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> Reality is multicausal. Or perhaps there are no causes at all, and the laws of physics are deterministic and time reversible. Perhaps causes appear only in o
by tshaddox 5y ago
> Reality is multicausal.
Or perhaps there are no causes at all, and the laws of physics are deterministic and time reversible. Perhaps causes appear only in our models of predicting the world, because our models contain agents and counterfactuals which don’t exist in the laws of physics but are useful for predicting some phenomena.
- MichaelBurge 5y agoDeterministic time-reversible things can still have causality. Just today I used gdb's reversible-debugging feature on a deterministic program to locate a bug. The existence of a bug implies causality in the program's execution state.
- GavinMcG 5y agoDeterministic time-reversible things could still have causality in a universe that has causality. But that's not an effective response to the claim that there's no causality at all.
- tshaddox 5y agoI suppose you could still talk about causes in a deterministic time-reversible system, but it doesn’t match the normal sense of the word “cause” given that future states determine past states just as much as past states determine future states.