I’ll admit defeat if you give me a good explanation of causation.
Until then, the argument, more or less, stands, and is just this:
There is no good explanation of causation.
We should consider to get rid of it, since we can explain all phenomena otherwise (random events in an infinte universe as spoken of by inflationary cosmology)
the new theory is less mysterious and more parsimonous. It might help explain other puzzles that are tied to causation like mental causation and time travel paradoxes.
the fact that it predicts nothing can be seen as a downside, but should not disqualify it, since the theory can explain that very fact.
Of course this is highly counterintuitive. But here, of all places, it should be given at least serioius discussion.
Okay… I wasn’t going to downvote the post because this is the sort of thing I thought was marvelously clever when I was thirteen (so there’s hope) and you’d already been downvoted below posting threshold (so it’d be just punitive), but really?
You have provided a way the universe could be (the word my undergrad prof used for a universe with no causation was “Humeiform”, as opposed to “uniform”): there could be a lot of sub-universes arranged spatially in a single possible world, in which infinitely many universes instantiate every possible sequence of events.
You don’t have any way to explain why we should find ourselves in a sub-universe that seems to fall into miraculously well-regulated patterns, when the overwhelming likelihood if you pick a sub-universe at random is that wacky, irregular stuff will happen all the time. The anthropic principle won’t help you, because there’s no reason in this system for the observers to mostly find themselves in sub-universes with apparent regularity.
Less mysterious? “There is no reason anything should be as it is; it just is, at random” doesn’t eliminate the mystery or even push it back another level or two—it wallows in mystery, it rests its head on a pillow of mystery at night, it has a middle-management job at the mystery factory, and it watches the mystery channel on TV every day. It’s just so saturated in mystery that, having never found this much mystery in one place before, you have chosen to ignore it.
More parsimonious? Perhaps you can say “it’s all random” in fewer words than you can recite a basic physics textbook, but three words that have no evidence backing them, no way to obtain such evidence, and no connection with the world in which we find ourselves have a much lower usefulness density than any verbose, overexplained thing you care to pick out from science. Parsimony is about getting your theory as small as you can without losing information. Your theory, since it contains no information, could be expressed by chirping like a cricket.
The fact that it predicts nothing makes it practically useless and uninteresting. If you think it’s fun, it’s no skin off my nose if you believe it, but believing things because they are fun and not because they inform your behavior in an instrumentally useful way or because you have evidence for them is not what we as a community are getting at, so it should not come as a surprise to you that (given the causal regularities of this website) you were poorly received.
This comment reminds me of nothing so much as a philosophical Zero Punctuation review. In other words, you win the thread. I recommend you imagine hearing this quote in a Yahtzee voice:
“There is no reason anything should be as it is; it just is, at random” doesn’t eliminate the mystery or even push it back another level or two—it wallows in mystery, it rests its head on a pillow of mystery at night, it has a middle-management job at the mystery factory, and it watches the mystery channel on TV every day.
By your standards, we don’t have a “good explanation” for gravity, electricity, formal logic or indeed anything at all. However deep we go, you can always point your finger and say nyah nyah, you haven’t “explained” this base level! But your request would be hard to satisfy: pray tell, what conclusion could possibly follow from no premises at all? What concept is so obvious that it could be explained to an “ideal philosophy student of perfect emptiness”? None! So you’re forcing us into bottomless recursive descent instead of, you know, building more precise models and actually predicting stuff.
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work. - John Von Neumann
If you want a mathematical model of causality, read the links to Judea Pearl. But if you want a “philosophical explanation”, sorry, I can’t help you here and I doubt that anyone can.
It isn’t counterintuitive at all. I just think you have the physics/implications wrong. I think it probably does predict something. The anthropological effect only justifies sensing order to the extent that order was necessary for our existence. So if the only environment that mattered for the purposes of our existence was the planet Earth then we should only expect to find order on Earth. If you’re right, as we gather information about more and more remote locations we should see less and less constant conjunction. For example, I don’t think the neighboring galaxies perfectly obeying the laws of gravity is necessary for our continued existence—so that order cannot be explained away with an appeal to the anthropic principle.
More importantly though, inflation does not predict that in an infinite universe there will be a finite region that contains every modally possible configuration. The possible configurations are constrained by the laws of physics. Indeed, you can’t predict inflation unless you assume some (all?) of those laws are working throughout the universe. I think accepting inflation requires you to accept some universal laws of physics. As such, your theory is implicitly denied by inflation.
the fact that it predicts nothing can be seen as a downside, but should not disqualify it, since the theory can explain that very fact.
If that doesn’t disqualify it, then I propose the following “Divergent Theory”, defined as follows:
Everything is Divergent Theory.
Divergent Theory predicts Divergent Theory, thus Divergent Theory predicts everything.
