Director
Gerard Milburn
Institution The University of Queensland
The scientific method is grounded on the concept of causation and intelligent agency. In this project, we aim to give a philosophically coherent, theoretically justified and experimentally validated defence of the thesis that to be a cause, information must be embodied and acquires causal power when intelligent agents use embodied information to optimise their performance in a physical setting. The project will address big questions including: Does information have causal power? How does one understand causal relations in a quantum world? Are there new quantum architectures for control, based on automated intelligent agents (IA) with access to the full power of quantum information processing?
The project is structured around three integrated investigations, philosophical, theoretical and experimental. The theoretical investigation will use quantum information theory to find communication tasks that lead to novel causal structures, determine if a quantum intelligent agent (IA) can learn more efficiently than a classical IA, and design linear optical schemes for the experiment. The philosophical component will explore the extent to which quantum information throws light on how we should understand causation and will integrate the theory and experimental results to provide a coherent defence of the thesis that information has causal power in quantum physics. At the end of the project we will have discovered—and experimentally implemented—a set of statistical inequalities for testing quantum causality and a new class of quantum control protocols incorporating quantum computation.
Project Resources
Causal modelling provides a powerful set of tools for identifying causal structure from observed correlations. It is well known that such tech...
This paper provides a prospectus for a new way of thinking about the wavefunction of the universe: a Ψ-epistemic quantum cosmology. We present...
The principle of common cause asserts that positive correlations between causally unrelated events ought to be explained through the action of...
Despite the tremendous empirical success of quantum theory there is still widespread disagreement about what it can tell us about the nature o...
Wood and Spekkens (2015) argue that any causal model explaining the EPRB correlations and satisfying no-signalling must also violate the assum...
Quantum coherence, present whenever a quantum system exists in a superposition of multiple classically distinct states, marks one of the funda...
Supervised learning algorithms take as input a set of labelled examples and return as output a predictive model. