breckes

• breckes 18 Mar 2012 18:57 UTC

  1 point

  on: Cau­sa­tion, Prob­a­bil­ity and Objectivity

  Do you know Jon Williamson’s work? It seems to give an answer to your question (but I’ve not read it yet). Here’s the first paragraph of Section 9.1 “Mental yet Objective” of his book “Bayesian Nets and Causality”:

  Epistemic causality embodies the following position. The causal relation is mental rather than physical: a causal structure is part of an agent’s representation of the world, just as a belief function is, and causal claims do not directly supervene on mind-independent features of the world. But causality is objective rather than subjective: some causal structures are more warranted than others on the basis of the agent’s background knowledge, so if two people disagree about what causes what, one may be right and the other wrong. Thus epistemic causality sits between a wholly subjective mental account and a physical account of causality, just as objective Bayesianism sits between strict subjectivism and physical probability.

  Here’s a link to his papers on causality. At least the fifth, “Causality”, contains an introduction to epistemic causality.

• breckes 16 Jan 2012 21:08 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Grognor’s comment on: link to a Feyn­man video (and a 2nd (dis­tantly re­lated) video)

  In fact this talk and the others in the same series have been transcribed and published as a book: “The character of physical law”; here is a direct pdf link.

• breckes 1 Oct 2011 22:10 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Ed­ward Nel­son claims proof of in­con­sis­tency in Peano Arithmetic

  On the FOM list, he writes:

  Terrence Tao, at http://​​golem.ph.utexas.edu/​​category/​​2011/​​09/​​ and independently Daniel Tausk (private communication) have found an irreparable error in my outline. (...)

  (...) I withdraw my claim.

  The consistency of P remains an open problem.

• breckes 27 Sep 2011 20:48 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Ed­ward Nel­son claims proof of in­con­sis­tency in Peano Arithmetic

  He gave a more detailed comment on the n-Category Café.