My first answer is that the idea of ‘interventions’ comes from causality- if I don’t like being wet, and it’s raining, I can deploy an umbrella, and that will make me not get wet(ter) from the rain. The idea that everything is made of causes and effects meaningfully constrains actions, because an agent that understands causes can manipulate reality better than an agent which doesn’t understand causes.
But that’s just a further elaboration of what reality looks like now. It’s difficult for me to imagine a world without causality- and I don’t think that’s just because I (like most humans) am a deeply causal thinker. Causal models are just math, and so they can be imagined just like multiple spatial geometries can be imagined, regardless of what the universe’s real shape is. I think you would need to have a universe in which no causal models could be justified by the data, which would be an incredibly strange place.
And, actually, by the definition of universe you use in the post, a universe without a causal structure would just be a single node, forever alone.
My first answer is that the idea of ‘interventions’ comes from causality- if I don’t like being wet, and it’s raining, I can deploy an umbrella, and that will make me not get wet(ter) from the rain. The idea that everything is made of causes and effects meaningfully constrains actions, because an agent that understands causes can manipulate reality better than an agent which doesn’t understand causes.
But that’s just a further elaboration of what reality looks like now. It’s difficult for me to imagine a world without causality- and I don’t think that’s just because I (like most humans) am a deeply causal thinker. Causal models are just math, and so they can be imagined just like multiple spatial geometries can be imagined, regardless of what the universe’s real shape is. I think you would need to have a universe in which no causal models could be justified by the data, which would be an incredibly strange place.
And, actually, by the definition of universe you use in the post, a universe without a causal structure would just be a single node, forever alone.