Decius comments on Stuff That Makes Stuff Happen - Less Wrong

51 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 October 2012 10:49AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (127)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Decius 17 October 2012 10:30:03PM 2 points [-]

Any time there's a noun, a verb, and a subject[sic], there's causality.

Counterexamples "I know this." "Rational people with the same information cannot reasonably disagree about their conclusions." "General and Special Relativity both require that observers in different reference frames measure the length of an artifact differently."

I think you might have meant is "Any time that a concrete subject takes an action with a direct object", there's causality; there's probably a more general form.

I know that the top card is either the six of spades or some variant of 'rules of poker/ranking of poker hands'. There is no 'because' in that sentence, because 'because' is a word that only has meaning in causal terms. Go ahead- test me with the nearest deck of cards.