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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
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    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Retrocausation (the later coin flip A causing the earlier prediction B) generates a paradox because intervention is always possible after the prediction is made.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.If the coin flip A causes the earlier prediction B, then after B has occurred we should not be able to prevent A from happening.
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    • 2.It is always within human power to intervene and prevent the coin flip A after prediction B has been made.
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    • 3.Therefore A seems both to be the cause and not to be the cause of B.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Causal processes that run backwards in time are constrained by consistency conditions (Novikov's self-consistency principle) that physically prohibit interventions that would generate paradoxes.
      ?

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    • 2.If retrocausation holds, then any apparent 'intervention' after prediction B must itself be part of the causal chain that produced B, making true prevention nomologically impossible.
      ?

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    • 3.The intuition that intervention is 'always possible' conflates epistemic access with metaphysical openness, a distinction Judea Pearl's interventionist framework explicitly marks via the do-calculus.
      ?

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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Price and Wharton's time-symmetric causation model shows that retrocausal constraints manifest as boundary conditions, not as local compulsions, so freedom to 'try' intervening is compatible with systematic failure to succeed.
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    • 2.Lewis's counterfactual analysis of causation requires that we evaluate dependence under the closest possible world, and in worlds with retrocausation the closest worlds where A is prevented are worlds where B never occurred in the first place.
      ?

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