Colloquium: March 13th
Title:Robust Patterns in the Causal Nexus
Speaker: Holly Andersen (SFU)
Friday, March 13th at 2:30pm in CLE A203
Abstract:
Information theory, which expands many core ideas and techniques from thermodynamics, offers a new avenue to explain the connection between the directed arrows of thermodynamics and causation. Attempts to use various measures of information transfer to sort out causal structure from data sets have met with at most mixed results. Part of the problem with these prior attempts is that information theory can be applied to just about anything. To get causal mileage out of information theory, it must be applied to the right sorts of relata, namely, causal relata. On the one side, informational relationships will only be causal informational relationships when the relata are causal. On the other side, though, it is not straightforward to what information theory should be applied such that the resulting informational relationships would be causal.