Philosophy Reviewed
Unpublished Reviews Philosophy Reviewed Wednesday, July 11, 2018 Minds and Machines on Causality and the Brain June 2018, Volume 28, Issue 2, This volume of Minds and Machines is the product of a conference, which seems largely to have determined the contributions. Although purportedly about science, the essays are often principally directed at those philosophers of science who do not understand the banalities of the sciences they write about or are interested in. (Scientists tend to like this kind of stuff, because it is people saying what the scientists know or think. Everyone likes cheerleading.) Only one of the essays, Romeijin and Williamson's, makes any contribution a brain scientist could conceivably use. Romeijin and Williamson, Intervention and Identification in Latent Variable Modeling The authors actually do something. They show that if X, Y, L are binary, and L is the common cause of X, Y, and X, Y are measured and L is unmeasured and there and there are no other causal relations between X and Y, then an exogenous perturbation of the distribution of L allows identification of p(X | L) and p(Y | L) (and of course, p(X,Y | L) for all values of L, without knowledge of the distributions of L before and after perturbation except that the distributions are different. Of course, it isn't true if the relation between X, Y and L is linear, or if besides the common cause, X influences Y, or if L has more than two values, etc. The authors give no empirical example that realizes their result.
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