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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

Reasoning involves inferring and applying causation which is different from correlation [1]. One can possibly define process of "understanding" as building a "model" of the system where previously unseen events can be predicated or justified using the model. The big difference in "human understanding" seems to be that we can extract fairly minimal set of laws that govern the system from our observations that we can communicate and apply very efficiently.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...

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> Reasoning involves inferring and applying causation which is different from correlation

A couple points here:

* The way humans model causation is just non-naive statistical correlation (controlling for variables). That technique is still accurately described as "statistical correlation"

* I'm not even convinced that human reasoning _does_ imply generating a model of causation. Let's exclude things like rigorous scientific studies for the purpose of the discussion and focus on day-to-day human reasoning: I think the thought processes of most of the people I know could most accurately be explained by correlating things across time. Modeling causation is often incidental (X often happens after Y is a reasonable enough heuristic for general use).

> Let's exclude things like rigorous scientific studies for the purpose of the discussion and focus on day-to-day human reasoning

I think you'll need to look at the other end of the spectrum to see an abundance of (wrong?) models of causality: Religion and Law.

There are no "confirmed" cases of anyone actually going to heaven or hell or purgatory (or whatever else), and yet many of us still conform to some arbitary ruleset in the hopes of eventually ending (or not ending) up in one of thoses places, because we have constructed some model of how doing this gets you into hell and doing that gets you into heaven.

Similarly, we have plenty of evidence on how companies spend huge effort on finding loopholes in tax laws in order to avoid taxes, and yet instead of simplyfing the ruleset (so that there are obviously no holes in it) we still opt for piling on more laws (so that there are no obvious holes in it) because we construct (faulty?) models of how those new rules will prevent further exploits.

That's not really relevant. These models can easily infer causation by seeing what happens as a result of their actions.

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