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Causal relationships can go in reverse time. For instance, I know I will be hungry tomorrow so today I go to the grocery store. Tomorrow’s breakfast causes toda

Causal relationships can go in reverse time. For instance, I know I will be hungry tomorrow so today I go to the grocery store. Tomorrow’s breakfast causes todays shopping. Perhaps better not to think too much on this though.

yakubin 4y ago
By that logic if for whatever reason you skip breakfast tomorrow, a non-existent thing will have been a cause of your actions.
- simple-thoughts 4y ago
  The future is possibilities that are not actualized yet. So, whether or not I actually eat breakfast or not is irrelevant as the future potentiality is the cause of my behavior today. Once tomorrow is today, it is no longer the future.
  - yakubin 4y ago
    Your present prediction is the cause. You could even be predicting something that is logically impossible, i.e. there is no potentiality, still the prediction (in the present) would cause you to do something about it.
- mistermann 4y ago
  Thoughts aren't non-existent though, they have a different type of existence. I think time may be similar, in that while we seem to have an innate conscious experience/perception of ~absolute time and absolute reality, the way the subconscious mind implements the portion of reality it is the source of may be substantially different.
  - yakubin 4y ago
    That thought predicting the future is in the present though, not in the future.
    - mistermann 4y ago
      I wonder: does "is in the present" make sense (in the way that it makes sense "here"), in fact, at the cognitive level?
fluoridation 4y ago
The idea of tomorrow's breakfast causes today's shopping. You're probably right that tomorrow you'll need to eat breakfast, but you might not be.
zarathustreal 4y ago
>Tomorrow's breakfast causes todays shopping. This is a logical inconsistency. Tomorrow's breakfast does not yet exist, only your "knowing" about it. Your thought has already happened today, therefore "knowing" you will be hungry is the true cause, not the potential for breakfast itself.
BenoitP 4y ago
Also Vietnam vets and LSD-fueled hippies exist in the same set, and each can have effects that go in different directions. On top of that, merging their effects (in policy setting for example) sort of is a barrier to attributing causality. It forces a 2 dimensional signal to go to 1 dimension. Neural networks can backpropagate attribution through that, but only with the convention that this attribution is the marginal effect. And that's a complex problem: who would be responsible for a policy change when there's a population contributing long-term for 48%, but a short term population adds 4%. Which population is the real cause? the 48% or the 4%? Is there a right answer to this question?
pjlegato 4y ago
As David Hume points out, you don't actually know you'll be hungry tomorrow. You assume you will be based on induction from similar past events, but this is not certain. (He does concede that it's reasonable to plan as if it were a certainty in such cases, in the absence of any falsifying evidence.) The famous counterexample metaphor is farmyard turkeys. For months, for their entire lives, the turkeys observe the diligent farmer bringing food and water, providing for their every need so that they don't have to do anything. On the day before Thanksgiving, a turkey philosopher confidently declares that, based on this prior evidence, we can conclude that the farmer, their great benefactor, exists only to serve and further the interests of turkeydom.
- simple-thoughts 4y ago
  Perfect. The philosopher turkey views the past as causing the future while in fact the farmer’s future meal caused the turkey’s past experiences. A great example of how serious an error rejecting reverse causality can be.
  - mannykannot 4y ago
    The turkey is simply wrong in its inductive reasoning. Your hunger tomorrow will be a consequence of the forward causal process of metabolism. That the turkey's demise occurs specifically on thanksgiving day is partly determined by a cultural attitude having its origin in past events. Aristotle, of course, used a broader ontology of causes than is commonly used today, but there should be no confusion if we are careful to define what we mean. In particular, final causes are more commonly regarded as psychological attitudes, whereby if someone acts now to bring about a certain circumstance in the future, the circumstance is caused by what they were thinking prior to the action.
    - pjlegato 4y ago
      Hume uses the example of the sun rising: though the sun has (so far) always risen in the east, there is no logical reason to assume that it will _necessarily_ do the same tomorrow tomorrow. Though we can reasonably plan for this as the most likely scenario based on available evidence, it is not _necessarily_ going to happen. There is, likewise, no logically necessary reason to assume that that causal process of metabolism will continue to work tomorrow as it always has in the past, though it is indeed reasonable to prepare for that outcome as the most likely outcome.
jjk166 4y ago
Your past experiences have caused you to expect you'll be hungry tomorrow, but shy of someone building a time machine there's no way for causal relationships to actually go backwards. If you wake up tomorrow craving bacon there's no mechanism for you to cause your past self to pick some up.

