The ontology of causal process theories

There is a widespread belief that the so-called process theories of causation developed by Wesley Salmon and Phil Dowe have given us an original account of what causation really is. In this paper, I show that this is a misconception. The notion of "causal process" does not offer us a new ontological account of causation. I make this argument by explicating the implicit ontological commitments in Salmon and Dowe's theories. From this, it is clear that Salmon's Mark Transmission Theory collapses to a counterfactual theory of causation, while the Conserved Quantity Theory collapses to David Fair's phsyicalist reduction of causation

The Fundamental Nature of the Log Loss Function

The standard loss functions used in the literature on probabilistic prediction are the log loss function, the Brier loss function, and the spherical loss function; however, any computable proper loss function can be used for comparison of prediction algorithms. This note shows that the log loss function is most selective in that any prediction algorithm that is optimal for a given data sequence (in the sense of the algorithmic theory of randomness) under the log loss function will be optimal under any computable proper mixable loss function; on the other hand, there is a data sequence and a prediction algorithm that is optimal for that sequence under either of the two other standard loss functions but not under the log loss function.Comment: 12 page

Common Causes and The Direction of Causation

Is the common cause principle merely one of a set of useful heuristics for discovering causal relations, or is it rather a piece of heavy duty metaphysics, capable of grounding the direction of causation itself? Since the principle was introduced in Reichenbach’s groundbreaking work The Direction of Time (1956), there have been a series of attempts to pursue the latter program—to take the probabilistic relationships constitutive of the principle of the common cause and use them to ground the direction of causation. These attempts have not all explicitly appealed to the principle as originally formulated; it has also appeared in the guise of independence conditions, counterfactual overdetermination, and, in the causal modelling literature, as the causal markov condition. In this paper, I identify a set of difficulties for grounding the asymmetry of causation on the principle and its descendents. The first difficulty, concerning what I call the vertical placement of causation, consists of a tension between considerations that drive towards the macroscopic scale, and considerations that drive towards the microscopic scale—the worry is that these considerations cannot both be comfortably accommodated. The second difficulty consists of a novel potential counterexample to the principle based on the familiar Einstein Podolsky Rosen (EPR) cases in quantum mechanics

Compression and intelligence: social environments and communication

Compression has been advocated as one of the principles which pervades inductive inference and prediction - and, from there, it has also been recurrent in definitions and tests of intelligence. However, this connection is less explicit in new approaches to intelligence. In this paper, we advocate that the notion of compression can appear again in definitions and tests of intelligence through the concepts of `mind-reading¿ and `communication¿ in the context of multi-agent systems and social environments. Our main position is that two-part Minimum Message Length (MML) compression is not only more natural and effective for agents with limited resources, but it is also much more appropriate for agents in (co-operative) social environments than one-part compression schemes - particularly those using a posterior-weighted mixture of all available models following Solomonoff¿s theory of prediction. We think that the realisation of these differences is important to avoid a naive view of `intelligence as compression¿ in favour of a better understanding of how, why and where (one-part or two-part, lossless or lossy) compression is needed.We thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and we thank Kurt Kleiner for some challenging and ultimately very helpful questions in the broad area of this work. We also acknowledge the funding from the Spanish MEC and MICINN for projects TIN2009-06078-E/TIN, Consolider-Ingenio CSD2007-00022 and TIN2010-21062-C02, and Generalitat Valenciana for Prometeo/2008/051.Dowe, DL.; Hernández Orallo, J.; Das, PK. (2011). Compression and intelligence: social environments and communication. En Artificial General Intelligence. Springer Verlag (Germany). 6830:204-211. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-22887-2_21S2042116830Chaitin, G.J.: Godel’s theorem and information. 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Can Machine Intelligence be Measured in the Same Way as Human intelligence?

In recent years the number of research projects on computer programs solving human intelligence problems in artificial intelligence (AI), artificial general intelligence, as well as in Cognitive Modelling, has significantly grown. One reason could be the interest of such problems as benchmarks for AI algorithms. Another, more fundamental, motivation behind this area of research might be the (implicit) assumption that a computer program that successfully can solve human intelligence problems has human-level intelligence and vice versa. This paper analyses this assumption

Mechanisms, Then and Now: From Metaphysics to Practice

For many old and new mechanists, Mechanism is both a metaphysical position and a thesis about scientific methodology. In this paper we discuss the relation between the metaphysics of mechanisms and the role of mechanical explanation in the practice of science, by presenting and comparing the key tenets of Old and New Mechanism. First, by focusing on the case of gravity, we show how the metaphysics of Old Mechanism constrained scientific explanation, and discuss Newton’s critique of Old Mechanism. Second, we examine the current mechanistic metaphysics, arguing that it is not warranted by the use of the concept of mechanism in scientific practice, and motivate a thin conception of mechanism (the truly minimal view), according to which mechanisms are causal pathways for a certain effect or phenomenon. Finally, we draw analogies between Newton’s critique of Old Mechanism and our thesis that the metaphysical commitments of New Mechanism are not necessary in order to illuminate scientific practice