Related papers: Top-Down Causation by Information Control: From a …
Research in Cognitive Science suggests that humans understand and represent knowledge of the world through causal relationships. In addition to observations, they can rely on experimenting and counterfactual reasoning -- i.e. referring to…
Bottom-up and top-down, as well as low-level and high-level factors influence where we fixate when viewing natural scenes. However, the importance of each of these factors and how they interact remains a matter of debate. Here, we…
We extend the concept that life is an informational phenomenon, at every level of organisation, from molecules to the global ecological system. According to this thesis: (a) living is information processing, in which memory is maintained by…
Emergence and causality are two fundamental concepts for understanding complex systems. They are interconnected. On one hand, emergence refers to the phenomenon where macroscopic properties cannot be solely attributed to the cause of…
Mathematical models are fundamental building blocks in the design of dynamical control systems. As control systems are becoming increasingly complex and networked, approaches for obtaining such models based on first principles reach their…
Events in distributed systems include sending or receiving messages, or changing some state in a node. Not all events are related, but some events can cause and influence how other, later events, occur. For instance, a reply to a received…
Emergence is a profound subject that straddles many scientific disciplines, including the formation of galaxies and how consciousness arises from the collective activity of neurons. Despite the broad interest that exists on this concept,…
A ubiquitous way that cells share information is by exchanging molecules. Yet, the fundamental ways that this information exchange is influenced by intracellular dynamics remain unclear. Here we use information theory to investigate a…
Winner Take All (WTA) circuits a type of Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) have been suggested as facilitating the brain's ability to process information in a Bayesian manner. Research has shown that WTA circuits are capable of approximating…
We propose an information-theoretic framework for analyzing control systems based on the close relationship of controllers to communication channels. A communication channel takes an input state and transforms it into an output state. A…
Fundamental limits on the controllability of physical systems are discussed in the light of information theory. It is shown that the second law of thermodynamics, when generalized to include information, sets absolute limits to the minimum…
This paper presents correct algorithms for answering the following two questions; (i) Does there exist a causal explanation consistent with a set of background knowledge which explains all of the observed independence facts in a sample?…
Directed cycles form the fundamental motifs in natural, social and artificial networks, yet their distinct computational roles remain under-explored, particularly in the context of higher-order structure and function. In this work, we…
In fact-checking applications, a common reason to reject a claim is to detect the presence of erroneous cause-effect relationships between the events at play. However, current automated fact-checking methods lack dedicated causal-based…
The advantages of using communication networks to interconnect controllers and physical plants motivate the increasing number of Networked Control Systems, in industrial and critical infrastructure facilities. However, this integration also…
Measures of information transfer have become a popular approach to analyze interactions in complex systems such as the Earth or the human brain from measured time series. Recent work has focused on causal definitions of information transfer…
Provenance, or information about the sources, derivation, custody or history of data, has been studied recently in a number of contexts, including databases, scientific workflows and the Semantic Web. Many provenance mechanisms have been…
Much of scientific data is collected as randomized experiments intervening on some and observing other variables of interest. Quite often, a given phenomenon is investigated in several studies, and different sets of variables are involved…
The growth rate of organisms depends both on external conditions and on internal states, such as the expression levels of various genes. We show that to achieve a criterion mean growth rate over an ensemble of conditions, the internal…
Information flow (or information transfer as may be called) the widely applicable general physics notion can be rigorously derived from first principles, rather than axiomatically proposed as an ansatz. Its logical association with…