CAUSATION
Background Material For A Mini-workshop On Causation
Tuesday 8th June, Learning Centre Room UG 10 2pm
University of Birmingham

Details of Workshop

(INCOMPLETE DRAFT: Liable to change -- Contributions welcome!)

Installed: 2 Jul 2014
Last updated: 5 Jul 2014; 8 Jul 2014
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This document is
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/causation-background.html
A partial index of discussion notes is in
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/misc/AREADME.html

Philosophical Theories of Causation
A long and varied history

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-metaphysics/
  The Metaphysics of Causation
  Questions about the metaphysics of causation may be usefully divided into
  questions about the causal relata, and questions about the causal relation.
  Questions about the causal relata include the questions of (1.1) whether they
  are in spacetime (immanence), (1.2) how fine-grained they are (individuation),
  and (1.3) how many there are (adicity). Questions about the causal relation
  include the questions of (2.1) how causally related and causally unrelated
  sequences differ (connection), (2.2) how sequences related as cause to effect
  differ from those related as effect to cause or as joint effects of a common
  cause (direction), and (2.3) how if at all sequences involving causes differ
  from those involving mere background conditions (selection).
  ....
  Philosophers have, of course, disagreed over all of these questions.....

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/
  Counterfactual Theories of Causation

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-mani/
  Causation and Manipulability

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-causation/
  Questions about the existence and nature of mental causation are prominent in
  contemporary discussions of the mind and human agency. Originally, the problem
  of mental causation was that of understanding how an immaterial mind, a soul,
  could interact with the body. Most philosophers nowadays repudiate souls, but
  the problem of mental causation has not gone away. Instead, focus has shifted to
  mental properties. How could mental properties be causally relevant to bodily
  behavior? How could something mental qua mental cause what it does? ...

  NOTE:
  Most philosophical discussions of these topics completely ignore what computer
  systems engineers have discovered and developed in the last half century or so
  about Virtual Machine Functionalism mentioned below.

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-causal/
  Causal theories of mental content attempt to explain how thoughts can be about
  things. They attempt to explain how one can think about, for example, dogs.
  These theories begin with the idea that there are mental representations and
  that thoughts are meaningful in virtue of a causal connection between a mental
  representation and some part of the world that is represented. In other words,
  the point of departure for these theories is that thoughts of dogs are about
  dogs because dogs cause the mental representations of dogs. .....

  NOTE:
  This is another area where most philosophical discussions completely ignore what
  has been achieved by engineers in giving machines, especially machines that
  include sophisticated virtual machinery the ability to have, and to use
  intentional states, for example when attempting to identify faults in complex
  machinery, or when controlling the behaviour of a complex machine (e.g. landing
  an airliner, or monitoring flows in oil refineries. (In the UK there was a major
  research project on transferring responsibility for such tasks from human
  operators to AI systems, in the 1980s, as part of the Alvey Project.
       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvey
  Philosophers (e.g. Elizabeth Anscombe) have distinguished the "direction of fit"
  of intentional states to what they refer to in belief-like states, and desire-like
  states. The same distinction between two "directions of fit" are important in
  many control systems -- that was McCarthy's point. Instead of arguing in a
  knowledge vacuum about what machines (especially computers) can and cannot do
  philosophers need to learn about the many intermediate cases and what difference
  they make, e.g. cases between a homeostatic control system and a plant control
  system or a future intelligent tutoring system, which will need to refer to
  mental sates and processes in learners.

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-medieval/
  Causation in medieval philosophy
  -- Aristotle's ideas
  -- Theology

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-process/
  ...philosophers interested in analysing causal processes have tended to see the
  chief task to be to distinguish causal processes such as atoms decaying and
  billiard balls moving across the table from pseudo processes such as moving
  shadows and spots of light. These philosophers claim to have found, in the
  notion of a causal process, a key to understanding causation in general.

