
Higher-level causation exists (but I wish it didn’t) - darwhy
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3294
======
ppod
Leaving aside the funny but flippant conclusion, I think this is still a bit
harsh on the causal channel capacity argument of the paper discussed. The
under-emphasised part is that _our brains and bodies_ do have an artificially
imposed uniform distribution over microstates, and that is why macro-level
causation is so useful (and often wrong) for us. Of course that might seem
obvious, and doesn't mean reductionism is false, and it's not something a
reductionist would disagree with, but I think it formalises and makes explicit
an assumption that often conceals the root of the disagreement.

The channel capacity thing provides an explanation (an excuse) for having to
settle for macrostates.

The 'normalization trick' is another important reminder that our brains are
scale-invariant. [https://xkcd.com/915/](https://xkcd.com/915/)

~~~
hcs
I don't see why "having to settle for macrostates" is anything more than the
observation that we use heuristics. Maybe because I don't understand your
statement "our brains and bodies do have an artificially imposed uniform
distribution over microstates"? The issue seems more due to the number of
states than anything about their initial distribution.

Caveat that I have read the post but not the paper.

------
nemo1618
>Maybe, as the physicist Yakir Aharonov has advocated, our universe has not
only a special, low-entropy initial state at the Big Bang, but also a
"postselected final state," toward which the outcomes of quantum measurements
get mysteriously "pulled"

This sounds a lot like Terence McKenna's "Transcendental Object at the End of
Time".

But on the whole... wow, you ever get so upset about a presidential election
that you invent a new theory of metaphysics?

~~~
mileszim
The remark on the Aharonov post-selection is weird coming from Aaronson's
usual hard adherence to known physics - postselection is relevant in the
quantum world only. For Aaronson to twist it into an argument of cosmology
seems markedly out of character.

~~~
yakult
It is, of course, a joke. He's doing a reductio ad absurdem at the end of a
tightly argued post about information theory.

It's the advantage of doing a blog post rather than a paper, I suppose.

~~~
mileszim
Good point, I liked the work he's criticizing so I think I'm currently primed
to take the post too seriously

------
latently
An interesting technicality from the post and paper is that the measure of
causal information (mutual information between the initial and final state)
bears some resemblence to the Lyapunov exponent as it is used to measure
whether a system is on the edge of chaos. When the exponent is 1 (IIRC) the
system does not diverge exponentially when the initial conditions are changed
slightly and the system is said to be on the edge of chaos and to have good
generalization ability. Anywhere else and the system is either damped or
chaotic and you don't expect "interesting" stuff to happen there, such as
higher-order "causal" effects. (seriously though, why are people so obsessed
with causality when it's clear that there is almost never one "causal"
description. let it go!)

~~~
yakult
Because sometimes there is, and when you know you can control or at least
predict the process. Sometimes this makes you mad dosh.

------
Mathnerd314
> Reverse Hollywoodism: The forces of good have every possible advantage, from
> money to expertise to knowledge to overwhelming numerical superiority. Yet
> somehow good still fumbles. Somehow a string of improbable coincidences, or
> a black swan or an orange Hitler, show up at the last moment to let
> horribleness eke out a last-minute victory, as if the universe itself had
> been rooting for horribleness all along. That’s our world.

This is kind of like Murphy's Law. Let's quote Richard Dawkins and Richard
Hand from the Wikipedia article:
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law))

> So-called laws like Murphy's law and Sod's law are nonsense because they
> require inanimate objects to have desires of their own, or else to react
> according to one's own desires. Dawkins points out that a certain class of
> events may occur all the time, but are only noticed when they become a
> nuisance. He gives as an example aircraft noise interfering with filming.
> Aircraft are in the sky all the time, but are only taken note of when they
> cause a problem. This is a form of confirmation bias whereby the
> investigator seeks out evidence to confirm his already formed ideas, but
> does not look for evidence that contradicts them.

> The law of truly large numbers should lead one to expect the kind of events
> predicted by Murphy's law to occur occasionally. Selection bias will ensure
> that those ones are remembered and the many times Murphy's law was not true
> are forgotten.

So reverse hollywoodism is really a theory on the limitations of humans in
their ability to be scientific: when humans go from the data to the trends
(stories), they ignore/distort some of the information to fit the narrative.
(See e.g. Trump's election; really not that unpredictable, given data like
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
fix/wp/2016/09/23/tr...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
fix/wp/2016/09/23/trump-is-headed-for-a-win-says-professor-whos-
predicted-30-years-of-presidential-outcomes-correctly/), but easy to miss when
reading the headlines)

------
tominous
That took a sudden turn! Normally I just go to Slate Star Codex when I want a
mixture of sparkling insight and teleological fiction -- though at least there
the fiction is clearly labelled.

Back in 2010 I made the prediction that (regardless of the truth) climate
change would look increasingly like religion by 2020. Looks like my prediction
is right on track.

~~~
yk
I strongly doubt that, even if we get a paper claiming the detection of god
tomorrow, for some reasonable definition of god. Then it would take time to
plan follow up experiments, include that into theory, work out the theological
implications, nail down parameters, etc. You know, all the stuff that climate
science did in the 80ies.

------
dwaltrip
This is an atypical post from Scott Aaronson, no?

I feel like things kind went off the deep end in the last section there.

------
albertTJames
How can this reach the first page of HN. This is not science, nor it is sound
logic.

~~~
zepto
Then you should be trivially able to provide a simple explanation of why, or a
reference to something that rebuts it.

~~~
sidlls
Not necessarily. Some articles of this sort are so skew to reason that they
defy refutation by virtue of how far out of bounds they are.

~~~
Mathnerd314
They're "not even wrong"
([http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong)),
just a waste of time

~~~
zepto
Can you say why this article is not even wrong?

------
dkarapetyan
Scott seems upset.

~~~
ianai
Bad case of the Mondays.

------
ianai
I feel like I understood 30% of what he said. Any chance at a quick refresher?

~~~
ignoramous
From what I understand, the blogger says he agrees that scientific
reductionism is false, or specifically that details abt microstates of a
system (like say, states of quantum objects in countless atoms in a system)
don't really have a say in the system's macrostates.

The blogger also argues against an experimentation (to prove reductionism
false) introduced by the paper he is discussing in the article quite
convincingly, I must say.

Here's a couple of extracts from the article that should clear the premise up
for you:

"For here is the argument from the Entropy paper, for the existence of
macroscopic causality that’s not reducible to causality in the underlying
components." <the argument follows>

"...scientific reductionism is false. There is higher-level causation in our
universe, and it’s 100% genuine, not just a verbal sleight-of-hand. In
particular, there are causal forces that can only be understood in terms of
human desires and goals, and not in terms of subatomic particles blindly
bouncing around."

~~~
aoeuasdf1
I'm pretty sure the second part of the blog is tongue-in-cheek.

