Related papers: Causal Stance
In the past century many fundamental results on unpredictability, undecidability and uncertainty have compelled scientists to grapple with the idea that some questions may never be resolved within our current theories. While this…
A perplexing problem in understanding physical reality is why the universe seems comprehensible, and correspondingly why there should exist physical systems capable of comprehending it. In this essay I explore the possibility that rather…
Are minds subject to laws of physics? Are the laws of physics computable? Are conscious thought processes computable? Currently there is little agreement as to what are the right answers to these questions. Penrose goes one step further and…
The causal set approach to quantum gravity embodies the concepts of causality and discreteness. This article explores some foundational and conceptual issues within causal set theory.
The Principle of Sufficient Reason implies determinism. An explicit indeterministic quantum jump dynamics is constructed, which may be naturally transformed into a deterministic one. A consistent application of the Principle of Sufficient…
Recently, a new concept, primitive chaos, was proposed, as a concept closely related to the fundamental problems of physics itself such as determinism, causality, free will, predictability, and irreversibility [J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. {\bf 79},…
To make effective decisions, it is important to have a thorough understanding of the causal relationships among actions, environments, and outcomes. This review aims to surface three crucial aspects of decision-making through a causal lens:…
In non relativistic physics it is assumed that both chronological ordering and causal ordering of events (telling whether there exists a causal relationship between two events or not) are absolute, observer independent properties. In…
Conditionals are useful for modelling, but are not always sufficiently expressive for capturing information accurately. In this paper we make the case for a form of conditional that is situation-based. These conditionals are more expressive…
This paper analyzes the notion of causality in a conceptual model, mainly as applied in software engineering. Conceptual system modeling can be considered a three-level process that begins with building a static structural description to…
Quantum causality extends the conventional notion of fixed causal structure by allowing channels and operations to act in an indefinite causal order. The importance of such an indefinite causal order ranges from the foundational---e.g.…
Recent research has severely constrained the standard ``defect'' models of cosmic structure formation. Here I discuss the nature of the problems with defect models, and place this discussion in the context of the big picture of cosmic…
This paper proposes a basic theory on physical reality, and a new foundation for quantum mechanics and classical mechanics. It does not only solve the problem of the arbitrariness on the operator ordering for the quantization procedure, but…
Classically the causal order of two timelike separated events A and B is fixed -- either A before B or B before A. This is no longer true in quantum theory, where it is possible to encounter superpositions of causal orders. The quantum…
Philosophical analyses of causation take many forms but one major difficulty they all aim to address is that of the spatio-temporal continuity between causes and their effects. Bertrand Russell in 1913 brought the problem to its most…
Bell non-local correlations cannot be naturally explained in a fixed causal structure. This serves as a motivation for considering models where no global assumption is made beyond logical consistency. The assumption of a fixed causal order…
Causality has the potential to truly transform the way we solve a large number of real-world problems. Yet, so far, its potential largely remains to be unlocked as causality often requires crucial assumptions which cannot be tested in…
The design of scientific experiments deserves its own variation of formal verification to catch cases where scientists made important mistakes, such as forgetting to take confounding variables into account. One of the most fundamental…
A particular science is not only defined by its object of study, but also by the point of view and method under which it considers that same object. Taking space and time as an illustrative example, our main aim here is to bring out an…
I explore whether it is possible to make sense of the quantum mechanical description of physical reality by taking the proper subject of physics to be correlation and only correlation, and by separating the problem of understanding the…