Related papers: Top-Down Causation by Information Control: From a …
Top-down causation has been suggested to occur at all scales of biological organization as a mechanism for explaining the hierarchy of structure and causation in living systems. Here we propose that a transition from bottom-up to top-down…
Downward causation is self-causation, the causel effect from the whole to its parts, and is considered a promising theory for the problem of mental causation. However, it remains to be clarified how an irreducible but supervenient downward…
One of the basic assumptions implicit in the way physics is usually done is that all causation flows in a bottom up fashion, from micro to macro scales. However this is wrong in many cases in biology, and in particular in the way the brain…
Digital computers carry out algorithms coded in high level programs. These abstract entities determine what happens at the physical level: they control whether electrons flow through specific transistors at specific times or not, entailing…
Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…
Mental events are considered to supervene on physical events. A supervenient event does not change without a corresponding change in the underlying subvenient physical events. Since wholes and their parts exhibit the same…
Ecological systems are emergent features of ecological and adaptive dynamics of a community of interacting species. By natural selection through the abiotic environment and by co-adaptation within the community, species evolve, thereby…
Concurrent systems identify systems, either software, hardware or even biological systems, that are characterized by sets of independent actions that can be executed in any order or simultaneously. Computer scientists resort to a causal…
This work outlines the novel application of the empirical analysis of causation, presented by Kutach, to the study of information theory and its role in physics. The central thesis of this paper is that causation and information are…
Causality has become a fundamental approach for explaining the relationships between events, phenomena, and outcomes in various fields of study. It has invaded various fields and applications, such as medicine, healthcare, economics,…
Feedback is ubiquitous in both biological and engineered control systems. In biology, in addition to typical feedback between plant and controller, we observe feedback pathways within control systems, which we call internal feedback…
In science, macro level descriptions of the causal interactions within complex, dynamical systems are typically deemed convenient, but ultimately reducible to a complete causal account of the underlying micro constituents. Yet, such a…
Originally developed as a theory of consciousness, integrated information theory provides a mathematical framework to quantify the causal irreducibility of systems and subsets of units in the system. Specifically, mechanism integrated…
Biological networks are a very convenient modelling and visualisation tool to discover knowledge from modern high-throughput genomics and postgenomics data sets. Indeed, biological entities are not isolated, but are components of complex…
The concepts of information transfer and causal effect have received much recent attention, yet often the two are not appropriately distinguished and certain measures have been suggested to be suitable for both. We discuss two existing…
Interactions between internet users are mediated by their devices and the common support infrastructure in data centres. Keeping track of causality amongst actions that take place in this distributed system is key to provide a seamless…
Hierarchical analysis is considered and a multilevel model is presented in order to explore causality, chance and complexity in financial economics. A coupled system of models is used to describe multilevel interactions, consistent with…
A defining property of complex systems is that they have multiscale structure. How does this multiscale structure come about? We argue that within systems there emerges a hierarchy of scales that contribute to a system's causal workings. An…
In this paper, we show that organisms can be modeled as hierarchical Bayesian control systems with small world and information bottleneck (bow-tie) network structure. Such systems combine hierarchical perception with hierarchical goal…
The causal closure of physics is usually discussed in a context free way. Here I discuss it in the context of engineering systems and biology, where strong emergence takes place due to a combination of upwards emergence and downwards…