My entry. Ultimately I’m not sure whether I agree or disagree with your point, but I hope I’ve bought up some valuable things.
I’m not sure how strong you are in physics; the “Causality is real, counterfactuals are not” section is a brief summary of some fairly abstract and general properties of physics, so we might need to discuss it further in the comments if they do not immediately ring true to you.
Thanks for your submission. I’m still thinking about it, but I really appreciated how your entry engaged with the topic.
Yeah, I did at one point have a brief passing thought that you could make an argument along the lines you followed (that counterfactuals are a construction, but that they are built on top of underlying rules of the universe which have a real existence). Ideally, I would have thought through this line of thought before writing The Nature of Counterfactuals, but I lack the patience to spend a long time polishing before I release a post, so I mentally tagged it as something to think more about later.
I guess one reason why I might have tagged this as a “latter” thought is that I’m still trying to figure out my way around the debate between those who believe that the universe has laws vs. the more Humean perspective that things just are.
Thanks for developing this perspective. At the very least, it’ll provide a more solid target for me to engage with (vs. the vague intuition I had that an argument along these lines might be viable), but it’s also possible that I may come to agree with it after I’ve thought it through.
I’m not familiar with Hume’s philosophy, but the idea that “things just are” without being restricted to follow some patterns/laws seems to lose badly in a Bayesian way to theories which accept the laws that exist.
My entry. Ultimately I’m not sure whether I agree or disagree with your point, but I hope I’ve bought up some valuable things.
I’m not sure how strong you are in physics; the “Causality is real, counterfactuals are not” section is a brief summary of some fairly abstract and general properties of physics, so we might need to discuss it further in the comments if they do not immediately ring true to you.
Thanks for your submission. I’m still thinking about it, but I really appreciated how your entry engaged with the topic.
Yeah, I did at one point have a brief passing thought that you could make an argument along the lines you followed (that counterfactuals are a construction, but that they are built on top of underlying rules of the universe which have a real existence). Ideally, I would have thought through this line of thought before writing The Nature of Counterfactuals, but I lack the patience to spend a long time polishing before I release a post, so I mentally tagged it as something to think more about later.
I guess one reason why I might have tagged this as a “latter” thought is that I’m still trying to figure out my way around the debate between those who believe that the universe has laws vs. the more Humean perspective that things just are.
Thanks for developing this perspective. At the very least, it’ll provide a more solid target for me to engage with (vs. the vague intuition I had that an argument along these lines might be viable), but it’s also possible that I may come to agree with it after I’ve thought it through.
I’m not familiar with Hume’s philosophy, but the idea that “things just are” without being restricted to follow some patterns/laws seems to lose badly in a Bayesian way to theories which accept the laws that exist.
Perhaps, I’ve only heard them vaguely, second-hand, so I’m reluctant to take a position on this yet.