First, notice a situation that occurs many times. Then pay attention to the ways in which things are different from one iteration to the next. At this point, and here is where causal information begins, if some of the variables represent your own behavior, you can systematically intervene in the situation by changing those behaviors. For cleanest results, contrive a controlled experiment that is analogous the the original situation.
In short, you insert causal information by intervening.
This of course requires you to construct a reference class of situations that are substantially similar to one another, but humans seem to be pretty good at that within our domains of familiarity.
By the way, thank you for explaining the underlying assumption of acyclicity. I’ve been trying to internalize the math of causal calculus and it bugged me that cyclic causes weren’t allowed. Now I understand that it is a simplification and that the calculus isn’t quite as powerful as I thought.
I don’t have an answer to my own koan, but this was one of the possibilities that I thought of:
In short, you insert causal information by intervening.
But how does one intervene? By causing some variable to take some value, while obstructing the other causal influences on it. So causal knowledge is already required before one can intervene. This is not a trivial point—if the knowledge is mistaken, the intervention may not be successful, as I pointed out with the example of trying to warm a room thermostat by placing a candle near it.
Causal knowledge is required to ensure success, but not to stumble across it. Over time, noticing (or stumbling across if you prefer) relationships between the successes stumbled upon can quickly coalesce into a model of how to intervene. Isn’t this essentially how we believe causal reasoning originated? In a sense, all DNA is information about how to intervene that, once stumbled across, persisted due to its efficacy.
I think that one bootstraps the process with contrived situations designed to appeal to ones intuitions. For example, one attempts to obtain causal information through a randomised controlled trial. You mark the obverse face of a coin “treatment” and reverse face “control” and toss the coin to “randomly” assign your patients.
Let us briefly consider the absolute zero of no a priori knowledge at all. Perhaps the coin knows the prognosis of the patient and comes down “treatment” for patients with a good prognosis, intending to mislead you into believing that the treatment is the cause of good outcomes. Maybe, maybe not. Let’s stop considering this because insanity is stalking us.
We are willing to take a stand. We know enough, a prior, to choose and operate a randomisation device and thus obtain a variable which is independent of all the others and causally connected to none of them. We don’t prove this, we assume it. When we encounter a compulsive gambler, who believes in Lady Luck who is fickle and very likely is actually messing with us via the coin, we just dismiss his hypothesis. Life is short, one has to assume that certain obvious things are actually true in order to get started, and work up from there.
My answer: Attributing causation is part of our human instincts. We are born with some desire to do it. We may develop that skill by reflecting on it during our lifetime.
(How did we humans develop that instinct? Evolution, probably. Humans who had mutated to reason about causality died less – for instance, they might have avoided drinking from a body of water after seeing something poisonous put in, because they reasoned that the poison addition would cause the water to be poisonous.)
There isn’t any better explanation. If you don’t accept the idea of causality as given, you can never explain anything. Roryokane is using causality to explain how causality originated, and that’s not a good way to go about proving the way causality works or anything but it is a good way of understanding why causality exists, or rather just accepting that we can never prove causality exists.
Our instincts are just wired to interpret causality that way, and that makes it a brute fact. You might as well claim that calling a certain color yellow and then saying it looks yellow as a result of human nature is a non-explanation, you might be technically right to do so but in that case then you’re asking for answers you’re never actually going to get.
You might as well claim that calling a certain color yellow and then saying it looks yellow as a result of human nature is a non-explanation, you might be technically right to do so but in that case then you’re asking for answers you’re never actually going to get.
That would be a non-explanation, but a better explanation is in fact possible. You can look at the way that light is turned into neural signals by the eye, and discover the existence of red-green, blue-yellow, and light-dark axes, and there you have physiological justification for six of our basic colour words. (I don’t know just how settled that story is, but it’s settled enough to be literally textbook stuff.)
So, that is what a real explanation looks like. Attributing anything to “human nature” is even more wrong than attributing it to “God”. At least we have some idea of what “God” would be if he existed, but “human nature” is a blank, a label papering over a void. How do Sebastian Thrun’s cars drive themselves? Because he has integrated self-driving into their nature. How does opium produce sleep? By its dormitive nature. How do humans distinguish colours? By their human nature.
But causality is uniquely impervious to those kind of explanations. You can explain why humans believe in causality in a physiological sense, but I didn’t think that is what you were asking for. I thought you were asking for some overall metaphysical justification for causality, and there really isn’t any. Causal reasoning works because it works, there’s no other justification to be had for it.
Koan: How, then, does the process of attributing causation get started?
