Ah, okay, thanks for the clarification. I did in fact interpret you as proposing an agency theory of causality; I think the following helped to mislead me in that direction:
I’m not sure it makes sense to say things like “The fine structure constant caused complex life.” Causality may be a rather parochial concept in the scheme of things and therefore we get rather confused about it when trying to extend it’s application away from the domain of potential human intervention
I think I actually wanted to refer to the preface of Pearl’s book, in particular this part:
In the last decade, owing partly to advances in graphical models, causality has undergone a major transformation: from a concept shrouded in mystery into a mathematical object with well-defined semantics and well-founded logic...Put simply, causality has been mathematized.
My implication would have been that causality is not a merely human folk-concept that makes sense only in the context of “agents”; but if you weren’t saying otherwise, this is of course moot.
So I should clarify a bit more. We can understand causality as the following: A causes B iff an intervention on A alters the value of B. The concept of ‘intervention’ is doing the work here. Agency theories reduce ‘intervention’ to possible actions of free agents. I prefer Pearl’s approach which fails to reduce the concept of intervention to non-causal concepts but a) doesn’t obviously fail to actually describe our concept of cause the way the agency approach does and b) is a lot more illuminating. However, that doesn’t mean our concept of intervention doesn’t have any element of agency to it or that the two are entirely distinct. At the least, it seems plausible our evolved understanding of causality is interconnected with our evolved concept of agency, even if causality can be discussed mathematically in isolation.
An intervention on the fine structure constant is more mysterious to me than an intervention on the velocity of a pool ball- and it isn’t necessarily just one being within my current capabilities and the other not. And for obvious reasons understanding a first cause under a manipulationist approach is really sketchy.
Ah, okay, thanks for the clarification. I did in fact interpret you as proposing an agency theory of causality; I think the following helped to mislead me in that direction:
I think I actually wanted to refer to the preface of Pearl’s book, in particular this part:
My implication would have been that causality is not a merely human folk-concept that makes sense only in the context of “agents”; but if you weren’t saying otherwise, this is of course moot.
So I should clarify a bit more. We can understand causality as the following: A causes B iff an intervention on A alters the value of B. The concept of ‘intervention’ is doing the work here. Agency theories reduce ‘intervention’ to possible actions of free agents. I prefer Pearl’s approach which fails to reduce the concept of intervention to non-causal concepts but a) doesn’t obviously fail to actually describe our concept of cause the way the agency approach does and b) is a lot more illuminating. However, that doesn’t mean our concept of intervention doesn’t have any element of agency to it or that the two are entirely distinct. At the least, it seems plausible our evolved understanding of causality is interconnected with our evolved concept of agency, even if causality can be discussed mathematically in isolation.
An intervention on the fine structure constant is more mysterious to me than an intervention on the velocity of a pool ball- and it isn’t necessarily just one being within my current capabilities and the other not. And for obvious reasons understanding a first cause under a manipulationist approach is really sketchy.