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-causal/
  Causal theories of mental content attempt to explain how thoughts can be about
  things. They attempt to explain how one can think about, for example, dogs.
  These theories begin with the idea that there are mental representations and
  that thoughts are meaningful in virtue of a causal connection between a mental
  representation and some part of the world that is represented. In other words,
  the point of departure for these theories is that thoughts of dogs are about
  dogs because dogs cause the mental representations of dogs. .....

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fictionalism-modal/
  Modal Fictionalism
  Questions about necessity (or what has to be, or what cannot be otherwise) and
  possibility (or what can be, or what could be otherwise) are questions about
  modality. Fictionalism is an approach to theoretical matters in a given area
  which treats the claims in that area as being in some sense analogous to
  fictional claims: claims we do not literally accept at face value, but which we
  nevertheless think serve some useful function. However, despite its name, "Modal
  Fictionalism" in its usual manifestations is not primarily fictionalism about
  claims of necessity and possibility, but rather a fictionalist approach to
  claims about possible worlds.

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-backwards/
  Backward Causation
  retro-causation

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-singularities/lightcone.html
  .... the causal structure of spacetime ... specifies which events (that is,
  which points of space and time) can be connected by trajectories that are slower
  than light, which events can be connected by trajectories traveling at the speed
  of light, and which events cannot be connected by anything travelling at or
  below light speed. Events in the first group are said to be "timelike related,"
  because a physical clock could travel from one event to the other. Events in the
  second group are "lightlike related" because a light ray can travel from one to
  the other. Events in the third group are "spacelike related." Given that it is
  physically impossible (on the standard interpretation of relativity theory) for
  any causal process to exceed the speed of light, these three possible ways of
  being connected tell us whether one event is able to influence another.

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computation-physicalsystems/
  In our ordinary discourse, we distinguish between physical systems that perform
  computations, such as computers and calculators, and physical systems that
  don't, such as rocks. Among computing devices, we distinguish between more and
  less powerful ones. These distinctions affect our behavior: if a device is
  computationally more powerful than another, we pay more money for it. What
  grounds these distinctions? What is the principled difference, if there is one,
  between a rock and a calculator, or between a calculator and a computer?
  Answering these questions is more difficult than it may seem.
  ...Computation is also central to psychology and neuroscience (and perhaps other
  areas of biology). According to the computational theory of cognition, cognition
  is a kind of computation: the behavior of cognitive systems is causally
  explained by the computations they perform. In order to test a computational
  theory of something, we need to know what counts as a computation in a physical
  system. Once again, the nature of computation lies at the foundation of
  empirical science.
  ....
  Some authors argue that the physical universe is fundamentally computational.
  The universe itself is a computing system, and everything in it is a computing
  system too (or part thereof).

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-probabilistic/
  Probabilistic Causation

      probabilistic theories of singular causation
      probabilistic theories of general causation
      ....
      (Should include Karl Popper on propensities?)
  

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-bayesian/
  Contrast relations of evidence vs relations of causation.

• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-process/
  Causal Processes vs "pseudo causal" processes
  E.g. Bertrand Russell on "causal lines"

• http://rsfs.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/1.toc
  Royal Society meeting on Top-down causation
  Organized by George F. R. Ellis, Denis Noble and Timothy O'Connor
  February 6, 2012;

• Other topics:
  -- Mathematical causation (to be added)

      E.g. adding or removing a bridge in Konigsberg would cause a new
      route to become possible, removing the old impossibility.
      http://mathforum.org/isaac/problems/bridges1.html
  

  -- Social causation

• CLAIM:
  Much philosophical discussion of causation is now out of date, because it
  ignores causation in sophisticated virtual machinery (not just finite state
  machines). See Virtual Machine Functionalism

WORK IN PROGRESS -- TO BE EXPANDED
SUGGESTIONS FOR ONLINE MATERIAL TO BE ADDED WELCOME
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Maintained by Aaron Sloman
School of Computer Science
The University of Birmingham