Member Of Species

I continue to be confused about whether/when you're allowed to draw causal arrows from mathematical to physical facts.

@MemberOfSpecies I would have thought you can’t ever take a mathematical thing to be a cause… what would be an example?

@Meaningness "The fact that 5*5=25 and the fact that the room is 5x5 meters, together, cause the room to be 25 square meters."

@MemberOfSpecies Oh… weird… “Cause” seems an exceptionally vague and problematic notion, but fwiw on the whole I’d say that isn’t causal.

@Meaningness I guess I'm trying to figure out whether there's a principled reason for saying such things aren't causal.

@MemberOfSpecies Main intuition of “cause” is counterfactuals, and there isn’t a possible world in which 5x5!=25

@Meaningness "If 5x5 had been 26, this 5x5 room would have been 26 square meters" doesn't make zero sense to me.

@MemberOfSpecies but in any case, in the standard (Kripke) formulation, all mathematical facts are the same in all possible worlds.