy and hold a drink, scratch myself, hold the remote, and still be able to pick ticks out of my mates hair all at the same time.