Hoel's Causal Emergence Theory

Quantitative emergence theory based on Markov dynamics and effective information (EI).

Neighborhood — ranked by edge-count

thinker

Erik Hoel
introduces
Author of 'The Overfitted Brain'; Johnson references Hoel's framework of energy, information, and uncertainty as equivalent conserved quantities.
Joe Dewhurst
contradicts
Critiqued Hoel's causal emergence as epistemological rather than ontological.

concept

Effective Information (EI)
implements
Core measure of causal effect in Hoel's theory; mutual information between uniform input and output distributions.

claim

EI maximization serves as an objective standard for selecting coarse-graining and macro-dynamics.
supports
Claim by Hoel et al. and endorsed by this survey; used to counter subjectivity critiques.

framework

Neural Information Squeezer (NIS)
implements
Machine learning framework for causal emergence identification via encoder-dynamics learner-decoder architecture.

artifact

Yuan 2023 Emergence and Causality in Complex Systems: A Survey
mentions
This review paper surveys quantitative theories of causal emergence and their connections to machine learning.

finding

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

Causal Emergenceconcept0.844
Core concept: degree to which an agent exerts unique predictive power on its future; key to cognition at all scales.
Causal emergence provides new perspectives for causal representation learning, interpreting latent variables as emergent causalities.claim0.810
Cross-fertilization claim made in discussion.
Causal emergence is defined by the difference in the EI values between the macro-level and micro-level.quote0.804
Core definition from §1.
Causal emergence is widespread across measures of causation, not just EI.claim0.803
Claim by Comolatti & Hoel (2022) endorsed by this survey.
Causally Emergent Alignment Hypothesishypothesis0.803
The hypothesis that successful RL agents will display causal emergence that is predictive of final reward early in training and whose representational dynamics align with reward improvement.
Is causal emergence ontological or epistemological?question0.802
Philosophical debate discussed in §5.2.
When does causal emergence occur?question0.798
Open problem stated in §5.4.
Emergence refers to the phenomenon where macroscopic properties cannot be solely attributed to the cause of individual properties.quote0.793
Load-bearing definition from the abstract.