This suggests that the consistent agreement between physical and statistical times [i.e., the direction of time and the direction of causality] is a byproduct of the human choice of linguistic primitives and not a feature of physical reality. … Pearl and Verma (1991) speculated that this preference represents survival pressure to facilitate prediction of future events, and that evolution has evidently ranked this facility more urgent than that of finding hindsighted explanation for current events.
Eliezer wants to go from timeless physics to causality, to computation, to anticipation. He admits being unsure about the latter two steps, but even the first step doesn’t seem to work. And besides, timeless physics (and relational physics, which timeless physics builds on top of) itself is highly speculative and problematic. Is the intention to actually convince us of the correctness of these ideas, or just to make us “think outside the box” and realize that these possibilities exist?
Nick, here’s what Judea Pearl wrote on this topic. On page 59 of his book:
This suggests that the consistent agreement between physical and statistical times [i.e., the direction of time and the direction of causality] is a byproduct of the human choice of linguistic primitives and not a feature of physical reality. … Pearl and Verma (1991) speculated that this preference represents survival pressure to facilitate prediction of future events, and that evolution has evidently ranked this facility more urgent than that of finding hindsighted explanation for current events.
Eliezer wants to go from timeless physics to causality, to computation, to anticipation. He admits being unsure about the latter two steps, but even the first step doesn’t seem to work. And besides, timeless physics (and relational physics, which timeless physics builds on top of) itself is highly speculative and problematic. Is the intention to actually convince us of the correctness of these ideas, or just to make us “think outside the box” and realize that these possibilities exist?