You state in the first comment that they can be given causal justification. As far as I understand you argue with covariances above. Can you elaborate on what this causal justification is?
In a causal universe, if you observe things in different places that correlate with each other, they must have a common cause. That’s the principle VAEs/triplet losses/etc. can be understood as exploiting.
Right, but Reichenbach’s principle of common cause doesn’t tell you anything about how they are causally related? They could just be some nodes in a really large complicated causal graph. So I agree that we can assume causality somehow but we are much more interested in how the graph looks like, right?
So I agree that we can assume causality somehow but we are much more interested in how the graph looks like, right?
Not necessarily? Reality is really really big. It would be computationally infeasible to work with raw reality. Rather, you want abstractions that cover aggregate causality in a computationally practical way, throwing away most of the causal details. See also this:
You state in the first comment that they can be given causal justification. As far as I understand you argue with covariances above. Can you elaborate on what this causal justification is?
In a causal universe, if you observe things in different places that correlate with each other, they must have a common cause. That’s the principle VAEs/triplet losses/etc. can be understood as exploiting.
Right, but Reichenbach’s principle of common cause doesn’t tell you anything about how they are causally related? They could just be some nodes in a really large complicated causal graph. So I agree that we can assume causality somehow but we are much more interested in how the graph looks like, right?
Not necessarily? Reality is really really big. It would be computationally infeasible to work with raw reality. Rather, you want abstractions that cover aggregate causality in a computationally practical way, throwing away most of the causal details. See also this:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Gkv2TCbeE9jjMHXKR/reductionism-is-not-the-ultimate-tool-for-causal-inference