fubarobfusco comments on Timeless Causality - Less Wrong

21 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 May 2008 06:45AM

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Comment author: momothefiddler 05 May 2012 12:06:07PM 0 points [-]

I've read this again (along with the rest of the Sequence up to it) and I think I have a better understanding of what it's claiming. Inverting the axis of causality would require inverting the probabilities, such that an egg reforming is more likely than an egg breaking. It would also imply that our brains contain information on the 'future' and none on the 'past', meaning all our anticipations are about what led to the current state, not where the current state will lead.

All of this is internally consistent, but I see no reason to believe it gives us a "real" direction of causality. As far as I can tell, it just tells us that the direction we calculate our probabilities is the direction we don't know.

Going from a low-entropy universe to a high-entropy universe seems more natural, but only because we calculate our probabilities in the direction of low-to-high entropy. If we based our probabilities on the same evidence perceived the opposite direction, it would be low-to-high that seemed to need universes discarded and high-to-low that seemed natural.

...right?

Comment author: fubarobfusco 05 May 2012 04:05:09PM -1 points [-]

All of this is internally consistent, but I see no reason to believe it gives us a "real" direction of causality.

What do you want out of a "real" direction of causality, other than the above?

Comment author: momothefiddler 06 May 2012 01:11:07AM 0 points [-]

Well, Eliezer seems to be claiming in this article that the low-to-high is more valid than the high-to-low, but I don't see how they're anything but both internally consistent