I was thinking about the question “Why don’t agents construct crazy counterfactuals?”, and decided that I wanted a clearer idea of what crazy counterfactuals would look like in the case of evolution. As in, if you asked someone who had a crazy set of counterfactuals what would have happened if some organism had had some different DNA, what would they answer?
I think perhaps one distinction that needs to be made is between “counterfactuals exist only in our imagination” and “causality exist only in our imagination”.
Counterfactuals definitely exist only in our imagination. We’re literally making up some modified version of the world, and then extrapolating its imaginary consequences.
Often, we might define causality in terms of counterfactuals; “X causes Y if Y has a counterfactual dependence on X”. So in that sense we might imagine that causality too only exists in our imagination.
But at least in the Pearlian paradigm, it’s actually the opposite way around. You start with some causal (dynamical) system, and then counterfactuals are defined to be made-up/”mutilated” versions of that system. The reason we use counterfactuals in the Pearlian paradigm is because they are a convenient interface for “querying” the aggregated properties of causality.
I’d argue that there is some real underlying causality that generates the universe. Though it’s easy to be comfused about this, because we do not have direct access to this causality; instead we always think about massively-simplified carricatural models, which boil the enormous complexity of reality down into something manageable.
I was thinking about the question “Why don’t agents construct crazy counterfactuals?”, and decided that I wanted a clearer idea of what crazy counterfactuals would look like in the case of evolution. As in, if you asked someone who had a crazy set of counterfactuals what would have happened if some organism had had some different DNA, what would they answer?
Okay, that makes more sense now! I’ll try to circle back and take a look at your original comment again when I have time.
I think perhaps one distinction that needs to be made is between “counterfactuals exist only in our imagination” and “causality exist only in our imagination”.
Counterfactuals definitely exist only in our imagination. We’re literally making up some modified version of the world, and then extrapolating its imaginary consequences.
Often, we might define causality in terms of counterfactuals; “X causes Y if Y has a counterfactual dependence on X”. So in that sense we might imagine that causality too only exists in our imagination.
But at least in the Pearlian paradigm, it’s actually the opposite way around. You start with some causal (dynamical) system, and then counterfactuals are defined to be made-up/”mutilated” versions of that system. The reason we use counterfactuals in the Pearlian paradigm is because they are a convenient interface for “querying” the aggregated properties of causality.
I’d argue that there is some real underlying causality that generates the universe. Though it’s easy to be comfused about this, because we do not have direct access to this causality; instead we always think about massively-simplified carricatural models, which boil the enormous complexity of reality down into something manageable.
Yeah, sounds like a plausible theory.