Interestingly enough I simultaneously hold that both:
a) Counterfactuals only make sense from within themselves b) Counterfactuals are grounded by being an evolutionary adaption
Given this, I just wanted to encourage you to make sure that you don’t assume that it must be a) OR b), not both, without arguing for these being mutually exclusive possibilities.
It’s possible that evolution may provide us with a notion of counterfactuals that aren’t recursively dependent upon themselves, although this would have to overcome the challenge of talking about evolution without invoking counterfactuals.
Hm, now I wonder if I should try to come up with a causally-incorrect account of evolutionary history that still makes the same distributional predictions that the causally-correct ones do. This seems like it could produce a perspective on how different counterfactual models would interpret the grounding of our counterfactuals.
Because ultimately evolution is just a feature of the universe that any theory must account for, whether it makes causally correct predictions or not.
Update: coming up with an alternative account of the causality involved in evolutionary history is actually… Really hard? Which of course is to be expected because I’m essentially trying to come up with a false theory that can account for a real phenomenon. But I think there might be something to be learned about the nature of causality from the difficulty of coming up with alternative causal explanations for evolutionary history, even though any set of mere observations should in theory be able to have an infinitude of causal explanations.
Aha, I think I’ve got it! Assuming “reasonable” theories, there is only one notion of causality that allows you to talk about the causal effects of an organism’s genetics. Lemme explain:
One way we could create incorrect causal accounts of evolution would be to break various physical symmetries. Just because a ball falls to the ground when I drop it does not mean it would have fallen to the ground when if it had been dropped elsewhere; thus maybe our universe is extremely causally unusual, because it just happens to “thread the needle” between an infinitude of states where the laws of nature would have been entirely different.
The above sort of approach would permit pretty much any kind of counterfactual, but it would also be completely unable to explain why our universe just happens to thread the needle so perfectly.
(One might imagine that one could explain it with a “common cause” model, since after all confounding is the big alternative to direct causal effects. However, the common cause would have to encode the entire trajectory of our universe, which is an enormous amount of information; this just makes the problem recursive, in that one then needs to come up with a causal model to explain this information.)
So an account which breaks the equational laws of physics needs to appeal to a leap of faith on the order of all of the complexity of the entire universe’s trajectory, which seems “unreasonable” to me—if nothing else, it doesn’t seem computationally viable to represent such accounts.
But the laws of physics can be seen as non-causal equations, rather than as causal effects; generally they’re directly reversible, and even when they are not, they are still bijective and volume-preserving. That is, you can take any physical state and extrapolate it backwards, not just forwards. And you can also take a complicated jumble of pieces of physicals states across different times, and find trajectories that trace through them.
So you could, for instance, pick the state of the universe right now, and consider the causal model that reverses time; your counterfactuals when changing a variable would yield the universe trajectory that ends up in the modified state, rather than the universe trajectory that results from the modified state. This only has two problems, a minor one and a major one.
The minor problem is that this would break thermodynamics and with it, make most counterfactuals useless; any “backwards counterfactual” would put you on a trajectory where the past is not lower entropy than the future, because the reason entropy is increasing is because we started out in low entropy and most states are high entropy; it’s not possible to apply a counterfactual to a state and still have it extrapolate backwards to something low-entropy. (… I believe?)
But the major problem is that this would break counterfactuals with respect to genes. That is, in this physically-backwards model, an organism’s genes are not determined by what it inherits at conception, but rather by an entropic common-cause conspiracy that happens as it “undecays from death” and its genes “magically” assemble in each of its cells. Since the genes at conception would now be a common consequence rather than a common cause of the organism, you can no longer talk about the effects on the organism of switching out its genes at conception.
But, you might think there is a solution to this: Instead of picking a timeslice or something similar to that, you could pick each organism’s genes at the moment of its conception (combined with some arbitrary extra info to make it pick out a unique universe trajectory), and have the universe grow causally from there.
I think this also soooorta breaks counterfactuals with respect to genes, but not as badly as before. Specifically, counterfactuals with respect to currently existing organism’s genes work just fine. But if you do a counterfactual with respect to them, then I think that would lead to there being new organisms not previously accounted for, and I think counterfactuals with respect to these new organism’s genes would be just as broken as if you had done backwards causality. So here, you end up with a symmetry broken; counterfactuals with respect to the original organisms end up working differently than counterfactuals with respect to the new organisms.
I’m kind of confused here. I can understand individual sentences, but not where you’re going as a whole. So your aim here is to figure out why causality is forwards and not backwards? If not, what do you mean by there only being one notion of causality that allows threading the needle?
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.
