Comment author: breckes 18 March 2012 06:57:01PM 1 point [-]

Do you know Jon Williamson's work? It seems to give an answer to your question (but I've not read it yet). Here's the first paragraph of Section 9.1 “Mental yet Objective” of his book “Bayesian Nets and Causality”:

Epistemic causality embodies the following position. The causal relation is mental rather than physical: a causal structure is part of an agent’s representation of the world, just as a belief function is, and causal claims do not directly supervene on mind-independent features of the world. But causality is objective rather than subjective: some causal structures are more warranted than others on the basis of the agent’s background knowledge, so if two people disagree about what causes what, one may be right and the other wrong. Thus epistemic causality sits between a wholly subjective mental account and a physical account of causality, just as objective Bayesianism sits between strict subjectivism and physical probability.

Here's a link to his papers on causality. At least the fifth, “Causality”, contains an introduction to epistemic causality.

Comment author: Grognor 16 January 2012 08:53:02PM *  0 points [-]

This video is great.

[There was a comment here about transcribing, which I have removed.]

Comment author: breckes 16 January 2012 09:08:53PM 3 points [-]

In fact this talk and the others in the same series have been transcribed and published as a book: “The character of physical law”; here is a direct pdf link.

Comment author: gwern 01 October 2011 05:52:12PM 3 points [-]

Is that a withdrawal of the entire approach or just one part of it?

Comment author: breckes 01 October 2011 10:10:48PM 8 points [-]

On the FOM list, he writes:

Terrence Tao, at http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2011/09/ and independently Daniel Tausk (private communication) have found an irreparable error in my outline. (...)

(...) I withdraw my claim.

The consistency of P remains an open problem.

Comment author: [deleted] 27 September 2011 05:12:13PM *  9 points [-]

Specifically, Tao's comment:

I have read through the outline. Even though it is too sketchy to count as a full proof, I think I can reconstruct enough of the argument to figure out where the error in reasoning is going to be. Basically, in order for Chaitin's theorem (10) to hold, the Kolmogorov complexity of the consistent theory T has to be less than l. But when one arithmetises (10) at a given rank and level on page 5, the complexity of the associated theory will depend on the complexity of that rank and level; because there are going to be more than 2^l ranks and levels involved in the iterative argument, at some point the complexity must exceed l, at which point Chaitin's theorem cannot be arithmetised for this value of l.

(One can try to outrun this issue by arithmetising using the full strength of Q_0^*, rather than a restricted version of this language in which the rank and level are bounded; but then one would need the consistency of Q_0^* to be provable inside Q_0^*, which is not possible by the second incompleteness theorem.)

I suppose it is possible that this obstruction could be evaded by a suitably clever trick, but personally I think that the FTL neutrino confirmation will arrive first.

He's such a glorious mathematician. <3

Comment author: breckes 27 September 2011 08:48:14PM 6 points [-]

He gave a more detailed comment on the n-Category Café.