RichardKennaway comments on Causal Diagrams and Causal Models - Less Wrong

61 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 October 2012 09:49PM

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Comment author: RichardKennaway 15 October 2012 01:18:13PM 2 points [-]

You might as well claim that calling a certain color yellow and then saying it looks yellow as a result of human nature is a non-explanation, you might be technically right to do so but in that case then you're asking for answers you're never actually going to get.

That would be a non-explanation, but a better explanation is in fact possible. You can look at the way that light is turned into neural signals by the eye, and discover the existence of red-green, blue-yellow, and light-dark axes, and there you have physiological justification for six of our basic colour words. (I don't know just how settled that story is, but it's settled enough to be literally textbook stuff.)

So, that is what a real explanation looks like. Attributing anything to "human nature" is even more wrong than attributing it to "God". At least we have some idea of what "God" would be if he existed, but "human nature" is a blank, a label papering over a void. How do Sebastian Thrun's cars drive themselves? Because he has integrated self-driving into their nature. How does opium produce sleep? By its dormitive nature. How do humans distinguish colours? By their human nature.

Comment author: chaosmosis 15 October 2012 06:59:16PM *  1 point [-]

But causality is uniquely impervious to those kind of explanations. You can explain why humans believe in causality in a physiological sense, but I didn't think that is what you were asking for. I thought you were asking for some overall metaphysical justification for causality, and there really isn't any. Causal reasoning works because it works, there's no other justification to be had for it.