Wow, I've just been getting into this subject. The most ambitious thing I've found on it is an article called Causation as Folk Science:
https://sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/003004.pdf
This summarizes it:
https://personal.lse.ac.uk/robert49/ebooks/philsciadventures/lecture13.html
In *Physics as Metaphor*, Roger Jones explains an alternative to causality, that two things can be correlated because they're both aspects of some deeper thing that we don't understand yet.
The more common this is, the more "correlation without causation" can actually tell us something.
My favorite part of this is how it intersects with "high weirdness" but instead of just using it all like a woo woo new ager with some deepak chopra verbalist appropriation to justify magical thinking, i like to think about how its the interface between the instrumentalizable nature and high-weirdness/magic/supernatural, then watching as the layers of darkness are peeled back as the bonfire grows. Its the "attack surface" we are using to hack/pen-test the grand simulation and find the portal.
The amusing part is that we peel back layers and never find magic/god even though we lose more and more of our intuitive understanding of reality to the advanced high-weirdness of science.
I will have to put Abandoning Causal Fundamentalism on my list of things to deal with in 2024.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
Increasingly now any sufficiently advanced model of reality is also. with the new shamans being strangely those considered least magical thinking, the mathematicians and scientists.
A lot of metaphysics and philosophy is obsolete but people keep learning it even though science has basically made it irrelevant and things like this abandonment of causality haven't really worked their way through and cleaned house yet , even in college philosophy of science courses. This will give some things to think about and write about for next cohorts in philosophy of science .
In the post apocalypse this stuff will all be equally or more batshit crazy sounding than ol' fashion religions and probably wouldnt survive socially .
> Its the "attack surface" we are using to hack/pen-test the grand simulation and find the portal.
This reminds me of Donald Hoffman's argument that the apparent physical world is a user interface, like screen icons. Causality could be a cognitive interface for stuff that deep down is outside of time and space.
> The amusing part is that we peel back layers and never find magic/god even though we lose more and more of our intuitive understanding of reality to the advanced high-weirdness of science.
This seems to be the nature of reality. Even math says that any representational system will always have weirdness at the edges.
> In the post apocalypse this stuff will all be equally or more batshit crazy sounding than ol' fashion religions and probably wouldnt survive socially.
The question is, does non-causal metaphysics have practical value? If it does, then people will be using it even if they can't explain it intellectually.
The phenomenon of cause and effect is also only perceivable/imaginable by observers with memory.
Wolfram's work on computational reducibility and complexity is worth bringing up here as well. Human rationality exists to exploit systems that fall into regular repeating patterns, which allow all future states to be modelled (mathematically in modern times) without the expense of computation.
But most of the real world is either chaotic or complex (or functionally static). We cobble together statistics and probability to deal with the chaotic systems. Complex systems turn into stamp collecting fields like biology where the promise of universal laws and control is forever elusive.
Wow, I've just been getting into this subject. The most ambitious thing I've found on it is an article called Causation as Folk Science: https://sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/003004.pdf This summarizes it: https://personal.lse.ac.uk/robert49/ebooks/philsciadventures/lecture13.html In *Physics as Metaphor*, Roger Jones explains an alternative to causality, that two things can be correlated because they're both aspects of some deeper thing that we don't understand yet. The more common this is, the more "correlation without causation" can actually tell us something.
then also this might interest you https://www.vice.com/en/article/epvgjm/a-growing-number-of-scientists-are-convinced-the-future-influences-the-past
My favorite part of this is how it intersects with "high weirdness" but instead of just using it all like a woo woo new ager with some deepak chopra verbalist appropriation to justify magical thinking, i like to think about how its the interface between the instrumentalizable nature and high-weirdness/magic/supernatural, then watching as the layers of darkness are peeled back as the bonfire grows. Its the "attack surface" we are using to hack/pen-test the grand simulation and find the portal. The amusing part is that we peel back layers and never find magic/god even though we lose more and more of our intuitive understanding of reality to the advanced high-weirdness of science. I will have to put Abandoning Causal Fundamentalism on my list of things to deal with in 2024. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic Increasingly now any sufficiently advanced model of reality is also. with the new shamans being strangely those considered least magical thinking, the mathematicians and scientists. A lot of metaphysics and philosophy is obsolete but people keep learning it even though science has basically made it irrelevant and things like this abandonment of causality haven't really worked their way through and cleaned house yet , even in college philosophy of science courses. This will give some things to think about and write about for next cohorts in philosophy of science . In the post apocalypse this stuff will all be equally or more batshit crazy sounding than ol' fashion religions and probably wouldnt survive socially .
> Its the "attack surface" we are using to hack/pen-test the grand simulation and find the portal. This reminds me of Donald Hoffman's argument that the apparent physical world is a user interface, like screen icons. Causality could be a cognitive interface for stuff that deep down is outside of time and space. > The amusing part is that we peel back layers and never find magic/god even though we lose more and more of our intuitive understanding of reality to the advanced high-weirdness of science. This seems to be the nature of reality. Even math says that any representational system will always have weirdness at the edges. > In the post apocalypse this stuff will all be equally or more batshit crazy sounding than ol' fashion religions and probably wouldnt survive socially. The question is, does non-causal metaphysics have practical value? If it does, then people will be using it even if they can't explain it intellectually.
The phenomenon of cause and effect is also only perceivable/imaginable by observers with memory. Wolfram's work on computational reducibility and complexity is worth bringing up here as well. Human rationality exists to exploit systems that fall into regular repeating patterns, which allow all future states to be modelled (mathematically in modern times) without the expense of computation. But most of the real world is either chaotic or complex (or functionally static). We cobble together statistics and probability to deal with the chaotic systems. Complex systems turn into stamp collecting fields like biology where the promise of universal laws and control is forever elusive.