The counterfactual has never seemed epistemologically satisfying to me, because of the way the influence spreads. If I had in fact flicked the light switch, what is taking up the empty space where my body would have been? What happens at the power plant which is now generating a bit more current than it was before?
Implicitly there's this idea that every counterfactual can be contained and localized, but that runs counter to my understanding. Change one thing and you change the entire universe. That's true even classically -- even before you bring in quantum physics and its problems with counterfactuals.
Perhaps counterfactuals are a good model of the psychology of causation. And in fact, I suspect that psychology is as deep as causation runs; it doesn't in fact have a direct physical or epistemic analogue. All of which is fine and important, but I feel like it diminishes the value of the effort put into it. It's not studying VLTIMATE TRVTH, just a quirk of how brains think about stuff. And that would mean you need to use a very different toolset to work on it.
Implicitly there's this idea that every counterfactual can be contained and localized, but that runs counter to my understanding. Change one thing and you change the entire universe. That's true even classically -- even before you bring in quantum physics and its problems with counterfactuals.
Perhaps counterfactuals are a good model of the psychology of causation. And in fact, I suspect that psychology is as deep as causation runs; it doesn't in fact have a direct physical or epistemic analogue. All of which is fine and important, but I feel like it diminishes the value of the effort put into it. It's not studying VLTIMATE TRVTH, just a quirk of how brains think about stuff. And that would mean you need to use a very different toolset to work on it.