4 ms·

I'm confused, isn't the whole schtick around past events being related to future events the basis of causality?

ethanbond 6y ago
Right, and GP point is that we actually only have data about how past events are related to other past events (and even then, the data is not very good). We have no information at all about how past or current events are related to future events.
burrows 6y ago
What evidence do we have that causality will continue to “exist”?
- waterhouse 6y ago
  People who believe that past experience is a good predictor of the future will make decent predictions as a result; people who believe that past experience has nothing to do with the future ("anti-inductivists") will make wrong predictions again and again. The inductivists will therefore outcompete the anti-inductivists. On the other hand, as a friend of mine pointed out, for the anti-inductivists that manage to exist, although they keep suffering from making wrong predictions, they will not see this as a reason to change their philosophy, so they are stuck in an epistemic trap. Since evidence has no meaning for them, no evidence can change their minds.
  - whimsicalism 6y ago
    > The inductivists will therefore outcompete the anti-inductivists. You have no deductive or a priori reason to know this, rhetoric about "epistemically traps" aside.
    - shaded-enmity 6y ago
      So is this survivorship bias or something else? I don't understand your point. I have a white wall in front of me. If I take a brush and red paint and paint a big red circle on the wall, are you saying that the big red circle "just happens to be there" with no relationship to the brush, red paint and my actions?
      - jordan_curve 6y ago
        You only know that there will be a red spot on the wall based on your past experiences with the physical world. Why should we believe our experiences in the past are at all relevant to the future? We haven’t lived in the future. The laws of gravity could be totally different. All of our data about gravity is equally consistent with the theory “If I drop an apple it will fall only if it is before December 2020” as it is with our theory that the law of gravity will continue to exist in the future as it does today.
        ZeteticElench 6y ago
        "Why should we believe our experiences in the past are at all relevant to the future?" I can glibly say because it is utterly insane and silly to argue otherwise due to the immense success of science to explain how the world works and produce sophisticated technology. I could also take a Bayesian probability approach and assume some arbitrary prior 0 < p < 1 for the probability that when you apply paint to a brush and place that brush in contact with a white wall and move the brush in a circle a red circle will appear with the exact same size and the circle the brush moved in. Use the Bayesian formula to update your probability and then repeat a few thousand times. The probability will approach 1.
    - waterhouse 6y ago
      That's true. "Induction works in practice" is merely an empirical fact. But it is a fact. Our bodies embed it already: evolution has worked because the environment has changed slowly enough for advantageous mutations to remain advantageous for long enough to become ubiquitous in the species. But, again, the thesis "empirical evidence doesn't matter" is immune to empirical evidence. Now, if one were to try to construct a theoretical argument, I suspect it would go as follows: "If we assume the world could change in every aspect from moment to moment (e.g. pieces of matter could teleport anywhere in the universe, physical constants might change by the second, laws of physics might change over time or space, the very concepts of space and time might become invalid, ...), then the space of possible worlds is enormous and incomprehensible. If we don't have any rational way of assigning probabilities to any of the possible worlds, then this method of thinking doesn't have any implications for correct actions, because every action could be the best in some possible world; in that case, as long as you assign nonzero probability to the "laws of physics remain constant" universe most of us believe in, you may as well act as though it's the truth." If someone does claim to have a rational way of assigning probabilities to the possible worlds, then that would have to be addressed on its own terms, and any conclusion may be possible; but most such ways that people have proposed will tend to imply that "simple" possibilities are most likely, and "the laws of physics remain constant" will tend to rank highly among them.
