Well, if I may take up Bundle’s question on his behalf, Eliezer said, in the article to which these are comments:
“A universe is a connected fabric of causes and effects.”
and
Does the idea that everything is made of causes and effects meaningfully constrain experience? Can you coherently say how reality might look, if our universe did not have the kind of structure that appears in a causal model?
Where I take the second quote to imply an endorsement on Eliezer’s part of the claim ‘everything is made of causes and effects’.
Also, what work is “actually” doing in that sentence?
I don’t know, I was quoting (without making that clear) Bundle’s phrase.
Where I take the second quote to imply an endorsement on Eliezer’s part of the claim ‘everything is made of causes and effects’.
That was from a koan, and a good one at that. How would one perform an experiment to determine whether the universe operates on causes and effects? It suggests there might be something wrong with the conception that the universe is “made of” causes and effects.
Maybe, though given the introduction to the article, I think the koan is about the question ‘what counts as meaningful?‘, not ‘is the universe made of causal relations’.
But, perhaps more interesting than settling the question of whether or not Eliezer thinks the universe is made of causal relations, we can ask “Is the thesis that the universe is made of causal relations inconsistant with Eliezer’s (and your) views on the objectivity of causal relations?′
Given your responses, my dialectical instincts are telling me you think the answer to the above is ‘Yes, they are inconsistant, and it is false that the universe is made of causal relations’. Is that so?
Given your responses, my dialectical instincts are telling me you think the answer to the above is ‘Yes, they are [inconsistent], and it is false that the universe is made of causal relations’. Is that so?
Yes. I thought I actually made that explicit. At least, it’s not “made of” causal relations any more than it’s “made of” probability.
Thanks. I think Eliezer is endorsing the ‘causal relations are fundamental’ reading, and that this apparently conflicts with the idea that causality is the tool of a limited observer. I think he’s likely to see these as reconcilable in some way. That, at any rate, is my prediction.
Well, if I may take up Bundle’s question on his behalf, Eliezer said, in the article to which these are comments:
and
Where I take the second quote to imply an endorsement on Eliezer’s part of the claim ‘everything is made of causes and effects’.
I don’t know, I was quoting (without making that clear) Bundle’s phrase.
That was from a koan, and a good one at that. How would one perform an experiment to determine whether the universe operates on causes and effects? It suggests there might be something wrong with the conception that the universe is “made of” causes and effects.
Maybe, though given the introduction to the article, I think the koan is about the question ‘what counts as meaningful?‘, not ‘is the universe made of causal relations’.
But, perhaps more interesting than settling the question of whether or not Eliezer thinks the universe is made of causal relations, we can ask “Is the thesis that the universe is made of causal relations inconsistant with Eliezer’s (and your) views on the objectivity of causal relations?′
Given your responses, my dialectical instincts are telling me you think the answer to the above is ‘Yes, they are inconsistant, and it is false that the universe is made of causal relations’. Is that so?
Yes. I thought I actually made that explicit. At least, it’s not “made of” causal relations any more than it’s “made of” probability.
Thanks. I think Eliezer is endorsing the ‘causal relations are fundamental’ reading, and that this apparently conflicts with the idea that causality is the tool of a limited observer. I think he’s likely to see these as reconcilable in some way. That, at any rate, is my prediction.
My prediction is that he never noticed this problem before.
My prediction is that he will not respond to this line of criticism within the next three days.