Reflections on the Consequences of Causality
Today I had the honor and privilege to attend a talk by Kira Radinsky, the genius woman who revolutionized the field of predictive analytics and machine learning. There is a lot to say about why Kira is one of the most impactful woman of the 21st century, and I am sure that her work will continue to inspire millions of people. I am super thankful to the Nevo Network for giving us this opportunity.
In her talk, Kira explains how her research changed the way predictions are done. Usually, people would look at data and try to find statistical reasoning that explains a given fact or event. In some cases this means that correlation can be misinterpreted for causality. Her model, instead, looks a lot of data and then tries to find patterns that repeat with a high probability. Her model managed to predict several meaningful world events.
As I was listening to her, I could not help but think about what her work implies philosophically.
Are we able to predict every event with enough amount of data? Can events that have never happened before also be predicted? These, she pointed out, seemed to be some of the limits of the model itself. But who knows, maybe someone will again push the field further.
More interestingly, a question kept coming up in my mind: is there a finite set of parameters that, given the exact initial conditions can model and predict every event in time? In other words, could we find a common causality for every event in the world, just like in principle there is a common ancestor to every human on earth?
If the answer is yes, it would have deep implications in how we understand what randomness means. In fact, there would be no random events, and what we know today as chaos is actually just a way to formally say that we do not understand the properties of a system.
So if what we call nature, had an initial state and is defined by a finite set of rules and initial conditions, then every event in the universe is, in theory, predictable. On the one hand, it makes sense to believe that such a theoretical model could exist. On the other hand, it is puzzling to believe that we, as part of that same nature, could fully understand our own nature.
In mathematics, there is a concept called the incompleteness theorem, proven by Gödel, one of the most important mathematicians in the 20th century. The theorem states, vaguely, that a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency. Or in other words, that a system cannot be understood formally without considering knowledge from outside that system. If we interpolate this to all of nature, then we cannot actually understand nature and causality of events simply by using the laws of nature.
Of course, this theory does not imply that nature does not have such a structure, it just tells us that we may not know what that structure is. This gap is what makes life so beautiful, the fact that we cannot understand or control every aspect of our life, and we need to accept that.
💡 Pro tip: check out Kira’s TED Talk to understand the impact of her work. Also, do not get discouraged by not being able to predict everything, life is beautiful as is.
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