Backtracking Counterfactuals. (arXiv:2211.00472v1 [cs.AI])

Counterfactual reasoning -- envisioning hypothetical scenarios, or possible
worlds, where some circumstances are different from what (f)actually occurred
(counter-to-fact) -- is ubiquitous in human cognition. Conventionally,
counterfactually-altered circumstances have been treated as "small miracles"
that locally violate the laws of nature while sharing the same initial
conditions. In Pearl's structural causal model (SCM) framework this is made
mathematically rigorous via interventions that modify the causal laws while the
values of exogenous variables are shared. In recent years, however, this purely …

arxiv backtracking