= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Eugine_Nier comments on Causal Reference - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (242)
Okay, I can see that I need to spell out in more detail one of the ideas here - namely that you're trying to generalize over a repeating type of causal link and that reference is pinned down by such generalization. The Sun repeatedly sends out light in individual Sun-events, electrons repeatedly go on traveling through space instead of vanishing; in a universe like ours, rather than the F(i) being whole new transition tables randomly generated each time, you see the same F(physics) over and over. This is what you can pin down and refer to. Any causal graph is acyclic and can be divided as you say; the surprising thing is that there are no F-types, no causal-link-types, which (over repeating time) descend from one kind of variable to another, without (over time) there being arrows also going back from that kind to the other. Yes, we're generalizing and inducting over time, otherwise it would make no sense to speak of thingies that "affect each other". No two individual events ever affect each other!
So in the end, we're back a frequentism.
Also, what about unique events?
Somewhat tangentially, I'd like to point out that simply bringing up relative frequencies of different types of events in discussion doesn't make one a crypto-frequentist -- the Bayesian approach doesn't bar relative frequencies from consideration. In contrast, frequentism does deprecate the use of mathematical probability as a model or representation of degrees of belief/plausibility.
Er, no, they're called Dynamic Bayes Nets. And there are no known unique events relative to the fundamental laws of physics; those would be termed "miracles". Physics repeats perfectly - there's no question of frequentism because there's no probabilities - and the higher-level complex events are one-time if you try to measure them precisely; Socrates died only once, etc.
What about some of the things going on at the LHC?