Butterfly Effect

This past week, while we were discussing free will vs. determinism, and a bunch of topics popped up that made me think of different situations. The present is already gone- and the future has yet to be. The present right now is different than the present 30 seconds ago. We are moving and shifting through time, and to say that "time is gone," is a metaphor. For some odd reason, this got me thinking about the butterfly effect. By definition, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions, where a small change at one place in a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences to a later state. This topic can be looked at from a sociological, psychological, and a philosophical standpoint, however, i'm just going to be discussing the philosophical side to the butterfly effect. Is it by our own free will we decide to do things, or is it because it is pre-determined? One small change in anything you do can affect your life significantly everyday, and we don't even know it. As a general example, had you not made the decision to attend Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, your life would be 100% different.