Causal Anthropocentrism

There is a pattern of thinking that has annoyed me. Today I found the name for it: "causal anthropocentrism".

What triggered this post is a quote by Xi Jinping:

There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves.

The Thucydides Trap describes this unhappy pattern: as a hegemonic power grows weaker relative to an emerging power, war often results. This concept worried Graham Allison a lot, and you can find him talking about it in books and lectures. This does not concern this post.

What annoyed me about Xi's quote is the part

they might create such traps for themselves

Causality is not fundamental in the world

Today we tear down the illusion of causality, with quantum mechanics.

This started when I was reading The Order of Time (2018) by the rather poetic physicist Carlo Rovelli, and read that he said that causality is not certain, and two events can have a superposition of causality: a superposition of two possibilities: A causes B, and B causes A.

Quantum corelations with no causal order

The paper that started this seems to be a highly cited (over 200 currently) Quantum correlations with no causal order (2012), Ognyan Oreshkov, Fabio Costa, Časlav Brukner.

The abstract starts with a question: is causality fundamental?

Let's read: Bringing about the past, and Backwards causation

Backward causality is not something only physicists think about. Philosophers have thought about it a lot. We'll read about a classic paper Bringing about the past (1964), Michael Dummett.

I'm going to just pick out memorable and easily understandable tidbits that collage to a picture of what the theory of backward causality is about, and not try to summarize the whole thing -- if you want the whole thing, read the paper in whole.