You find people using this term to cut out parts of a story and jump ahead because the exact sequence of events are too obvious to recount. George Carlin said "One thing leads to another"? Not always because, sometimes one thing leads to the same thing, ask an addict. You would think the obvious definition would be that you did one thing, which led to a situation where it was logical to do some other related thing. That would be assuming that the next situation would be logical or it was obvious.
The problem we run into however is using the word "Thing". This word is used when you cannot or do not want to refer to the object, idea or location in a specific way, like, what's that thing over there on the table? Basically it would be an object that you are not familiar with or don't know much about and making the statement one thing leads to another would imply you knew something about the item you are calling a thing. It gets even more confusing when making the statement, I have a lot of things to do today. This poses and implies all kinds of possibilities, probably completely unrelated to material items.
"I would like to live next to the beach and close to my job, but I can't have things both ways". This is another example of using the word, thing, related to a condition or to a particular situation. "I have a few things on my mind right now", completely abstract and only the person saying this would have any idea what those things are. You can see from the few examples mentioned the word "Thing" is critical in our headline of "Does One Thing Lead to Another". Because if we were to use this in our last example, "I have a few things on my mind right now and one thing will lead to another", we are left in the dark, no idea what so ever of which things will lead to another or are they even possible.
You can see that very small differences in initial conditions will cause errors in our conclusion and will yield widely diverging outcomes. This happens because these are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by the initial conditions. We cannot assume that the present condition will determine the future and the approximate present does not approximately determine the future either.
If we assume one thing will lead to another we must also assume we already know what the first and last things are. The problem here is, will there be a direct connection from point "A" to point "B" with nothing in between, or will there be distractions or obstacles. This will certainly affect one thing from leading to another, but would it actually cause us to not reach the final conclusion or does this even matter with the question, because no matter what, if one thing leads to another then the question must be, does one thing lead to another, then another, then another and on into infinity, would it ever end.
The term one thing leads to another is much like Chaos Theory, which deals with deterministic systems whose behavior can in principle be predicted. It would be impossible to predict however which thing it will lead to, so in reality one thing has the potential to lead to another, but we cannot predict the future so we don't know where it will stop and whether or not it is even related to the initial thing.
The uncertainty increases exponentially with elapsed time. Meaning the longer it takes us to get from one thing to another the more unpredictable the final thing will be. One thing does have the potential to lead to another but it will be determined by how much clarity there is in the "thing", how much uncertainty there is in the time during the "leads to" and will "another" be relevant to the initial thing, or, does really matter.
"I would like to live next to the beach and close to my job, but I can't have things both ways". This is another example of using the word, thing, related to a condition or to a particular situation. "I have a few things on my mind right now", completely abstract and only the person saying this would have any idea what those things are. You can see from the few examples mentioned the word "Thing" is critical in our headline of "Does One Thing Lead to Another". Because if we were to use this in our last example, "I have a few things on my mind right now and one thing will lead to another", we are left in the dark, no idea what so ever of which things will lead to another or are they even possible.
You can see that very small differences in initial conditions will cause errors in our conclusion and will yield widely diverging outcomes. This happens because these are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by the initial conditions. We cannot assume that the present condition will determine the future and the approximate present does not approximately determine the future either.
If we assume one thing will lead to another we must also assume we already know what the first and last things are. The problem here is, will there be a direct connection from point "A" to point "B" with nothing in between, or will there be distractions or obstacles. This will certainly affect one thing from leading to another, but would it actually cause us to not reach the final conclusion or does this even matter with the question, because no matter what, if one thing leads to another then the question must be, does one thing lead to another, then another, then another and on into infinity, would it ever end.
The term one thing leads to another is much like Chaos Theory, which deals with deterministic systems whose behavior can in principle be predicted. It would be impossible to predict however which thing it will lead to, so in reality one thing has the potential to lead to another, but we cannot predict the future so we don't know where it will stop and whether or not it is even related to the initial thing.
The uncertainty increases exponentially with elapsed time. Meaning the longer it takes us to get from one thing to another the more unpredictable the final thing will be. One thing does have the potential to lead to another but it will be determined by how much clarity there is in the "thing", how much uncertainty there is in the time during the "leads to" and will "another" be relevant to the initial thing, or, does really matter.