Related papers: The Physics of Causation
Assembly theory (AT) quantifies selection using the assembly equation and identifies complex objects that occur in abundance based on two measurements, assembly index and copy number, where the assembly index is the minimum number of…
Since the time of Darwin, scientists have struggled to reconcile the evolution of biological forms in a universe determined by fixed laws. These laws underpin the origin of life, evolution, human culture and technology, as set by the…
Assembly Theory (AT) was developed to help distinguish living from non-living systems. The theory is simple as it posits that the amount of selection or Assembly is a function of the number of complex objects where their complexity can be…
Quantifying the evolution and complexity of materials is of importance in many areas of science and engineering, where a central open challenge is developing experimental complexity measurements to distinguish random structures from evolved…
Assembly Theory (AT) and its central measure, the assembly index (Ai), represent an invaluable opportunity to address some of the most persistent and widespread conflations and misconceptions about computability and complexity theory in…
Evolution is often understood through genetic mutations driving changes in an organism's fitness, but there is potential to extend this understanding beyond the genetic code. We propose that natural products - complex molecules central to…
Assembly Theory (AT) is a theory that explains how to determine if a complex object is the product of evolution. Here we explain why attempts to compare AT to compression algorithms, ref 1, does not help identify if the object is the…
We prove the full equivalence between Assembly Theory (AT) and Shannon Entropy via a method based upon the principles of statistical compression renamed `assembly index' that belongs to the LZ family of popular compression algorithms (ZIP,…
We demonstrate that the assembly pathway method underlying assembly theory (AT) is an encoding scheme widely used by popular statistical compression algorithms. We show that in all cases (synthetic or natural) AT performs similarly to other…
Algorithms for causal discovery have recently undergone rapid advances and increasingly draw on flexible nonparametric methods to process complex data. With these advances comes a need for adequate empirical validation of the causal…
All physical process are subject to some laws which determine with math accurately its time-space evolution. These laws are described, in the last analysis for the principle of causality. The physical space can be homogeneous or…
How do we estimate the probability of an abundant objects' formation, with minimal context or assumption about is origin? To explore this we have previously introduced the concept of pathway assembly (as pathway complexity), in a graph…
Assembly theory predicts that a distinguishing signature of life is its ability to produce complex molecules in abundance, opening new possibilities for life detection. Experimental validation of this approach has so far relied on abiotic…
An assembly is a large population of neurons whose synchronous firing is hypothesized to represent a memory, concept, word, and other cognitive categories. Assemblies are believed to provide a bridge between high-level cognitive phenomena…
We propose Universal Causality, an overarching framework based on category theory that defines the universal property that underlies causal inference independent of the underlying representational formalism used. More formally, universal…
Selection is central to biological evolution, yet there has been no general experimental framework for quantifying selection in chemical systems before life. Here we demonstrate that selection in a prebiological chemical system can be…
We have developed the concept of pathway assembly to explore the amount of extrinsic information required to build an object. To quantify this information in an agnostic way, we present a method to determine the amount of pathway assembly…
A causal set is a partially ordered set on a countably infinite ground-set such that each element is above finitely many others. A natural extension of a causal set is an enumeration of its elements which respects the order. We bring…
From the standpoint of applied ontology, the problem of understanding and modeling causation has been recently challenged on the premise that causation is real. As a consequence, the following three results were obtained: (1) causation can…
It is often claimed that one cannot locate a notion of causation in fundamental physical theories. The reason most commonly given is that the dynamics of those theories do not support any distinction between the past and the future, and…