The fact that Divergent Theory predicts everything means it predicts nothing. This can be seen as a downside, but should not disqualify it, since the theory can explain that very fact.
Everybody,
I’ll admit defeat if you give me a good explanation of causation. Until then, the argument, more or less, stands, and is just this:
There is no good explanation of causation. We should consider to get rid of it, since we can explain all phenomena otherwise (random events in an infinte universe as spoken of by inflationary cosmology)
the new theory is less mysterious and more parsimonous. It might help explain other puzzles that are tied to causation like mental causation and time travel paradoxes.
the fact that it predicts nothing can be seen as a downside, but should not disqualify it, since the theory can explain that very fact.
Of course this is highly counterintuitive. But here, of all places, it should be given at least serioius discussion.
Okay… I wasn’t going to downvote the post because this is the sort of thing I thought was marvelously clever when I was thirteen (so there’s hope) and you’d already been downvoted below posting threshold (so it’d be just punitive), but really?
You have provided a way the universe could be (the word my undergrad prof used for a universe with no causation was “Humeiform”, as opposed to “uniform”): there could be a lot of sub-universes arranged spatially in a single possible world, in which infinitely many universes instantiate every possible sequence of events.
You don’t have any way to explain why we should find ourselves in a sub-universe that seems to fall into miraculously well-regulated patterns, when the overwhelming likelihood if you pick a sub-universe at random is that wacky, irregular stuff will happen all the time. The anthropic principle won’t help you, because there’s no reason in this system for the observers to mostly find themselves in sub-universes with apparent regularity.
Less mysterious? “There is no reason anything should be as it is; it just is, at random” doesn’t eliminate the mystery or even push it back another level or two—it wallows in mystery, it rests its head on a pillow of mystery at night, it has a middle-management job at the mystery factory, and it watches the mystery channel on TV every day. It’s just so saturated in mystery that, having never found this much mystery in one place before, you have chosen to ignore it.
More parsimonious? Perhaps you can say “it’s all random” in fewer words than you can recite a basic physics textbook, but three words that have no evidence backing them, no way to obtain such evidence, and no connection with the world in which we find ourselves have a much lower usefulness density than any verbose, overexplained thing you care to pick out from science. Parsimony is about getting your theory as small as you can without losing information. Your theory, since it contains no information, could be expressed by chirping like a cricket.
The fact that it predicts nothing makes it practically useless and uninteresting. If you think it’s fun, it’s no skin off my nose if you believe it, but believing things because they are fun and not because they inform your behavior in an instrumentally useful way or because you have evidence for them is not what we as a community are getting at, so it should not come as a surprise to you that (given the causal regularities of this website) you were poorly received.
This comment reminds me of nothing so much as a philosophical Zero Punctuation review. In other words, you win the thread. I recommend you imagine hearing this quote in a Yahtzee voice:
Judea Pearl shakes his head sadly at you.
well said
Hey, we’re giving your ideas serious discussion.
By your standards, we don’t have a “good explanation” for gravity, electricity, formal logic or indeed anything at all. However deep we go, you can always point your finger and say nyah nyah, you haven’t “explained” this base level! But your request would be hard to satisfy: pray tell, what conclusion could possibly follow from no premises at all? What concept is so obvious that it could be explained to an “ideal philosophy student of perfect emptiness”? None! So you’re forcing us into bottomless recursive descent instead of, you know, building more precise models and actually predicting stuff.
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work. - John Von Neumann
If you want a mathematical model of causality, read the links to Judea Pearl. But if you want a “philosophical explanation”, sorry, I can’t help you here and I doubt that anyone can.
It isn’t counterintuitive at all. I just think you have the physics/implications wrong. I think it probably does predict something. The anthropological effect only justifies sensing order to the extent that order was necessary for our existence. So if the only environment that mattered for the purposes of our existence was the planet Earth then we should only expect to find order on Earth. If you’re right, as we gather information about more and more remote locations we should see less and less constant conjunction. For example, I don’t think the neighboring galaxies perfectly obeying the laws of gravity is necessary for our continued existence—so that order cannot be explained away with an appeal to the anthropic principle.
More importantly though, inflation does not predict that in an infinite universe there will be a finite region that contains every modally possible configuration. The possible configurations are constrained by the laws of physics. Indeed, you can’t predict inflation unless you assume some (all?) of those laws are working throughout the universe. I think accepting inflation requires you to accept some universal laws of physics. As such, your theory is implicitly denied by inflation.
If that doesn’t disqualify it, then I propose the following “Divergent Theory”, defined as follows:
Everything is Divergent Theory.
Divergent Theory predicts Divergent Theory, thus Divergent Theory predicts everything.
The fact that Divergent Theory predicts everything means it predicts nothing. This can be seen as a downside, but should not disqualify it, since the theory can explain that very fact.