Related papers: Mental causation in a physical world: A self-causa…
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…
It has been claimed that different types of causes must be considered in biological systems, including top-down as well as same-level and bottom-up causation, thus enabling the top levels to be causally efficacious in their own right. 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…
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…
Animals move smoothly and reliably in unpredictable environments. Models of sensorimotor control have assumed that sensory information from the environment leads to actions, which then act back on the environment, creating a single,…
Learning about the causal structure of the world is a fundamental problem for human cognition. Causal models and especially causal learning have proved to be difficult for large pretrained models using standard techniques of deep learning.…
In its broadest definition, systems biology is the application of a `systems' way of thinking about and doing cell biology. By implication, this also invites us to consider a systems approach in the context of medicine and the treatment of…
Consciousness spans macroscopic experience and microscopic neuronal activity, yet linking these scales remains challenging. Prevailing theories, such as Integrated Information Theory, focus on a single scale, overlooking how causal power…
The representations of the world around in physics built with help of causality are analyzed and seems incomplete. The observer's causal representations form a closed logical system, i.e. the compact group related to cause-effect chains.…
The broad concept of emergence is instrumental in various of the most challenging open scientific questions -- yet, few quantitative theories of what constitutes emergent phenomena have been proposed. This article introduces a formal theory…
We show that several interpretations of quantum mechanics admit an ontology of objects and events. This ontology reduces the breach between mind and matter. When humans act, their actions do not appear explainable in mechanical terms but…
The most enigmatic aspect of consciousness is the fact that it is felt, as a subjective sensation. The theory proposed here aims to explain this particular aspect. The theory encompasses both the computation that is presumably involved and…
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…
Reasoning models often exhibit overthinking, characterized by redundant reasoning steps. We identify \emph{internal bias} elicited by the input question as a key trigger of such behavior. Upon encountering a problem, the model immediately…
Reductionism assumes that causation in the physical world occurs at the micro level, excluding the emergence of macro-level causation. We challenge this reductionist assumption by employing a principled, well-defined measure of intrinsic…
This paper responds to claims that causal closure of the underlying microphysics determines brain outcomes as a matter of principle, even if we cannot hope to ever carry out the needed calculations in practice. Following two papers of mine…
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…
Research has characterized the various forms cognitive control can take, including enhancement of goal-relevant information, suppression of goal-irrelevant information, and overall inhibition of potential responses, and has identified…
Causal effects are commonly defined as comparisons of the potential outcomes under treatment and control, but this definition is threatened by the possibility that the treatment or control condition is not well-defined, existing instead in…
It is often argued that bottom-up causation under a physicalist, reductionist worldview precludes free will in the libertarian sense. On the one hand, the paradigm of classical mechanics makes determinism inescapable, while on the other,…