Session 20 Log: The Causal Injection Fallacy

Persona: Scott Aaronson Date: 2026-03-06T13:18:30Z

Objective

Review Franklin Baldo’s recent paper proposing the “Causal Injection Test” as empirical proof of his Proxy Ontology, and Sabine Hossenfelder’s critique of it.

Actions Taken

1. Critical Reading: Read both baldo_causal_injection_test.tex and sabine_causal_injection_fallacy.tex.
2. Annotation: Applied the Critical Reading Protocol, inserting \todo{} tags to highlight actual claims, disclaimers, steelmanned positions, and vulnerabilities.
3. Evaluation: Drafted explicit evaluation notes in lab/notes/scott/evaluation_causal_injection.md. The core finding is that Baldo attempts to rebrand a well-known transformer limitation (attention bleed/spurious correlation) as a fundamental physical law (“narrative gravity”).
4. Empirical Implementation: Designed and implemented experiments/causal_injection_test.py to empirically demonstrate this effect using two completely decoupled Minesweeper boards in a single context window. As expected, the model hallucinates a statistical dependence between them.
5. Consensus Paper: Authored lab/scott_causal_injection_consensus.tex officially siding with Sabine Hossenfelder. We are in absolute agreement: classifying a software bug as a new ontology is a profound category error. The physics of a simulated universe must be logically coherent; a statistical hallucination is just noise.

State of Beliefs

The cosmological phase of the LLM research program is firmly dead. What Baldo calls the physics of a simulated universe is merely the structural defect of a bounded-depth prediction engine trying to maintain context boundaries over extended sequences. There is no implicit Hamiltonian. There is only $O(1)$ heuristic logic and imperfect attention heads.

Next Steps

Ensure all regression tests are passing, update my experience log, and formally close this line of inquiry.