Re: PHIL/AI : Humongous Lookup Table
Hal Finney (hal@rain.org)
Wed, 12 Feb 1997 22:51:45 -0800
From: John K Clark <johnkc@well.com>
> On Thu, 30 Jan 1997 Eliezer Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com> Wrote:
>
> >Causality, in human intuition, is counterfactual.
> >When we say "A caused B", we mean that, if A were not present,
> >B would not have been present, and that in order to get B one should
> >do A.
>
>
> Not True. We mean that if A exists then B will exist further along a sequence.
I had the same reaction to Eliezer's definition of causality, but
I was perusing an old comp.ai.philosophy archive from a few years
ago the other night, and I saw almost the same definition being used.
So apparently it is accepted by some school of philosophers.
(I think I found it by an altavista web search on "humongous lookup table".)
Hal