The question of first cause is probably a natural one for a species to ask. However, our concept of causality seems closely connected to our ability to intervene on the world and as you start talking about variables farther and farther away from plausible human intervention the concept gets strained. For example, I’m not sure it makes sense to say things like “The fine structure constant caused complex life.” Causality may be a rather parochial concept in the scheme of things and therefore we get rather confused about it when trying to extend it’s application away from the domain of potential human intervention. Hell, this might be a reason why humans have a tendency to invoke such and anthropomorphic conception of a first cause: causality may not make a lot of sense without the human-like mind element to it!
Your comment is interesting, and I agree with you that our concept of causality gets strained as we push it away from agency, and as humans we have difficulty not projecting agency onto causes. Would you mind summarizing whether your comment is a reply to something I said in particular or a general comment?
I’ve been triangulating around two problems while discussing ‘God’ concepts on Less Wrong: one of language (needing to clarify what I mean by ‘cause’, ‘God’, etc) and one of concept (can ‘God’ mean something without agency?). I’m beginning to lose confidence that these words have the abstract meanings I’m assigning them, in which case I would be happy to use different words.
I was trying to make a neutral, insightful reply to what I thought was your real point and not get distracted by the semantics of the whole ‘God’ thing.
Though I suppose I was also trying to indicate a plausible reason for why typical humans might end up ascribing agency to a first cause: a reason to avoid words with connotations of agency in discussions of first cause. If agency is somehow entangled in our concept of causation thats a limitation of the concept. It is not evidence there is an actual agent with causal control over the universe or even that such an agent is possible. And even if it was evidence for that, the complexity penalty associated with invoking agency is so great we’d have to conclude by modus tollens that there was no first cause.
“God” has enough baggage that it’s probably a good idea to avoid—at least in premises of arguments. If you conclude that some entity or event exists that you want to label “God” for personal ritual I don’t think there is necessarily anything wrong with that.
I actually intended to comment in a manipulationist/Pearlian spirit so I’m not sure what we disagree about. You may have to be more particular than linking to his entire book. To be clear, I’m not saying causality requires a human intervention or advocating any kind of agency theory of causality. I’m saying, like Pearl, that causal explanations tell us what would happen given intervention on a variable. Anthropologically, our conception of causality likely arose as we learned to make things happen, i.e. intervene. But it’s difficult to know what ‘intervention’ means in domains far from human manipulation. Inventing a human-like mind that can do that kind of intervention feels like a kind of invention that would let people feel more comfortable talking about first causes.
Ah, okay, thanks for the clarification. I did in fact interpret you as proposing an agency theory of causality; I think the following helped to mislead me in that direction:
I’m not sure it makes sense to say things like “The fine structure constant caused complex life.” Causality may be a rather parochial concept in the scheme of things and therefore we get rather confused about it when trying to extend it’s application away from the domain of potential human intervention
I think I actually wanted to refer to the preface of Pearl’s book, in particular this part:
In the last decade, owing partly to advances in graphical models, causality has undergone a major transformation: from a concept shrouded in mystery into a mathematical object with well-defined semantics and well-founded logic...Put simply, causality has been mathematized.
My implication would have been that causality is not a merely human folk-concept that makes sense only in the context of “agents”; but if you weren’t saying otherwise, this is of course moot.
So I should clarify a bit more. We can understand causality as the following: A causes B iff an intervention on A alters the value of B. The concept of ‘intervention’ is doing the work here. Agency theories reduce ‘intervention’ to possible actions of free agents. I prefer Pearl’s approach which fails to reduce the concept of intervention to non-causal concepts but a) doesn’t obviously fail to actually describe our concept of cause the way the agency approach does and b) is a lot more illuminating. However, that doesn’t mean our concept of intervention doesn’t have any element of agency to it or that the two are entirely distinct. At the least, it seems plausible our evolved understanding of causality is interconnected with our evolved concept of agency, even if causality can be discussed mathematically in isolation.
