“Actually” isn’t intended in any sense except emphasis and to express that Eliezer’s view is contrary to my expectations (for instance, “I thought it was a worm, but it was actually a small snake”).
Eliezer does seem to be endorsing the statement that “everything is made of causes and effects”, but I am unsure of his exact position. The maximalist interpretation of this would be, “in the correct complete theory of everything, I expect that causation will be basic, one of the things to which other laws are reduced. It will not be the case that causation is explained in terms of laws that make no mention of causation”. This view I strongly disagree with, not least because I generally think something has gone wrong with one’s philosophy if it predicts something about fundamental physics (like Kant’s a priori deduction that the universe is Euclidean).
I suspect this is not Eliezer’s position, though I am unsure because of his “Timeless Physics” post, which I disagree with (as I lean towards four-dimensionalism) but which seems consonant with the above position in that both are consistent with time being non-fundamental. If he means something weaker, though, I don’t know what it is.
Yes, I think Timeless Physics puts you on the right track, and it should be pretty clear that “causality” doesn’t apply so much at the level of comparing possible states of configuration space, aside from perhaps metaphorically to point to which ones are adjacent to which other ones.
“Actually” isn’t intended in any sense except emphasis and to express that Eliezer’s view is contrary to my expectations (for instance, “I thought it was a worm, but it was actually a small snake”).
Eliezer does seem to be endorsing the statement that “everything is made of causes and effects”, but I am unsure of his exact position. The maximalist interpretation of this would be, “in the correct complete theory of everything, I expect that causation will be basic, one of the things to which other laws are reduced. It will not be the case that causation is explained in terms of laws that make no mention of causation”. This view I strongly disagree with, not least because I generally think something has gone wrong with one’s philosophy if it predicts something about fundamental physics (like Kant’s a priori deduction that the universe is Euclidean).
I suspect this is not Eliezer’s position, though I am unsure because of his “Timeless Physics” post, which I disagree with (as I lean towards four-dimensionalism) but which seems consonant with the above position in that both are consistent with time being non-fundamental. If he means something weaker, though, I don’t know what it is.
Yes, I think Timeless Physics puts you on the right track, and it should be pretty clear that “causality” doesn’t apply so much at the level of comparing possible states of configuration space, aside from perhaps metaphorically to point to which ones are adjacent to which other ones.