My answer:
First, notice a situation that occurs many times. Then pay attention to the ways in which things are different from one iteration to the next. At this point, and here is where causal information begins, if some of the variables represent your own behavior, you can systematically intervene in the situation by changing those behaviors. For cleanest results, contrive a controlled experiment that is analogous the the original situation.
In short, you insert causal information by intervening.
This of course requires you to construct a reference class of situations that are substantially similar to one another, but humans seem to be pretty good at that within our domains of familiarity.
By the way, thank you for explaining the underlying assumption of acyclicity. I’ve been trying to internalize the math of causal calculus and it bugged me that cyclic causes weren’t allowed. Now I understand that it is a simplification and that the calculus isn’t quite as powerful as I thought.
I don’t have an answer to my own koan, but this was one of the possibilities that I thought of:
But how does one intervene? By causing some variable to take some value, while obstructing the other causal influences on it. So causal knowledge is already required before one can intervene. This is not a trivial point—if the knowledge is mistaken, the intervention may not be successful, as I pointed out with the example of trying to warm a room thermostat by placing a candle near it.
Causal knowledge is required to ensure success, but not to stumble across it. Over time, noticing (or stumbling across if you prefer) relationships between the successes stumbled upon can quickly coalesce into a model of how to intervene. Isn’t this essentially how we believe causal reasoning originated? In a sense, all DNA is information about how to intervene that, once stumbled across, persisted due to its efficacy.
I think that one bootstraps the process with contrived situations designed to appeal to ones intuitions. For example, one attempts to obtain causal information through a randomised controlled trial. You mark the obverse face of a coin “treatment” and reverse face “control” and toss the coin to “randomly” assign your patients.
Let us briefly consider the absolute zero of no a priori knowledge at all. Perhaps the coin knows the prognosis of the patient and comes down “treatment” for patients with a good prognosis, intending to mislead you into believing that the treatment is the cause of good outcomes. Maybe, maybe not. Let’s stop considering this because insanity is stalking us.
We are willing to take a stand. We know enough, a prior, to choose and operate a randomisation device and thus obtain a variable which is independent of all the others and causally connected to none of them. We don’t prove this, we assume it. When we encounter a compulsive gambler, who believes in Lady Luck who is fickle and very likely is actually messing with us via the coin, we just dismiss his hypothesis. Life is short, one has to assume that certain obvious things are actually true in order to get started, and work up from there.
My answer: Attributing causation is part of our human instincts. We are born with some desire to do it. We may develop that skill by reflecting on it during our lifetime.
(How did we humans develop that instinct? Evolution, probably. Humans who had mutated to reason about causality died less – for instance, they might have avoided drinking from a body of water after seeing something poisonous put in, because they reasoned that the poison addition would cause the water to be poisonous.)
This is a non-explanation, or rather, three non-explanations.
“Human nature does it” explains no more than “God does it”.
“It’s part of human nature because it must have been adaptive in the past” likewise. Causal reasoning works, but why does it work?
And “mutated to reason about causality” is just saying “genes did it”, which is still not an advance on “God did it”.
There isn’t any better explanation. If you don’t accept the idea of causality as given, you can never explain anything. Roryokane is using causality to explain how causality originated, and that’s not a good way to go about proving the way causality works or anything but it is a good way of understanding why causality exists, or rather just accepting that we can never prove causality exists.
Our instincts are just wired to interpret causality that way, and that makes it a brute fact. You might as well claim that calling a certain color yellow and then saying it looks yellow as a result of human nature is a non-explanation, you might be technically right to do so but in that case then you’re asking for answers you’re never actually going to get.
That would be a non-explanation, but a better explanation is in fact possible. You can look at the way that light is turned into neural signals by the eye, and discover the existence of red-green, blue-yellow, and light-dark axes, and there you have physiological justification for six of our basic colour words. (I don’t know just how settled that story is, but it’s settled enough to be literally textbook stuff.)
So, that is what a real explanation looks like. Attributing anything to “human nature” is even more wrong than attributing it to “God”. At least we have some idea of what “God” would be if he existed, but “human nature” is a blank, a label papering over a void. How do Sebastian Thrun’s cars drive themselves? Because he has integrated self-driving into their nature. How does opium produce sleep? By its dormitive nature. How do humans distinguish colours? By their human nature.
But causality is uniquely impervious to those kind of explanations. You can explain why humans believe in causality in a physiological sense, but I didn’t think that is what you were asking for. I thought you were asking for some overall metaphysical justification for causality, and there really isn’t any. Causal reasoning works because it works, there’s no other justification to be had for it.