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RichardKennaway comments on Sensation & Perception - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (15)
I disagree with your interpretation of Scott's question (that is I agree, with the first, but not the second part of your sentence). But Scott is aware of this thread, he may pipe up himself!
There are two ways interventions come up: definitionally and operationally. We may choose to define causation via interventions or not, and we may need to resort to interventions (or not..) to discover causation. A ton of modern causal inference is precisely about finding ways of avoiding having to resort to interventions while still trying to get at causation defined via interventions.
I also think a big part of Scott's question is about justifying what you believe.
Sure. Hume himself had like 3-4 definitions on his own (including his "proto-counterfactual" definition, which is fairly close to how I think about it).
I am not sure if causality is in the territory or not. I used to think "no," but now I am not sure.
I hadn't noticed that the OP is also called Scott. The Scott I intended to refer to there was Aaronson. ScottL's question doesn't mention causation, but is more general: is perception alone enough to learn everything that we learn? To which I am suggesting that no, action is also required, although I don't have a rigorous argument to that effect.
This is how humans learn causality.
I meant Aaronson, also.
Human babies may learn causality from observations, but:
(a) In this scenario the baby is the armchairian, and the parents are the omniscient Universe programmers. The parents know the baby is right in some cases, but how does the baby itself know it is right, without actually pushing things around. Armchairians aren't allowed to push things around, either to learn or to verify what they learned.
(b) I think ScottL's question is also about justifying your beliefs (I don't think it is such an easy problem). But I am (perhaps naturally) more interested in Scott Aaronson's question.
The baby is pushing things around, not being an Armchairian. That's what I intended as the point of the video. Causality is one of the earliest things we learn, even before walking and talking, and we learn it by acting and perceiving the effects.
I agree!