Jeff Beck: preference

Transcript context

…No. So we could just model the light cone at the particle level. Oh yeah. So that's how Well that'd expensive. Yeah. Yeah. Mean that's the way physicists see the world. And we see the world in terms of populations and people and all these macroscopic things. And we still reasonably do experiments and we do interventions and we randomization. To truly identify a causal relationship you have to do an intervention, right? You know, the classic example, this is also in lung cancer, It's like, I forget how long ago this was, but at 1 point there was this belief that alcoholism caused lung cancer, but it was actually because they were in poor health because they were alcoholics, and they smoked a lot more than the rest of the population. So you do need to do that kind of intervention to discover a causal relationship. However, right, the causal relationships that we care about are the ones that mesh with our affordances. Right? If, you know, identifying a microscopic causal relationship is super, that's great. Right? But unless you have really tiny tweezers, it's not very helpful. Right? What you need to do is you need to identify the causal relationships that are present in the domain in which you are capable of acting. We care about the causal relationships at the macroscopic level because that is where we live. We live at the macroscopic level. Most of our actions are at the Now, 1 of the best things about humans is our ability to extend the domain of our affordances with technology. Right? We have like nuclear power because what we did was we acquired the ability to take tweezers, you know, at that at that scale and like, you know, make these things happen. Right? We figured out how to take advantage of causal relationships at that level, not because we have those abilities, but we were able to create the tools that that that gave us access to that space. It all depends on what the problem it is that you're trying to solve. And the causal relationships that you always care about will be the ones that are related to the actions that you are capable of performing. Now that said, there's clearly a great advantage in understanding the microscopic causal relationships, right. If for no other reason then that might lead to us discovering a way to expand our affordances into another aspect of the microscopic domain. Is this just instrumental? This just something that it's a little bit like we say that agents have intentions and representations, and it's just a great way of understanding things. But for all intents and purposes, not actually how it works.…

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