Interestingly enough I simultaneously hold that both:
a) Counterfactuals only make sense from within themselves
b) Counterfactuals are grounded by being an evolutionary adaption
Given this, I just wanted to encourage you to make sure that you don’t assume that it must be a) OR b), not both, without arguing for these being mutually exclusive possibilities.
It’s possible that evolution may provide us with a notion of counterfactuals that aren’t recursively dependent upon themselves, although this would have to overcome the challenge of talking about evolution without invoking counterfactuals.
Anyway, looking forward to reading your post.
Hm, now I wonder if I should try to come up with a causally-incorrect account of evolutionary history that still makes the same distributional predictions that the causally-correct ones do. This seems like it could produce a perspective on how different counterfactual models would interpret the grounding of our counterfactuals.
Because ultimately evolution is just a feature of the universe that any theory must account for, whether it makes causally correct predictions or not.
Update: coming up with an alternative account of the causality involved in evolutionary history is actually… Really hard? Which of course is to be expected because I’m essentially trying to come up with a false theory that can account for a real phenomenon. But I think there might be something to be learned about the nature of causality from the difficulty of coming up with alternative causal explanations for evolutionary history, even though any set of mere observations should in theory be able to have an infinitude of causal explanations.
Aha, I think I’ve got it! Assuming “reasonable” theories, there is only one notion of causality that allows you to talk about the causal effects of an organism’s genetics. Lemme explain:
One way we could create incorrect causal accounts of evolution would be to break various physical symmetries. Just because a ball falls to the ground when I drop it does not mean it would have fallen to the ground when if it had been dropped elsewhere; thus maybe our universe is extremely causally unusual, because it just happens to “thread the needle” between an infinitude of states where the laws of nature would have been entirely different.
The above sort of approach would permit pretty much any kind of counterfactual, but it would also be completely unable to explain why our universe just happens to thread the needle so perfectly.
(One might imagine that one could explain it with a “common cause” model, since after all confounding is the big alternative to direct causal effects. However, the common cause would have to encode the entire trajectory of our universe, which is an enormous amount of information; this just makes the problem recursive, in that one then needs to come up with a causal model to explain this information.)
So an account which breaks the equational laws of physics needs to appeal to a leap of faith on the order of all of the complexity of the entire universe’s trajectory, which seems “unreasonable” to me—if nothing else, it doesn’t seem computationally viable to represent such accounts.
But the laws of physics can be seen as non-causal equations, rather than as causal effects; generally they’re directly reversible, and even when they are not, they are still bijective and volume-preserving. That is, you can take any physical state and extrapolate it backwards, not just forwards. And you can also take a complicated jumble of pieces of physicals states across different times, and find trajectories that trace through them.
So you could, for instance, pick the state of the universe right now, and consider the causal model that reverses time; your counterfactuals when changing a variable would yield the universe trajectory that ends up in the modified state, rather than the universe trajectory that results from the modified state. This only has two problems, a minor one and a major one.
The minor problem is that this would break thermodynamics and with it, make most counterfactuals useless; any “backwards counterfactual” would put you on a trajectory where the past is not lower entropy than the future, because the reason entropy is increasing is because we started out in low entropy and most states are high entropy; it’s not possible to apply a counterfactual to a state and still have it extrapolate backwards to something low-entropy. (… I believe?)
But the major problem is that this would break counterfactuals with respect to genes. That is, in this physically-backwards model, an organism’s genes are not determined by what it inherits at conception, but rather by an entropic common-cause conspiracy that happens as it “undecays from death” and its genes “magically” assemble in each of its cells. Since the genes at conception would now be a common consequence rather than a common cause of the organism, you can no longer talk about the effects on the organism of switching out its genes at conception.
But, you might think there is a solution to this: Instead of picking a timeslice or something similar to that, you could pick each organism’s genes at the moment of its conception (combined with some arbitrary extra info to make it pick out a unique universe trajectory), and have the universe grow causally from there.
I think this also soooorta breaks counterfactuals with respect to genes, but not as badly as before. Specifically, counterfactuals with respect to currently existing organism’s genes work just fine. But if you do a counterfactual with respect to them, then I think that would lead to there being new organisms not previously accounted for, and I think counterfactuals with respect to these new organism’s genes would be just as broken as if you had done backwards causality. So here, you end up with a symmetry broken; counterfactuals with respect to the original organisms end up working differently than counterfactuals with respect to the new organisms.
I’m kind of confused here. I can understand individual sentences, but not where you’re going as a whole. So your aim here is to figure out why causality is forwards and not backwards? If not, what do you mean by there only being one notion of causality that allows threading the needle?
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.