An intervention on the fine structure constant is more mysterious to me than an intervention on the velocity of a pool ball- and it isn’t necessarily just one being within my current capabilities and the other not. And for obvious reasons understanding a first cause under a manipulationist approach is really sketchy.
The question of first cause is probably a natural one for a species to ask. However, our concept of causality seems closely connected to our ability to intervene on the world and as you start talking about variables farther and farther away from plausible human intervention the concept gets strained. For example, I’m not sure it makes sense to say things like “The fine structure constant caused complex life.” Causality may be a rather parochial concept in the scheme of things and therefore we get rather confused about it when trying to extend it’s application away from the domain of potential human intervention. Hell, this might be a reason why humans have a tendency to invoke such and anthropomorphic conception of a first cause: causality may not make a lot of sense without the human-like mind element to it!
That may be true for final cause and formal cause, but efficient causality is obvious even when there is no evidence of rational minds.
Loved how the paint was explained at the end.
Your comment is interesting, and I agree with you that our concept of causality gets strained as we push it away from agency, and as humans we have difficulty not projecting agency onto causes. Would you mind summarizing whether your comment is a reply to something I said in particular or a general comment?
I’ve been triangulating around two problems while discussing ‘God’ concepts on Less Wrong: one of language (needing to clarify what I mean by ‘cause’, ‘God’, etc) and one of concept (can ‘God’ mean something without agency?). I’m beginning to lose confidence that these words have the abstract meanings I’m assigning them, in which case I would be happy to use different words.
I was trying to make a neutral, insightful reply to what I thought was your real point and not get distracted by the semantics of the whole ‘God’ thing.
Though I suppose I was also trying to indicate a plausible reason for why typical humans might end up ascribing agency to a first cause: a reason to avoid words with connotations of agency in discussions of first cause. If agency is somehow entangled in our concept of causation thats a limitation of the concept. It is not evidence there is an actual agent with causal control over the universe or even that such an agent is possible. And even if it was evidence for that, the complexity penalty associated with invoking agency is so great we’d have to conclude by modus tollens that there was no first cause.
“God” has enough baggage that it’s probably a good idea to avoid—at least in premises of arguments. If you conclude that some entity or event exists that you want to label “God” for personal ritual I don’t think there is necessarily anything wrong with that.
An understandable point of view, but see here.
I actually intended to comment in a manipulationist/Pearlian spirit so I’m not sure what we disagree about. You may have to be more particular than linking to his entire book. To be clear, I’m not saying causality requires a human intervention or advocating any kind of agency theory of causality. I’m saying, like Pearl, that causal explanations tell us what would happen given intervention on a variable. Anthropologically, our conception of causality likely arose as we learned to make things happen, i.e. intervene. But it’s difficult to know what ‘intervention’ means in domains far from human manipulation. Inventing a human-like mind that can do that kind of intervention feels like a kind of invention that would let people feel more comfortable talking about first causes.
Ah, okay, thanks for the clarification. I did in fact interpret you as proposing an agency theory of causality; I think the following helped to mislead me in that direction:
I think I actually wanted to refer to the preface of Pearl’s book, in particular this part:
My implication would have been that causality is not a merely human folk-concept that makes sense only in the context of “agents”; but if you weren’t saying otherwise, this is of course moot.
So I should clarify a bit more. We can understand causality as the following: A causes B iff an intervention on A alters the value of B. The concept of ‘intervention’ is doing the work here. Agency theories reduce ‘intervention’ to possible actions of free agents. I prefer Pearl’s approach which fails to reduce the concept of intervention to non-causal concepts but a) doesn’t obviously fail to actually describe our concept of cause the way the agency approach does and b) is a lot more illuminating. However, that doesn’t mean our concept of intervention doesn’t have any element of agency to it or that the two are entirely distinct. At the least, it seems plausible our evolved understanding of causality is interconnected with our evolved concept of agency, even if causality can be discussed mathematically in isolation.
An intervention on the fine structure constant is more mysterious to me than an intervention on the velocity of a pool ball- and it isn’t necessarily just one being within my current capabilities and the other not. And for obvious reasons understanding a first cause under a manipulationist approach is really sketchy.