Related papers: Recognising Top-Down Causation
In real-world systems, phase transitions often materialize abruptly, making it difficult to design appropriate controls that help uncover underlying processes. Some agent-based computational models display transformations similar to phase…
In this position paper we discuss three main shortcomings of existing approaches to counterfactual causality from the computer science perspective, and sketch lines of work to try and overcome these issues: (1) causality definitions should…
Causal discovery problems use a set of observations to deduce causality between variables in the real world, typically to answer questions about biological or physical systems. These observations are often recorded at regular time…
The idea that events obey a definite causal order is deeply rooted in our understanding of the world and at the basis of the very notion of time. But where does causal order come from, and is it a necessary property of nature? We address…
The Turing Machine is the paradigmatic case of computing machines, but there are others such as analogical, connectionist, quantum and diverse forms of unconventional computing, each based on a particular intuition of the phenomenon of…
Causal reasoning is essential to science, yet quantum theory challenges it. Quantum correlations violating Bell inequalities defy satisfactory causal explanations within the framework of classical causal models. What is more, a theory…
Any real interaction process produces many incompatible system versions, or realisations, giving rise to omnipresent dynamic randomness and universally defined complexity (arXiv:physics/9806002). Since quantum behaviour dynamically emerges…
Understanding the laws that govern a phenomenon is the core of scientific progress. This is especially true when the goal is to model the interplay between different aspects in a causal fashion. Indeed, causal inference itself is…
This work examines the interconnections between logic, epistemology, and sciences within the Naturalist tradition. It presents a scheme that connects logic, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and cognition, emphasizing…
This is an essay in what might be called ``mathematical metaphysics.'' There is a fundamental duality that run through mathematics and the natural sciences. The duality starts as the logical level; it is represented by the Boolean logic of…
Mechanistic interpretability aims to reverse engineer neural networks by uncovering which high-level algorithms they implement. Causal abstraction provides a precise notion of when a network implements an algorithm, i.e., a causal model of…
The design of new devices and experiments in science and engineering has historically relied on the intuitions of human experts. This credo, however, has changed. In many disciplines, computer-inspired design processes, also known as…
We present a domain-general account of causation that applies to settings in which macro-level causal relations between two systems are of interest, but the relevant causal features are poorly understood and have to be aggregated from vast…
Correlation is not causation. As simple as this widely agreed-upon statement may seem, scientifically defining causality and using it to drive our modern biomedical research is immensely challenging. In this perspective, we attempt to…
Information flow provides a natural measure for the causal interaction between dynamical events. This study extends our previous rigorous formalism of componentwise information flow to the bulk information flow between two complex…
One of the defining features of living systems is their adaptability to changing environmental conditions. This requires organisms to extract temporal and spatial features of their environment, and use that information to compute the…
Traditional cognitive science rests on a foundation of classical logic and probability theory. This foundation has been seriously challenged by several findings in experimental psychology on human decision making. Meanwhile, the formalism…
Algorithms have been fundamental to recent global technological advances and, in particular, they have been the cornerstone of technical advances in one field rapidly being applied to another. We argue that algorithms possess fundamentally…
Algorithmic approach is based on the assumption that any quantum evolution of many particle system can be simulated on a classical computer with the polynomial time and memory cost. Algorithms play the central role here but not the…
A perplexing problem in understanding physical reality is why the universe seems comprehensible, and correspondingly why there should exist physical systems capable of comprehending it. In this essay I explore the possibility that rather…