Cargando…

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...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Milburn, Gerard J., Shrapnel, Sally, Evans, Peter W.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
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
_version_ 1785095870667030528
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