concept
active
concept:causal-emergenceCausal Emergence
Core concept: degree to which an agent exerts unique predictive power on its future; key to cognition at all scales.
Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count
Papers (2)
paper
Thinkers (1)
thinker
- Erik HoelintroducesAuthor of 'The Overfitted Brain'; Johnson references Hoel's framework of energy, information, and uncertainty as equivalent conserved quantities.
Communities (1)
community
- Active Inferencemembers_of
Claims (2)
claim
- Causal emergence identification tasks can be understood as causal representation learning tasks.associated_withAuthors propose a conceptual mapping between CE identification and CRL.
- Cross-fertilization claim made in discussion.
Concepts (10)
concept
- Emergencerelated_toCreation of qualitatively new properties at higher organizational level; requires non-linear fitness interactions.
- World Modelsassociated_withTheme issue context: relates to internal models of environment, central to consciousness and cognition across substrates.
- Downward Causationassociated_withMechanism by which large-scale organizational patterns override lower-level genetic details; enables planarian robustness despite noisy genome.
- Effective Information (EI)associated_withCore measure of causal effect in Hoel's theory; mutual information between uniform input and output distributions.
- Recently proposed method for estimating causal emergence; applied to RL agent latent-space representations.
- Latent-Space Representationsassociated_withSubstrate on which causal emergence was computed across agent lifetimes; aligned with learning success.
- Agent Causal Powerassociated_withFundamental property: ability of agents to exert causal influence and be drivers of subsequent events; key to cognition.
- Causal powerassociated_withThe ability of an agent to be a driver of subsequent events; a hallmark of cognition that causal emergence quantifies.
- Causal Decouplingassociated_withEmergent causation where macro-variable has causal influence on its own future independently of micro-states.
- Representational dynamicsassociated_withThe evolution of an agent's latent representations over the course of training, shown to align with reward improvement when causal emergence is high.
Questions (4)
question
- Core motivating question addressed by the empirical RL study; identified as major knowledge gap.
- Link between emergence and adaptation.
- Philosophical debate discussed in §5.2.
- Open problem stated in §5.4.
Findings (3)
finding
- Klein et al. (2021) analysis of biological interactomes.
- Varley (2020) analysis using ordinal partition network on cellular automata.
- Swain et al. (2022) EI-based study of ant colonies.
Related by similarity (8)
cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edgeEntities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.
- Quantitative emergence theory based on Markov dynamics and effective information (EI).
- Core definition from §1.
- A framework the paper uses alongside feature geometry to deepen mechanistic understanding of LMs
- Claim by Comolatti & Hoel (2022) endorsed by this survey.
- The standard 'it just happens' account of surprising complex outcomes that the paper argues is a research-stopping, defeatist move.
- The property that through processes we do not understand, we can produce systems with capabilities we did not directly engineer — applies to both biological reproduction and AI
- Function determining the value of a variable based on its causal parents in an acyclic causal model.