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Physical Grounds for Causal Perspectivalism
We ground the asymmetry of causal relations in the internal physical states of a special kind of open and irreversible physical system, a causal agent. A causal agent is an autonomous physical system, maintained in a steady state, far from thermal equilibrium, with special subsystems: sensors, actua...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MDPI
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10453189/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37628219 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e25081190 |
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author | Milburn, Gerard J. Shrapnel, Sally Evans, Peter W. |
author_facet | Milburn, Gerard J. Shrapnel, Sally Evans, Peter W. |
author_sort | Milburn, Gerard J. |
collection | PubMed |
description | We ground the asymmetry of causal relations in the internal physical states of a special kind of open and irreversible physical system, a causal agent. A causal agent is an autonomous physical system, maintained in a steady state, far from thermal equilibrium, with special subsystems: sensors, actuators, and learning machines. Using feedback, the learning machine, driven purely by thermodynamic constraints, changes its internal states to learn probabilistic functional relations inherent in correlations between sensor and actuator records. We argue that these functional relations just are causal relations learned by the agent, and so such causal relations are simply relations between the internal physical states of a causal agent. We show that learning is driven by a thermodynamic principle: the error rate is minimised when the dissipated power is minimised. While the internal states of a causal agent are necessarily stochastic, the learned causal relations are shared by all machines with the same hardware embedded in the same environment. We argue that this dependence of causal relations on such ‘hardware’ is a novel demonstration of causal perspectivalism. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10453189 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | MDPI |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-104531892023-08-26 Physical Grounds for Causal Perspectivalism Milburn, Gerard J. Shrapnel, Sally Evans, Peter W. Entropy (Basel) Article We ground the asymmetry of causal relations in the internal physical states of a special kind of open and irreversible physical system, a causal agent. A causal agent is an autonomous physical system, maintained in a steady state, far from thermal equilibrium, with special subsystems: sensors, actuators, and learning machines. Using feedback, the learning machine, driven purely by thermodynamic constraints, changes its internal states to learn probabilistic functional relations inherent in correlations between sensor and actuator records. We argue that these functional relations just are causal relations learned by the agent, and so such causal relations are simply relations between the internal physical states of a causal agent. We show that learning is driven by a thermodynamic principle: the error rate is minimised when the dissipated power is minimised. While the internal states of a causal agent are necessarily stochastic, the learned causal relations are shared by all machines with the same hardware embedded in the same environment. We argue that this dependence of causal relations on such ‘hardware’ is a novel demonstration of causal perspectivalism. MDPI 2023-08-10 /pmc/articles/PMC10453189/ /pubmed/37628219 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e25081190 Text en © 2023 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
spellingShingle | Article Milburn, Gerard J. Shrapnel, Sally Evans, Peter W. Physical Grounds for Causal Perspectivalism |
title | Physical Grounds for Causal Perspectivalism |
title_full | Physical Grounds for Causal Perspectivalism |
title_fullStr | Physical Grounds for Causal Perspectivalism |
title_full_unstemmed | Physical Grounds for Causal Perspectivalism |
title_short | Physical Grounds for Causal Perspectivalism |
title_sort | physical grounds for causal perspectivalism |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10453189/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37628219 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e25081190 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT milburngerardj physicalgroundsforcausalperspectivalism AT shrapnelsally physicalgroundsforcausalperspectivalism AT evanspeterw physicalgroundsforcausalperspectivalism |