Related papers: The philosophy of causal set theory
Metaphysics is traditionally conceived as aiming at the truth -- indeed, the most fundamental truths about the most general features of reality. Philosophical naturalists, urging that philosophical claims be grounded on science, have often…
Classical physics encompasses the study of physical phenomena which ranges from local (a point) to nonlocal (a region) in space and/or time. We discuss the concept of spatial and temporal nonlocality. However, one of the likely implications…
This is a chapter of the planned monograph "Out of Nowhere: The Emergence of Spacetime in Quantum Theories of Gravity", co-authored by Nick Huggett and Christian W\"uthrich and under contract with Oxford University Press. (More information…
An argument is presented that if a theory of quantum gravity is physically discrete at the Planck scale and the theory recovers General Relativity as an approximation, then, at the current stage of our knowledge, causal sets must arise…
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…
Synchronization of chaos arises between coupled dynamical systems and is very well understood as a temporal phenomena which leads the coupled systems to converge or develop a dependence with time. In this work, we provide a complementary…
Using a process-theoretic formalism, we introduce the notion of a causal-inferential theory: a triple consisting of a theory of causal influences, a theory of inferences (of both the Boolean and Bayesian varieties), and a specification of…
The hypothesis that the causal properties of space-time, as well as other properties of physical systems like unitarity, charge conservation, etc., might be decided by the higher dimensional structure (in particular, higher-dimensional…
Causal sets are locally finite, partially ordered sets (posets), which are considered as discrete models of spacetimes. On the one hand, causal sets corresponding to a spacetime manifold are commonly generated with a random process called…
Computational analysis of time-course data with an underlying causal structure is needed in a variety of domains, including neural spike trains, stock price movements, and gene expression levels. However, it can be challenging to determine…
Causal set quantum gravity is a Lorentzian approach to quantum gravity, based on the causal structure of spacetime. It models each spacetime configuration as a discrete causal network of spacetime points. As such, key questions of the…
The canonical formalism of general relativity affords a particularly interesting characterisation of the infamous hole argument. It also provides a natural formalism in which to relate the hole argument to the problem of time in classical…
There has been a body of works deriving the complex Hilbert space structure of quantum theory from axioms/principles/postulates to deepen our understanding about quantum theory and to reveal ways to go beyond it to resolve foundational…
Causality is a subject of philosophical debate and a central scientific issue with a long history. In the statistical domain, the study of cause and effect based on the notion of `fairness' in comparisons dates back several hundred years,…
One might think that, once we know something is computable, how efficiently it can be computed is a practical question with little further philosophical importance. In this essay, I offer a detailed case that one would be wrong. In…
Space and time are central concepts for understanding our World. They are important ingredients at the core of every scientific theory and subject of intense debate in philosophy. Albert Einstein's Special and General theories of Relativity…
Set theory brought revolution to philosophy of mathematics and it can bring revolution to philosophy of physics too. All that stands in the way is the intuition that sets of physical objects cannot themselves be physical objects, which…
Causality is fundamental to science, but it appears in several different forms. One is relativistic causality, which is tied to a space-time structure and forbids signalling outside the future. A second is an operational notion of causation…
The universal dynamic uncertainty, discovered in Parts I and II of this series of papers for the case of Hamiltonian quantum systems, is further specified to reveal the hierarchical structure of levels of dynamically redundant…
The landscape of causal relations that can hold among a set of systems in quantum theory is richer than in classical physics. In particular, a pair of time-ordered systems can be related as cause and effect or as the effects of a common…