Member Of Species

@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.

@Meaningness This feels like sweeping the problem under the rug. We have uncertainty about mathematical facts with conditional structure.

@MemberOfSpecies causality is normally taken as an objective fact, not an epistemic state.

@Meaningness And it seems like we should be able to talk about causes even in a deterministic universe that fundamentally has no probability

@MemberOfSpecies Yes; the Kripke framework is non-probabilistic, in fact. it’s just about what “could have been different.” But math couldnt