Determinism Revisited

[Brandon]

Good points, apportioner.

Am I wrong to assume that there is a certain naivete involved in the principles of causality? It seems to me that it can only be applied to immediate, short-term examples. And furthermore, since events don't exist in a vaccuum, how can we be sure what causes what?

For example, I was at a basketball game tonight. I got up to take a piss, and while I was gone, a player crashed down into my vacant seat. When I got back, my dad told me "good thing you got up and left." The assumption was that my getting up had nothing to do with the player falling, and he would have landed there in either situation, but how do we know that? This is really just Chaos Theory, but how do we know for sure that my getting up didn't cause a ripple effect to occur?