Tyrrell_McAllister comments on The Fabric of Real Things - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 October 2012 02:11AM

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Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 15 October 2012 04:28:29PM *  3 points [-]

For instance, how would an omniscient agent decide if A causes B according Eliezer's account of Pearl? I don't think they would be able to, except maybe in cases where they could count frequencies as a substitute for using probabilities.

Indeed. Eliezer motivates causal graphs by pointing to limitations in the observer: It's just not feasible to gather all of the necessary frequencies to do pure Bayesian conditionalization. But that's saying something about the observer, not about the object that the observer is talking about.

We're only talking about causal networks because of our own limitations as epistemic agents. It seems a weird leap to say that reality itself is made out of this stuff (causal networks) that we wouldn't even be thinking about if it weren't for our own imperfections.