Related papers: How Downwards Causation Occurs in Digital Computer…
Complex systems have interested researchers across a broad range of fields for many years and as computing has become more accesible and feasible, it is now possible to simulate aspects of these systems. A major point of research is how…
By means of an intriguing physical example, magnetic surface swimmers, that can be described in terms of Dennett's intentional stance, I reconstruct a hierarchy of necessary and sufficient conditions for the applicability of the intentional…
Why do some physical systems possess consciousness, while others do not? Is this a question of physics? Or is it a question of the theory of causation? Physics and the theory of causation serve different descriptive purposes, and in this…
It is often claimed that the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic and time-symmetric and that therefore our experience of the passage of time is an illusion. This paper will critically discuss these claims and show that they are…
A cyber physical human complex system failure prevents the accomplishment of the systems intended function. The failure of a complex system could be a breakdown of any system hardware, human related factors, application software, or the…
Control systems are ubiquitous in modern technology, comprising an engineered plant to be kept within specific, often fine-tuned, limits, and a separate controller that ensures this is the case. While modern controllers often employ digital…
Computer programs are often factored into pure components -- simple, total functions from inputs to outputs -- and components that may have side effects -- errors, changes to memory, parallel threads, abortion of the current loop, etc. We…
A notion of delegated causality is introduced. This subtle kind of causality is dual to interventional causality. Delegated causality elucidates the causal role of dynamical systems at the "edge of chaos", explicates evident cases of…
Existing abstract models of quantum computation make reference to circuit elements, much in contrast to their classical counterparts. Circuits, as a model of computation, substantially limit algorithmic expression and obscure high-level…
The chemical dynamics scene is the most important application of computer simulation. We show that electrons jump between potential holes of different depths (new molecular orbits, hybrid atomic orbits with different energies) under the…
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…
Fast moving classical variables can generate quantum mechanical behavior. We demonstrate how this can happen in a model. The key point is that in classically (ontologically) evolving systems one can still define a conserved quantum energy.…
This paper introduces a new structural causal model tailored for representing threshold-based IT systems and presents a new algorithm designed to rapidly detect root causes of anomalies in such systems. When root causes are not causally…
Human and artificial organizations may be described as networks of interacting parts. Those parts exchange data and control information and, as a result of these interactions, organizations produce emergent behaviors and purposes -- traits…
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…
Detecting and understanding reasons for defects and inadvertent behavior in software is challenging due to their increasing complexity. In configurable software systems, the combinatorics that arises from the multitude of features a user…
Regulators and academics are increasingly interested in the causal effect that algorithmic actions of a digital platform have on consumption. We introduce a general causal inference problem we call the steerability of consumption that…
This paper argues that the physics of condensed matter cannot be fully reduced to the supposedly fundamental quantum mechanical theory for all the atoms of which the system consists. In fact, there are many reasons to reject the idea that…
Temporal causality defines what property causes some observed temporal behavior (the effect) in a given computation, based on a counterfactual analysis of similar computations. In this paper, we study its closure properties and the…
Emergent behavior that appears at a given level of organization may be characterized as arising from an organizationally lower level in such a way that it transcends a mere increase in the behavioral degree of complexity. It is therefore to…