Related papers: Causation, Information, and Physics
The cognitive frame in which most neuropsychological research on the neural basis of behavior is conducted contains the assumption that brain mechanisms per se fully suffice to explain all psychologically described phenomena. This…
This paper introduces several fundamental concepts in information theory from the perspective of their origins in engineering. Understanding such concepts is important in neuroscience for two reasons. Simply applying formulae from…
Causal influences are at the core of any empirical science, the reason why its quantification is of paramount relevance for the mathematical theory of causality and applications. Quantum correlations, however, challenge our notion of cause…
A data science task can be deemed as making sense of the data or testing a hypothesis about it. The conclusions inferred from data can greatly guide us to make informative decisions. Big data has enabled us to carry out countless prediction…
Quantum information, a field in which great advances have been made in the past decades, now presents opportunities for chemistry. One roadblock to progress, especially for experimental chemical science, is that new concepts and technical…
This essay considers a simple model of observers that are influenced by the world around them. Consistent quantification of information about such influences results in a great deal of familiar physics. The end result is a new perspective…
This article is a short review on the concept of information. We show the strong relation between Information Theory and Physics, beginning by the concept of bit and its representation with classical physical systems, and then going to the…
Inferring the causal direction and causal effect between two discrete random variables X and Y from a finite sample is often a crucial problem and a challenging task. However, if we have access to observational and interventional data, it…
Causality is one of the most fundamental -- and yet elusive -- concepts in physics. From its intuitive role in everyday experience to its formal and often implicit role in scientific theories, causality has challenged philosophers and…
The explicit link between Promise Theory and Information Theory, while perhaps obvious, is laid out explicitly here. It's shown how causally related observations of promised behaviours relate to the probabilistic formulation of causal…
In the past decade, the toolkit of quantum information has been expanded to include processes in which the basic operations do not have definite causal relations. Originally considered in the context of the unification of quantum mechanics…
I suggest that the common unease with taking quantum mechanics as a fundamental description of nature (the "measurement problem") could derive from the use of an incorrect notion, as the unease with the Lorentz transformations before…
A suitable unified statistical formulation of quantum and classical mechanics in a *-algebraic setting leads us to conclude that information itself is noncommutative in quantum mechanics. Specifically we refer here to an observer's…
The purpose of this paper is to formalize the concept that best synthesizes our intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics -- that the information carried by a system is limited -- and, from this principle, to construct the foundations of…
We introduce two quantitative measures of the strength of causal relations in quantum theory and more general physical theories. These two measures, called the maximum and minimum causal effect, quantify the maximum and minimum changes in…
Quantum mechanics and information theory are among the most important scientific discoveries of the last century. Although these two areas initially developed separately it has emerged that they are in fact intimately related. In this…
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…
Quantum mechanics---the theory describing the fundamental workings of nature---is famously counterintuitive: it predicts that a particle can be in two places at the same time, and that two remote particles can be inextricably and…
Understanding the causal influences that hold among parts of a system is critical both to explaining that system's natural behaviour and to controlling it through targeted interventions. In a quantum world, understanding causal relations is…
Philosophical analyses of causation take many forms but one major difficulty they all aim to address is that of the spatio-temporal continuity between causes and their effects. Bertrand Russell in 1913 brought the problem to its most…