Some of these also have non-causal formulations (e.g. principles of least action), but there is always a causal description
Sort of true, although to make a “causal description” of GR one has to do unspeakable violence to the Einstein equation, which simply states that curvature = energy-momentum density. It also excludes many of the popular solutions with closed timelike curves and other anomalies. In any case, if you don’t need a causal formulation, or if you can derive it from a non-causal one, then asserting that causality is essential in physics would be reaching.
If physicists don’t explicitly talk about causes, it’s because the concept is too basic and agreed-on to need talking about.
That’s not true. Physicists do explicitly talk about causality, as in, how much of the future can be influenced by the past. Scott Aaronson recently wrote a paper about it.
All that said, however, I believe that what SC and especially WLC meant by causes in their debate was “external causes”, more in a sense of a creator, or at least fire in the equations, not the mundane idea of equations of physics being castable in a hyperbolic form. And that vague notion of external causes is what SC objected too.
A couple of points:
Sort of true, although to make a “causal description” of GR one has to do unspeakable violence to the Einstein equation, which simply states that curvature = energy-momentum density. It also excludes many of the popular solutions with closed timelike curves and other anomalies. In any case, if you don’t need a causal formulation, or if you can derive it from a non-causal one, then asserting that causality is essential in physics would be reaching.
That’s not true. Physicists do explicitly talk about causality, as in, how much of the future can be influenced by the past. Scott Aaronson recently wrote a paper about it.
All that said, however, I believe that what SC and especially WLC meant by causes in their debate was “external causes”, more in a sense of a creator, or at least fire in the equations, not the mundane idea of equations of physics being castable in a hyperbolic form. And that vague notion of external causes is what SC objected too.