Saturday, September 23, 2006
Faulty Causation
A nice blog entry about a study on how easy it is to induce faulty causation over at Scienceblogs. Of course, this isn't news. I would certainly update Hume's notion that "causation is a figment of our imagination" to something like "causation is a cognitive model constructed by the human brain to explain and anticipate events". Saying it is imagination implies that it is invalid - a figment. The blog entry seems to be entirely negative about causation - like it's really invalid. Causation is what keeps us from sticking our finger in the fire and petting a lion. It's the more subtle edges of causation where we get carried away. Things that take a long time to play out. Things that we don't understand.
A nice blog entry about a study on how easy it is to induce faulty causation over at Scienceblogs. Of course, this isn't news. I would certainly update Hume's notion that "causation is a figment of our imagination" to something like "causation is a cognitive model constructed by the human brain to explain and anticipate events". Saying it is imagination implies that it is invalid - a figment. The blog entry seems to be entirely negative about causation - like it's really invalid. Causation is what keeps us from sticking our finger in the fire and petting a lion. It's the more subtle edges of causation where we get carried away. Things that take a long time to play out. Things that we don't understand.
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