Causal explanations are a special case of acausal explanations, things like Solomonoff induction that posit hypotheses for some data/process/computation and don’t care about the actual history of the thing. Acausal explanations enable coordination, multiple things of different natures and origins simulating shared computational (partial) reasons for their content. Actual history of a thing is merely one way in which it can be explained, it doesn’t seem crucial to distinguish.
Acausal explanations can themselves be agents, their decisions jointly controlling all the things they serve as explanations for (are simulated or reasoned-about by). This way, we recover intentional stance, even for fixed data (via Solomonoff induction), and can ask how to influence coordination by incentivising the agentic acausal explanations for the things that we want to coordinate. This kind of decision relevant representation of a thing (in terms of the acausal explanations it admits) seems like the right way of establishing its meaning.
Causal explanations are a special case of acausal explanations, things like Solomonoff induction that posit hypotheses for some data/process/computation and don’t care about the actual history of the thing. Acausal explanations enable coordination, multiple things of different natures and origins simulating shared computational (partial) reasons for their content. Actual history of a thing is merely one way in which it can be explained, it doesn’t seem crucial to distinguish.
Acausal explanations can themselves be agents, their decisions jointly controlling all the things they serve as explanations for (are simulated or reasoned-about by). This way, we recover intentional stance, even for fixed data (via Solomonoff induction), and can ask how to influence coordination by incentivising the agentic acausal explanations for the things that we want to coordinate. This kind of decision relevant representation of a thing (in terms of the acausal explanations it admits) seems like the right way of establishing its meaning.