Related papers: Physics, Determinism, and the Brain

It has been shown at other occasions that recent results of modern physics can be used to shed some more light onto the foundations of the world, provided the actual task of philosophy is being re-interpreted in terms of a theory which is…

Interactions between internet users are mediated by their devices and the common support infrastructure in data centres. Keeping track of causality amongst actions that take place in this distributed system is key to provide a seamless…

Neural spikes in the brain form stochastic sequences, i.e., belong to the class of pulse noises. This stochasticity is a counterintuitive feature because extracting information - such as the commonly supposed neural information of mean…

We study the interaction of views, queries, and background knowledge in the form of existential rules. The motivating questions concern monotonic determinacy of a query using views w.r.t. rules, which refers to the ability to recover the…

We provide a unified operational framework for the study of causality, non-locality and contextuality, in a fully device-independent and theory-independent setting. Our work has its roots in the sheaf-theoretic framework for contextuality…

So-called hidden variables introduced in quantum mechanics by de Broglie and Bohm have changed their initial enigmatic meanings and acquired quite reasonable outlines of real and measurable characteristics. The start viewpoint was the…

We present a precise definition of cause and effect in terms of a fundamental notion called unresponsiveness. Our definition is based on Savage's (1954) formulation of decision theory and departs from the traditional view of causation in…

This paper argues that the traditional opposition between determinism and indeterminism in physics is representational rather than ontological. Deterministic-stochastic dualities are available in principle, and arise in a non-contrived way…

This paper is a shortened version of the full paper that was published in the journal Frontiers of Psychology in May 2022. In recent decades, the scientific study of consciousness has significantly increased our understanding of this…

Mental events are considered to supervene on physical events. A supervenient event does not change without a corresponding change in the underlying subvenient physical events. Since wholes and their parts exhibit the same…

In this paper, following an elementary line of thought which somewhat differs from the usual one, we prove once more that any deterministic theory predictively equivalent to quantum mechanics unavoidably exhibits a contextual character. The…

Probabilities of Causation play a fundamental role in decision making in law, health care and public policy. Nevertheless, their point identification is challenging, requiring strong assumptions such as monotonicity. In the absence of such…

There are many ways we can not know. Even in systems that we created ourselves, as, for example, systems in mathematical logic, Go\"edel and Tarski's theorems impose limits on what we can know. As we try to speak of the real world, things…

This paper explains why internal and external validity cannot be simultaneously maximised. It introduces "evidential states" to represent the information available for causal inference and shows that routine study operations (restriction,…

Recently, there have been several concerted international efforts - the BRAIN initiative, European Human Brain Project and the Human Connectome Project, to name a few - that hope to revolutionize our understanding of the connected brain.…

Causal inference is best understood using potential outcomes. This use is particularly important in more complex settings, that is, observational studies or randomized experiments with complications such as noncompliance. The topic of this…

We show here that what we call visual space of consciousness, the space of what we see, is a specific space different from the purely physical one and that its properties imply that it cannot be reduced to or deduced from physical laws.…

Built upon the concept of causal faithfulness, the so-called causal discovery algorithms propose the breakdown of mutual information (MI) and conditional mutual information (CMI) into sets of variables to reveal causal influences. These…

Pearl observes that causal knowledge enables predicting the effects of interventions, such as actions, whereas descriptive knowledge only permits drawing conclusions from observation. This paper extends Pearl's approach to causality and…

Understanding commonsense causality is a unique mark of intelligence for humans. It helps people understand the principles of the real world better and benefits the decision-making process related to causation. For instance, commonsense…