yakubin 4y ago

By that logic if for whatever reason you skip breakfast tomorrow, a non-existent thing will have been a cause of your actions.

simple-thoughts 4y ago
The future is possibilities that are not actualized yet. So, whether or not I actually eat breakfast or not is irrelevant as the future potentiality is the cause of my behavior today. Once tomorrow is today, it is no longer the future.
- yakubin 4y ago
  Your present prediction is the cause. You could even be predicting something that is logically impossible, i.e. there is no potentiality, still the prediction (in the present) would cause you to do something about it.
mistermann 4y ago
Thoughts aren't non-existent though, they have a different type of existence. I think time may be similar, in that while we seem to have an innate conscious experience/perception of ~absolute time and absolute reality, the way the subconscious mind implements the portion of reality it is the source of may be substantially different.
- yakubin 4y ago
  That thought predicting the future is in the present though, not in the future.
  - mistermann 4y ago
    I wonder: does "is in the present" make sense (in the way that it makes sense "here"), in fact, at the cognitive level?

fluoridation 4y ago

The idea of tomorrow's breakfast causes today's shopping. You're probably right that tomorrow you'll need to eat breakfast, but you might not be.

zarathustreal 4y ago

>Tomorrow's breakfast causes todays shopping. This is a logical inconsistency. Tomorrow's breakfast does not yet exist, only your "knowing" about it. Your thought has already happened today, therefore "knowing" you will be hungry is the true cause, not the potential for breakfast itself.

BenoitP 4y ago

Also Vietnam vets and LSD-fueled hippies exist in the same set, and each can have effects that go in different directions. On top of that, merging their effects (in policy setting for example) sort of is a barrier to attributing causality. It forces a 2 dimensional signal to go to 1 dimension. Neural networks can backpropagate attribution through that, but only with the convention that this attribution is the marginal effect. And that's a complex problem: who would be responsible for a policy change when there's a population contributing long-term for 48%, but a short term population adds 4%. Which population is the real cause? the 48% or the 4%? Is there a right answer to this question?

pjlegato 4y ago

As David Hume points out, you don't actually know you'll be hungry tomorrow. You assume you will be based on induction from similar past events, but this is not certain. (He does concede that it's reasonable to plan as if it were a certainty in such cases, in the absence of any falsifying evidence.) The famous counterexample metaphor is farmyard turkeys. For months, for their entire lives, the turkeys observe the diligent farmer bringing food and water, providing for their every need so that they don't have to do anything. On the day before Thanksgiving, a turkey philosopher confidently declares that, based on this prior evidence, we can conclude that the farmer, their great benefactor, exists only to serve and further the interests of turkeydom.

simple-thoughts 4y ago
Perfect. The philosopher turkey views the past as causing the future while in fact the farmer’s future meal caused the turkey’s past experiences. A great example of how serious an error rejecting reverse causality can be.
- mannykannot 4y ago
  The turkey is simply wrong in its inductive reasoning. Your hunger tomorrow will be a consequence of the forward causal process of metabolism. That the turkey's demise occurs specifically on thanksgiving day is partly determined by a cultural attitude having its origin in past events. Aristotle, of course, used a broader ontology of causes than is commonly used today, but there should be no confusion if we are careful to define what we mean. In particular, final causes are more commonly regarded as psychological attitudes, whereby if someone acts now to bring about a certain circumstance in the future, the circumstance is caused by what they were thinking prior to the action.
  - pjlegato 4y ago
    Hume uses the example of the sun rising: though the sun has (so far) always risen in the east, there is no logical reason to assume that it will _necessarily_ do the same tomorrow tomorrow. Though we can reasonably plan for this as the most likely scenario based on available evidence, it is not _necessarily_ going to happen. There is, likewise, no logically necessary reason to assume that that causal process of metabolism will continue to work tomorrow as it always has in the past, though it is indeed reasonable to prepare for that outcome as the most likely outcome.

jjk166 4y ago

Your past experiences have caused you to expect you'll be hungry tomorrow, but shy of someone building a time machine there's no way for causal relationships to actually go backwards. If you wake up tomorrow craving bacon there's no mechanism for you to cause your past self to pick some up.