      - whimsicalism 6y ago
        Exactly, and your responses both apply to Sabine's criticism as well. I like the tenor of your second argument, it reminds me of Pascal's wager. That said, you're not really addressing the problem of induction. We have no reason why you'd assign a higher probability to the "law of physics remain constant" to the "laws of physics are flipped in the next second", outside of gut reasoning. If we can use gut reasoning about induction, no reason we can when we assume that quarks are a real thing, or think about this solution to the BHIP.
        waterhouse 6y ago
        To be clear, a true "anti-inductivist" as I describe it would be completely deranged and unable to function in life. It's not really relevant except to people who start from a normal perspective and are considering the anti-inductivist hypothesis (usually either because they're studying philosophy or because someone else brought philosophy into the discussion, which is what happened here). For those people, it is important to realize that anti-inductivism can't be defeated on its own terms. By usual standards (for some definition of "usual"), the space of possible observations one could make is enormous, and the fact that they keep very, very consistently being in accord with the laws of physics as we've discovered them—often to many decimal places—is immense evidence in favor of "physics as we've discovered it" as compared to "anything might happen". Any viable competing theory would have to be reasonably simple (i.e. not include "billions of specific items that explain all prior observations" as axioms) and would have to make almost exactly the same predictions. ("Newtonian mechanics" is reasonably simple and makes similar predictions at the level most people can see, but with specialized equipment and experiments it has been disproven. "God did it" sounds simple, but either the word "God" smuggles in the extremely non-simple "God is a being whose psychological makeup led him to make the following billions of specific decisions that explain all prior observations", or it amounts to "God is a being who chooses to run the universe according to something approximating Einsteinian mechanics"; in that case, it is possible that God might decide to intervene and do something physics would say is impossible, but if you want to say that God will do any specific intervention, you would have to make a less-simple theory that explains why God would do that particular thing and not anything else, and the longer time passes without any verified physically-impossible miracles, the more unlikely most such theories get. "Intelligent beings vaguely like us arose, and decided to simulate our universe, following rules that approximate Einsteinian mechanics" is also possible—not much different from the God-based class of theories.)
- dnautics 6y ago
  we don't. It's the central faith of science that causality is a thing. You can't argue that causality is real because it's always worked; that is begging the question.
  - ZeteticElench 6y ago
    Not at all, something as simple as having two boxes and putting an object in one of them and then checking them at regular intervals two verify that the object is always in the box you placed it in and never in the box you didn't is proof of causality.
- ttctciyf 6y ago
  If "causality" were to fail, I can't see "evidence" faring any better. What would count as evidence, absent a serviceable notion of causality?

