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Jack comments on The Presumptuous Philosopher's Presumptuous Friend - Less Wrong
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For a bunch of people with what seems to be a Humean suspicion of metaphysics "causation" sure comes up a lot. If you think that causation is just a psychological projection onto constantly conjoined events then it isn't clear what the paradox here is.
There are non-metaphysical treatments of causality. I'm not sure if any particular interpretations are favoured around here, but they build on Bayes and they work. (I have yet to read it, but I've heard good things about Judea Pearl's Causality.)
It's a "psychological projection" inasmuch as probability itself is, but as with probability, that doesn't mean it's never a useful concept, as long as it's understood in the correct light.
Sure. But,
The way I see causal language being used doesn't suggest to me a demystified understanding of causality.
Maybe I'm being dense but it seems to me a non-metaphysical account of causality won't a priori exclude backwards causation and causality loops. In other words, even if we allow some kind of deflated causality that won't mean Newcomb's problem "makes no sense".
Oh, I wasn't agreeing with taw on that. Just responding to your association of causation with metaphysics. I don't see Omega breaking any causality, whether in a metaphysical or statistical sense.
As for excluding backwards causation and causality loops -- I'm not sure why we should necessarily want to exclude them, if a given system allows them and they're useful for explaining or predicting anything, even if they go against our more intuitive notions of causality. I was just recently thinking that backwards causality might be a good way to think about Newcomb's problem. (That idea might go down in flames, but I think the point stands that backward/cyclical causality should be allowed if they're found to be useful.)
I think we agree down the line.
I meant causation in purely physical sense. Disregarding complexity of quantum-ness, Omega can't do that as you get time loops.
I don't know what that means. Our most basic physics makes no mention of causation or even objects. There are just quantum fields with future states that can be predicted if you have knowledge of earlier states and the right equations. And no matter what "causation in a purely physical sense" means I have no idea why it prohibits an event at time t1 (Omega's predictions) from necessarily coinciding with an event at t2 (your decision).