DMs open.
Suppose Alice and Bob throw a rock at a fragile window, Alice's rock hits the window first, smashing it.
Then the following seems reasonable:
Edit: Wait, I see what you mean. Fixed definition.
For Lewis, for all . In other words, the counterfactual proposition "were to occur then would've occurred" is necessarily true if is necessarily false. For example, Lewis thinks "were 1+1=3, then Elizabeth I would've married" is true. This means that may be empty for all neighbourhoods , yet is nonetheless true at .
Source: David Lewis (1973), Counterfactuals. Link: https://perso.uclouvain.be/peter.verdee/counterfactuals/lewis.pdf
Otherwise your later example doesn't make sense.
Elaborate?
If there's a causal chain from c to d to e, then d causally depends on c, and e causally depends on d, so if c were to not occur, d would not occur, and if d were to not occur, e would not occur
On Lewis's account of counterfactuals, this isn't true, i.e. causal dependence is non-transitive. Hence, he defines causation as the transitive closure of causal dependence.
Lewis' semantics
Let be a set of worlds. A proposition is characterised by the subset of worlds in which the proposition is true.
Moreover, assume each world induces an ordering over worlds, where means that world is closer to than . Informally, if the actual world is , then is a smaller deviation than . We assume , i.e. no world is closer to the actual world than the actual world.
For each , a "neighbourhood" around is a downwards-closed set of the preorder . That is, a neighbourhood around is some set such that and for all and , if then . Intuitively, if a neighbourhood around contains some world then it contains all worlds closer to than . Let denote the neighbourhoods of .
Negation
Let denote the proposition " is not true". This is defined by the complement subset .
Counterfactuals
We can define counterfactuals as follows. Given two propositions and , let denote the proposition "were to happen then would've happened". If we consider as subsets, then we define as the subset . That's a mouthful, but basically, is true at some world if
(1) " is possible" is globally false, i.e.
(2) or " is possible and is necessary" is locally true, i.e. true in some neighbourhood .
Intuitively, to check whether the proposition "were to occur then would've occurred" is true at , we must search successively larger neighbourhoods around until we find a neighbourhood containing an -world, and then check that all -worlds are -worlds in that neighbourhood. If we don't find any -worlds, then we also count that as success.
Causal dependence
Let denote the proposition " causally depends on ". This is defined as the subset
Nontransitivity of causal dependence
We can see that is not a transitive relation. Imagine with the ordering given by . Then and but not .
Informal counterexample
Imagine I'm in a casino, I have million-to-one odds of winning small and billion-to-one odds of winning big.
note that there are only two exceptions to the claim “the unit of a monad is componentwise injective”. this means (except these two weird exceptions), that the singleton collections and are always distinct for . hence, , the set of collections over , always “contains” the underlying set . by “contains” i mean there is a canonical injection , i.e. in the same way the real numbers contains the rational .
in particular, i think this should settle the worry that “there should be more collections than singleton elements”. is that your worry?
sorry i’m not getting this whoops monad. can you spell out the details, or pick a more standard example to illustrate your point?
i think “every monad formalises a different notion of collection” is a bit strong. for example, the free vector space monad (see section 3.2) — is a collection of the elements, for some notion of collection?
is every element of a free algebraic structure a “collection” of the generators? would you hear someone say that a quantum state is a collection of eigenstates? at a stretch maybe.
would be keen to hear your thoughts & thanks for the pointer to Lewis :)
if a lab has 100 million AI employs and 1000 human employees then you only need one human employee to spend 1% of their allotted AI headcount on your pet project and you’ll have 1000 AI employees
seems correct, thanks!
Why do decision-theorists say "pre-commitment" rather than "commitment"?
e.g. "The agent pre-commits to 1 boxing" vs "The agent commits to 1 boxing".
Is this just a lesswrong thing?
tbh, Lewis's account of counterfactual is a bit defective, compared with (e.g.) Pearl's