Right, and GP point is that we actually only have data about how past events are related to other past events (and even then, the data is not very good). We have no information at all about how past or current events are related to future events.

burrows 6y ago

What evidence do we have that causality will continue to “exist”?

waterhouse 6y ago
People who believe that past experience is a good predictor of the future will make decent predictions as a result; people who believe that past experience has nothing to do with the future ("anti-inductivists") will make wrong predictions again and again. The inductivists will therefore outcompete the anti-inductivists. On the other hand, as a friend of mine pointed out, for the anti-inductivists that manage to exist, although they keep suffering from making wrong predictions, they will not see this as a reason to change their philosophy, so they are stuck in an epistemic trap. Since evidence has no meaning for them, no evidence can change their minds.
- whimsicalism 6y ago
  > The inductivists will therefore outcompete the anti-inductivists. You have no deductive or a priori reason to know this, rhetoric about "epistemically traps" aside.
  - shaded-enmity 6y ago
    So is this survivorship bias or something else? I don't understand your point. I have a white wall in front of me. If I take a brush and red paint and paint a big red circle on the wall, are you saying that the big red circle "just happens to be there" with no relationship to the brush, red paint and my actions?
    - jordan_curve 6y ago
      You only know that there will be a red spot on the wall based on your past experiences with the physical world. Why should we believe our experiences in the past are at all relevant to the future? We haven’t lived in the future. The laws of gravity could be totally different. All of our data about gravity is equally consistent with the theory “If I drop an apple it will fall only if it is before December 2020” as it is with our theory that the law of gravity will continue to exist in the future as it does today.
      - ZeteticElench 6y ago
        "Why should we believe our experiences in the past are at all relevant to the future?" I can glibly say because it is utterly insane and silly to argue otherwise due to the immense success of science to explain how the world works and produce sophisticated technology. I could also take a Bayesian probability approach and assume some arbitrary prior 0 < p < 1 for the probability that when you apply paint to a brush and place that brush in contact with a white wall and move the brush in a circle a red circle will appear with the exact same size and the circle the brush moved in. Use the Bayesian formula to update your probability and then repeat a few thousand times. The probability will approach 1.
  - waterhouse 6y ago
    That's true. "Induction works in practice" is merely an empirical fact. But it is a fact. Our bodies embed it already: evolution has worked because the environment has changed slowly enough for advantageous mutations to remain advantageous for long enough to become ubiquitous in the species. But, again, the thesis "empirical evidence doesn't matter" is immune to empirical evidence. Now, if one were to try to construct a theoretical argument, I suspect it would go as follows: "If we assume the world could change in every aspect from moment to moment (e.g. pieces of matter could teleport anywhere in the universe, physical constants might change by the second, laws of physics might change over time or space, the very concepts of space and time might become invalid, ...), then the space of possible worlds is enormous and incomprehensible. If we don't have any rational way of assigning probabilities to any of the possible worlds, then this method of thinking doesn't have any implications for correct actions, because every action could be the best in some possible world; in that case, as long as you assign nonzero probability to the "laws of physics remain constant" universe most of us believe in, you may as well act as though it's the truth." If someone does claim to have a rational way of assigning probabilities to the possible worlds, then that would have to be addressed on its own terms, and any conclusion may be possible; but most such ways that people have proposed will tend to imply that "simple" possibilities are most likely, and "the laws of physics remain constant" will tend to rank highly among them.
    - whimsicalism 6y ago
      Exactly, and your responses both apply to Sabine's criticism as well. I like the tenor of your second argument, it reminds me of Pascal's wager. That said, you're not really addressing the problem of induction. We have no reason why you'd assign a higher probability to the "law of physics remain constant" to the "laws of physics are flipped in the next second", outside of gut reasoning. If we can use gut reasoning about induction, no reason we can when we assume that quarks are a real thing, or think about this solution to the BHIP.
      - waterhouse 6y ago
        To be clear, a true "anti-inductivist" as I describe it would be completely deranged and unable to function in life. It's not really relevant except to people who start from a normal perspective and are considering the anti-inductivist hypothesis (usually either because they're studying philosophy or because someone else brought philosophy into the discussion, which is what happened here). For those people, it is important to realize that anti-inductivism can't be defeated on its own terms. By usual standards (for some definition of "usual"), the space of possible observations one could make is enormous, and the fact that they keep very, very consistently being in accord with the laws of physics as we've discovered them—often to many decimal places—is immense evidence in favor of "physics as we've discovered it" as compared to "anything might happen". Any viable competing theory would have to be reasonably simple (i.e. not include "billions of specific items that explain all prior observations" as axioms) and would have to make almost exactly the same predictions. ("Newtonian mechanics" is reasonably simple and makes similar predictions at the level most people can see, but with specialized equipment and experiments it has been disproven. "God did it" sounds simple, but either the word "God" smuggles in the extremely non-simple "God is a being whose psychological makeup led him to make the following billions of specific decisions that explain all prior observations", or it amounts to "God is a being who chooses to run the universe according to something approximating Einsteinian mechanics"; in that case, it is possible that God might decide to intervene and do something physics would say is impossible, but if you want to say that God will do any specific intervention, you would have to make a less-simple theory that explains why God would do that particular thing and not anything else, and the longer time passes without any verified physically-impossible miracles, the more unlikely most such theories get. "Intelligent beings vaguely like us arose, and decided to simulate our universe, following rules that approximate Einsteinian mechanics" is also possible—not much different from the God-based class of theories.)
dnautics 6y ago
we don't. It's the central faith of science that causality is a thing. You can't argue that causality is real because it's always worked; that is begging the question.
- ZeteticElench 6y ago
  Not at all, something as simple as having two boxes and putting an object in one of them and then checking them at regular intervals two verify that the object is always in the box you placed it in and never in the box you didn't is proof of causality.
ttctciyf 6y ago
If "causality" were to fail, I can't see "evidence" faring any better. What would count as evidence, absent a serviceable notion of causality?