question

active

question:how-causally-emergent-are-artificial-agents-compared-to-biological-ones

How causally emergent are artificial agents compared to biological ones?

Core motivating question addressed by the empirical RL study; identified as major knowledge gap.

Source paper

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(2026) · Federico Pigozzi · Michael Levin

paper

finding

claim

Biological agents increase causal emergence after learning new memories.
gates
Prior empirical observation from biological systems; motivates investigation in artificial agents.

concept

Causal Emergence
about
Core concept: degree to which an agent exerts unique predictive power on its future; key to cognition at all scales.
Artificial agents
about
Synthetic agents (here RL-trained neural networks) whose causal emergence was previously largely unknown; the paper addresses this gap.

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.

Biological and artificial agents share causal emergence as an axis of learning and reorganization.claim0.855
Interpretive assertion bridging Levin's biological cognition work with artificial RL; extends 'minds at all scales' thesis.
Causal emergence is defined by the difference in the EI values between the macro-level and micro-level.quote0.769
Core definition from §1.
Is causal emergence ontological or epistemological?question0.769
Philosophical debate discussed in §5.2.
Causal emergence can enable causal interventions to create better RL agents.claim0.764
Assertion that understanding causal emergence may lead to methods for manipulating agent representations to improve performance.
Causal emergence may be a previously undisclosed axis of reorganization of neural representations in RL agents.claim0.762
Authors' interpretive assertion that the observed alignment reveals a novel organizing principle of neural representation dynamics.
Causal emergence alignment with learning is a shared axis comparing biological and artificial creatures.claim0.760
Assertion that the correlation between causal emergence and learning constitutes another way biological and artificial intelligences converge.
When does causal emergence occur?question0.759
Open problem stated in §5.4.
Causal emergence is widespread across measures of causation, not just EI.claim0.758
Claim by Comolatti & Hoel (2022) endorsed by this survey.