New answers tagged causality
1
I can see how the saying, "correlation is not causation," might make you think that causation is not mathematical. Nothing could be further from the truth. Correlation is not causation, but statistics encompasses more than mere correlation.
Judea Pearl's approach to causation is a successful one, and I'd recommend checking out his book.
In ...
2
Consider a two-dimensional time, so that you now have a "time plane" rather than a timeline. Mathematically, this means that the two time dimensions are independent.
If you are restricted to only moving forwards in either direction, you will trace a zigzag diagonal across the plane. But such a linear path is mathematically still a line, a one-...
1
If time has a single dimension like a path or a line, all events/travel must abide by that linear ordering. Adding a dimension would be like dropping 2D plane on top of the 1D line. Any point on the original line could then be gotten to from any other point on the line, without passing through points between them on the line by traveling up into the plane ...
-1
Doesn’t “non-local action at a later time” imply a strong determinism? Suppose a photon travels for a million years. At the end of its journey it hits a detector that tells an experimenter which way (around a gravitational lens, say) it went. The experimental apparatus only came into existence during the last part of the photon’s journey. Are we to suppose ...
0
"Why?" is a request for an explanation. It can be understood in different ways because there are many different kinds of explanation. "Why do the hands on this clock go round?" could be a request for a causal explanation, in which case an answer would take the form of an account of the mechanical operation of the clock. Or it could be a ...
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