Related papers: Causal Sets and an Emerging Continuum

This paper offers suggested improvements to the causal sets program in discrete gravity, which treats spacetime geometry as an emergent manifestation of causal structure at the fundamental scale. This viewpoint, which I refer to as the…

Identifying an appropriate set of ``observables'' is a nontrivial task for most approaches to quantum gravity. We describe how it may be accomplished in the context of a recently proposed family of stochastic (but classical) dynamical laws…

One of approaches to quantum gravity is different models of a discrete pregeometry. An example of a discrete pregeometry on a microscopic scale is introduced. This is the particular case of a causal set. The causal set is a locally finite…

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,…

The idea that events obey a definite causal order is deeply rooted in our understanding of the world and at the basis of the very notion of time. But where does causal order come from, and is it a necessary property of nature? We address…

The constraints arising for a general set of causal relations, both classically and quantumly, are still poorly understood. As a step in exploring this question, we consider a coherently controlled superposition of "direct-cause" and…

Causality is a fundamental part of the scientific endeavour to understand the world. Unfortunately, causality is still taboo in much of psychology and social science. Motivated by a growing number of recommendations for the importance of…

The causal closure of physics is usually discussed in a context free way. Here I discuss it in the context of engineering systems and biology, where strong emergence takes place due to a combination of upwards emergence and downwards…

We describe a new form of retrocausality, which is found in the behaviour of a class of causal set theories, called energetic causal sets (ECS). These are discrete sets of events, connected by causal relations. They have three orders: (1) a…

Causal emergence is the theory that macroscales can reduce the noise in causal relationships, leading to stronger causes at the macroscale. First identified using the effective information and later the integrated information in model…

We explicitly compute the causal structure of the Schwarzschild black hole spacetime, by providing an algorithm to decide if any pair of events is causally related. The primary motivation for this study comes from discrete quantum gravity,…

Complex systems can be described at myriad different scales, and their causal workings often have multiscale structure (e.g., a computer can be described at the microscale of its hardware circuitry, the mesoscale of its machine code, and…

Causal additive models provide a tractable yet expressive framework for causal discovery in the presence of hidden variables. When unobserved backdoor or causal paths exist between two variables, their causal relationship is often…

Graphical models can represent a multivariate distribution in a convenient and accessible form as a graph. Causal models can be viewed as a special class of graphical models that not only represent the distribution of the observed system…

We propose a manifestly covariant framework for causal set dynamics. The framework is based on a structure, dubbed covtree, which is a partial order on certain sets of finite, unlabeled causal sets. We show that every infinite path in…

Causal discovery is the subfield of causal inference concerned with estimating the structure of cause-and-effect relationships in a system of interrelated variables, as opposed to quantifying the strength or describing the form of causal…

The first goal of this paper is to show that discreteness, locality, and relativistic covariance can peacefully coexist if the ordinary spacetime (OST) is replaced with phase spacetime (PST) as a geometric background of a Poisson process,…

Causality never gained the status of a "law" or "principle" in physics. Some recent literature even popularized the false idea that causality is a notion that should be banned from theory. Such misconception relies on an alleged…

In General Relativity the metric can be recovered from the structure of the lightcones and a measure giving the volume element. Since the causal structure seems to be simpler than the Lorentzian manifold structure, this suggests that it is…

We present several philosophical ideas emerging from the studies of complex systems. We make a brief introduction to the basic concepts of complex systems, for then defining "abstraction levels". These are useful for representing…