Related papers: Toy Models of Top Down Causation
A number of writers have been attracted to the idea that some of the peculiarities of quantum theory might be manifestations of 'backward' or 'retro' causality, underlying the quantum description. This idea has been explored in the…
A local, deterministic toy model for quantum mechanics is introduced and discussed. It is demonstrated that, when averaged over the hidden variables, the model produces the same predictions as quantum mechanics. In the model considered…
Theoretical physics is used for a toy model of molecular biology to assess conditions that lead to the edge of chaos (EOC) in a network of biomolecules. Results can enhance our ability to understand complex diseases and their treatment or…
We propose a toy-model theory, that mimics various characteristic features of quantum mechanics. Unlike the toy-models previously studied in the literature, our toy-model allows for an observer to have a full knowledge of a system's real…
Neural networks often pack many unrelated concepts into a single neuron - a puzzling phenomenon known as 'polysemanticity' which makes interpretability much more challenging. This paper provides a toy model where polysemanticity can be…
We consider an atomistic model defined through an interaction field satisfying a variational principle, and can therefore be considered a toy model of (orbital free) density functional theory. We investigate atomistic-to-continuum coupling…
Classical objects have been excluded as subjects of the observed quantum properties, and the related problem of the nature of quantum objects has been suspended since the early days of Quantum Theory. Recent experiments show that the…
Toy models are highly idealized and deliberately simplified models that retain only the essential features of a system in order to explore specific theoretical questions. Long used in physics and other sciences, they have recently begun to…
One of the basic assumptions implicit in the way physics is usually done is that all causation flows in a bottom up fashion, from micro to macro scales. However this is wrong in many cases in biology, and in particular in the way the brain…
Top-down causation has been suggested to occur at all scales of biological organization as a mechanism for explaining the hierarchy of structure and causation in living systems. Here we propose that a transition from bottom-up to top-down…
Causal Models are increasingly suggested as a means to reason about the behavior of cyber-physical systems in socio-technical contexts. They allow us to analyze courses of events and reason about possible alternatives. Until now, however,…
A simple toy model is proposed that would allow conscious perceptions to be either classical (perceptions of objects without large quantum uncertainties or variances) or highly quantum (e.g., having large variances in the perceived position…
It is argued that substantial portions of both Newtonian particle mechanics and general relativity can be viewed as relational (rather than absolute) theories. I furthermore use the relational particle models as toy models to investigate…
Causality has been often confused with the notion of determinism. It is mandatory to separate the two notions in view of the debate about quantum foundations. Quantum theory provides an example of causal not-deterministic theory. Here we…
'Capsule' models try to explicitly represent the poses of objects, enforcing a linear relationship between an object's pose and that of its constituent parts. This modelling assumption should lead to robustness to viewpoint changes since…
Various effects in human cognition, often considered `non-classical', have been argued to be most naturally modelled by quantum-like models of decision making. We extend this approach to describe models of cognition and decision-making in…
A probabilistic model describes a system in its observational state. In many situations, however, we are interested in the system's response under interventions. The class of structural causal models provides a language that allows us to…
We will argue that a phenomenological analysis of consciousness, similar to that of Husserl, shows that the effects of phenomenal qualities shape our perception of the world. It also shows the way the physical and mathematical sciences…
We construct a quantum measure on the power set of non-cyclic oriented graphs of N points, drawing inspiration from 1-dimensional directed percolation. Quantum interference patterns lead to properties which do not appear to have any…
We investigate a number of simple toy models to explore interesting relationships between dynamics and typicality. We start with an infinite model that has been proposed as an illustration of how non-ergodic dynamics can produce interesting…