Related papers: Determinism without causality
What is the difference of a prediction that is made with a causal model and a non-causal model? Suppose we intervene on the predictor variables or change the whole environment. The predictions from a causal model will in general work as…
In order to construct a quantum theory of gravity, we may have to abandon certain assumptions we were making. In particular, the concept of spacetime as a continuum substratum is questioned. Causal Sets is an attempt to construct a quantum…
Bayesian probability theory is one of the most successful frameworks to model reasoning under uncertainty. Its defining property is the interpretation of probabilities as degrees of belief in propositions about the state of the world…
Quantum theory makes the most accurate empirical predictions and yet it lacks simple, comprehensible physical principles from which the theory can be uniquely derived. A broad class of probabilistic theories exist which all share some…
We investigate the structure common to causal theories that attempt to explain a (part of) the world. Causality implies conservation of identity, itself a far from simple notion. It imposes strong demands on the universalizing power of the…
Quantum theory provides an extremely accurate description of fundamental processes in physics. It thus seems likely that the theory is applicable beyond the, mostly microscopic, domain in which it has been tested experimentally. Here we…
It is argued that the concept of free will, like the concept of truth in formal languages, requires a separation between an object level and a meta-level for being consistently defined. The Jamesian two-stage model, which deconstructs free…
The Causal Set approach to quantum gravity asserts that spacetime, at its smallest length scale, has a discrete structure. This discrete structure takes the form of a locally finite order relation, where the order, corresponding with the…
Identifying the causal structures between two statistically correlated events has been widely investigated in many fields of science. While some of the well-studied classical methods are carefully generalized to quantum version of causal…
The positivistic assumptions of determinism and objectivism in the realm of Newtonian mechanics are questioned in this paper. While objectivism is only challenged through proposing the mildest form of subjectivism, determinism is…
In order to claim that one has experimentally tested whether a noncontextual ontological model could underlie certain measurement statistics in quantum theory, it is necessary to have a notion of noncontextuality that applies to unsharp…
There is a persistent confusion about determinism and predictability. In spite of the opinions of some eminent philosophers (e.g., Popper), it is possible to understand that the two concepts are completely unrelated. In few words we can say…
In deterministic theories, one can start from a set of ontological states to formulate the dynamical laws, but these may not be directly observable. Observable are only equivalence classes of states, and these will span a basis of…
In (Beckers, 2025) I introduced nondeterministic causal models as a generalization of Pearl's standard deterministic causal models. I here take advantage of the increased expressivity offered by these models to offer a novel definition of…
Models in which causation arises from higher level structures as well as from microdynamics may be relevant to unifying quantum theory with classical physics or general relativity. They also give a way of defining a form of panprotopsychist…
Hidden-variable models aim to reproduce the results of quantum theory and to satisfy our classical intuition. Their refutation is usually based on deriving predictions that are different from those of quantum mechanics. Here instead we…
One of the key ways in which quantum mechanics differs from relativity is that it requires a fixed background reference frame for spacetime. In fact, this appears to be one of the main conceptual obstacles to uniting the two theories.…
Causal nonseparability refers to processes where events take place in a coherent superposition of different causal orders. These may be the key resource for experimental violations of causal inequalities and have been recently identified as…
On the real numbers, the notions of a semi-decidable relation and that of an effectively enumerable relation differ. The second only seems to be adequate to express, in an algorithmic way, non deterministic physical theories, where…
In decentralized stochastic control (or stochastic team theory) and game theory, if there is a pre-defined order in a system in which agents act, the system is called \textit{sequential}, otherwise it is non-sequential. Much of the…