The Divine Action Project, 1988–2003

This article explores the state of the art in theories of special divine action by means of a study of the Divine Action Project (DAP) co-sponsored by the Vatican Observatory and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley. The basic aim is to introduce the DAP and to summarize its results, especially as these were compiled in the final “capstone” meeting of the DAP, and drawing on the published output of the project where possible. The subsidiary aim is to evaluate criticisms of theories of special divine action developed within the DAP.ye

Causality and intervention in the Spin-Echo Experiments

En los llamados "experimentos espín-eco" el comportamiento del sistema de espines parece violar la segunda ley de la termodinámica. Por esta razón, los "experimentos espín-eco'' son considerados de gran interés en Fundamentos de la Física. Los intervencionistas han ofrecido explicaciones clásicas (Blatt 1959; Ridderbos and Redhead 1998) y explicaciones basadas en mecánica cuántica (Hemmo and Shenker 2005) de dichos experimentos. Aquí ambas explicaciones intervencionistas son analizadas mediante la Teoría Manipulabilista de las Explicaciones Causales (Woodward 2003). Se argumenta que el intervencionismo ganaría profundidad explicativa si proporcionara relaciones funcionales y realizara predicciones de los tiempos de relajación

Patterns, Information, and Causation

This paper articulates an account of causation as a collection of information-theoretic relationships between patterns instantiated in the causal nexus. I draw on Dennett’s account of real patterns to characterize potential causal relata as patterns with specific identification criteria and noise tolerance levels, and actual causal relata as those patterns instantiated at some spatiotemporal location in the rich causal nexus as originally developed by Salmon. I develop a representation framework using phase space to precisely characterize causal relata, including their degree of counterfactual robustness, causal profiles, causal connectivity, and privileged grain size. By doing so, I show how the philosophical notion of causation can be rendered in a format that is amenable for direct application of mathematical techniques from information theory such that the resulting informational measures are causal informational measures. This account provides a metaphysics of causation that supports interventionist semantics and causal modeling and discovery techniques

Dynamics of Wealth Inequality

We study an agent-based model of evolution of wealth distribution in a macro-economic system. The evolution is driven by multiplicative stochastic fluctuations governed by the law of proportionate growth and interactions between agents. We are mainly interested in interactions increasing wealth inequality that is in a local implementation of the accumulated advantage principle. Such interactions destabilise the system. They are confronted in the model with a global regulatory mechanism which reduces wealth inequality. There are different scenarios emerging as a net effect of these two competing mechanisms. When the effect of the global regulation (economic interventionism) is too weak the system is unstable and it never reaches equilibrium. When the effect is sufficiently strong the system evolves towards a limiting stationary distribution with a Pareto tail. In between there is a critical phase. In this phase the system may evolve towards a steady state with a multimodal wealth distribution. The corresponding cumulative density function has a characteristic stairway pattern which reflects the effect of economic stratification. The stairs represent wealth levels of economic classes separated by wealth gaps. As we show, the pattern is typical for macro-economic systems with a limited economic freedom. One can find such a multimodal pattern in empirical data, for instance, in the highest percentile of wealth distribution for the population in urban areas of China.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures (references added, some material moved to appendix

The enigma of irreversibility and the interplay between Physics, Mathematics and Philosophy

The problem of reconciling a reversible micro-dynamics with the second law of thermodynamics has been a scientific and conceptual challenge for centuries and it continues to animate heated debate even today. In my opinion, one key point lays in the interrelation between the physical, the mathematical and the philosophical aspects of the problem. In many treatments those domains of knowledge dangerously mix, generating confusion and misunderstanding. In this short work I will show how disentangling these three domains for the problem at hand will give a better understanding of the enigma of irreversibility and opens up possibility for future research

The enigma of irreversibility and the interplay between Physics, Mathematics and Philosophy

The problem of reconciling a reversible micro-dynamics with the second law of thermodynamics has been a scientific and conceptual challenge for centuries and it continues to animate heated debate even today. In my opinion, one key point lays in the interrelation between the physical, the mathematical and the philosophical aspects of the problem. In many treatments those domains of knowledge dangerously mix, generating confusion and misunderstanding. In this short work I will show how disentangling these three domains for the problem at hand will give a better understanding of the enigma of irreversibility and opens up possibility for future research

The Search for Invariance: Repeated Positive Testing Serves the Goals of Causal Learning

Positive testing is characteristic of exploratory behavior, yet it seems to be at odds with the aim of information seeking. After all, repeated demonstrations of one’s current hypothesis often produce the same evidence and fail to distinguish it from potential alternatives. Research on the development of scientific reasoning and adult rule learning have both documented and attempted to explain this behavior. The current chapter reviews this prior work and introduces a novel theoretical account—the Search for Invariance (SI) hypothesis—which suggests that producing multiple positive examples serves the goals of causal learning. This hypothesis draws on the interventionist framework of causal reasoning, which suggests that causal learners are concerned with the invariance of candidate hypotheses. In a probabilistic and interdependent causal world, our primary goal is to determine whether, and in what contexts, our causal hypotheses provide accurate foundations for inference and intervention—not to disconfirm their alternatives. By recognizing the central role of invariance in causal learning, the phenomenon of positive testing may be reinterpreted as a rational information-seeking strategy

Quantum causal models, faithfulness and retrocausality

Wood and Spekkens (2015) argue that any causal model explaining the EPRB correlations and satisfying no-signalling must also violate the assumption that the model faithfully reproduces the statistical dependences and independences---a so-called "fine-tuning" of the causal parameters; this includes, in particular, retrocausal explanations of the EPRB correlations. I consider this analysis with a view to enumerating the possible responses an advocate of retrocausal explanations might propose. I focus on the response of N\"{a}ger (2015), who argues that the central ideas of causal explanations can be saved if one accepts the possibility of a stable fine-tuning of the causal parameters. I argue that, in light of this view, a violation of faithfulness does not necessarily rule out retrocausal explanations of the EPRB correlations, although it certainly constrains such explanations. I conclude by considering some possible consequences of this type of response for retrocausal explanations