Well, kidding aside, your argument, taken from Pearl, seems elegant. I’ll however have to read the book before I feel entitled to having an opinion on that one, as I haven’t grokked the idea, merely a faint impression of it and how it sounds healthy.
So at this point, I only have some of my own ideas and intuitions about the problem, and haven’t searched for the answers yet.
Some considerations though :
Our idea of causality is based upon a human intuition. Could it be that it is just as wrong as vitalism, time, little billiard balls bumping around, or the yet confused problem of consciousness ? That’s what would bug me if I had no good technical explanation, one provably unbiased by my prior intuitive belief about causality (otherwise there’s always the risk I’ve just been rationalizing my intuition).
Every time we observe “causality”, we really only observe correlations, and then deduce that there is something more behind those. But is that a simple explanation ? Could we devise a simpler consistent explanation to account for our observation of correlations ? As in, totally doing away with causality ? Or at the very least, redefining causality as something that doesn’t quite correspond to our folk definition of it ?
Grossly, my intuition, when I hear the word causality is something along the lines of
″ Take event A and event B, where those events are very small, such that they aren’t made of interconnected parts themselves—they are the parts, building blocks that can be used in bigger, complex systems. Place event A anywhere within the universe and time, then provided the rules of physics are the same each time we do that, and nothing interferes in, event B will always occur, with probability 1, independantly of my observing it or not.”
Ok, so could (and should ?) we say that causality is when a prior event implies a probability of one for a certain posterior event to occur ? Or else, is it then not probability 1, just an arbitrarily very high probability ?
In the latter case with less than 1 probability, then that really violates my folk notion of causality, and I don’t really see what’s causal about a thing that can capriciously choose to happen or not, even if the conditions are the same.
In the former case, I can see how that would be a very new thing, I mean, probability 1 for one event implying that another will occur ? What better, firmer foundation to build an universe upon ? It feels really, very comfortable and convenient, all too comfortable in fact.
Basically, neither of those possibilities strike me as obviously right, for those reasons and then some, the idea I have of causality is confused at best. And yet, I’d say it is not too unsophisticated or pondered as it stands.
Which makes me wonder how people who’d have put less thought in it (probably a lot of people) can deservedly feel any more comfortable with saying it exists with no afterthought (almost everyone), even as they don’t have any good explanation for it (which is a rare thing), such as perhaps the one given by Pearl.
Well, kidding aside, your argument, taken from Pearl, seems elegant. I’ll however have to read the book before I feel entitled to having an opinion on that one, as I haven’t grokked the idea, merely a faint impression of it and how it sounds healthy.
So at this point, I only have some of my own ideas and intuitions about the problem, and haven’t searched for the answers yet.
Some considerations though :
Our idea of causality is based upon a human intuition. Could it be that it is just as wrong as vitalism, time, little billiard balls bumping around, or the yet confused problem of consciousness ? That’s what would bug me if I had no good technical explanation, one provably unbiased by my prior intuitive belief about causality (otherwise there’s always the risk I’ve just been rationalizing my intuition).
Every time we observe “causality”, we really only observe correlations, and then deduce that there is something more behind those. But is that a simple explanation ? Could we devise a simpler consistent explanation to account for our observation of correlations ? As in, totally doing away with causality ? Or at the very least, redefining causality as something that doesn’t quite correspond to our folk definition of it ?
Grossly, my intuition, when I hear the word causality is something along the lines of
″ Take event A and event B, where those events are very small, such that they aren’t made of interconnected parts themselves—they are the parts, building blocks that can be used in bigger, complex systems. Place event A anywhere within the universe and time, then provided the rules of physics are the same each time we do that, and nothing interferes in, event B will always occur, with probability 1, independantly of my observing it or not.” Ok, so could (and should ?) we say that causality is when a prior event implies a probability of one for a certain posterior event to occur ? Or else, is it then not probability 1, just an arbitrarily very high probability ?
In the latter case with less than 1 probability, then that really violates my folk notion of causality, and I don’t really see what’s causal about a thing that can capriciously choose to happen or not, even if the conditions are the same.
In the former case, I can see how that would be a very new thing, I mean, probability 1 for one event implying that another will occur ? What better, firmer foundation to build an universe upon ? It feels really, very comfortable and convenient, all too comfortable in fact.
Basically, neither of those possibilities strike me as obviously right, for those reasons and then some, the idea I have of causality is confused at best. And yet, I’d say it is not too unsophisticated or pondered as it stands. Which makes me wonder how people who’d have put less thought in it (probably a lot of people) can deservedly feel any more comfortable with saying it exists with no afterthought (almost everyone), even as they don’t have any good explanation for it (which is a rare thing), such as perhaps the one given by Pearl.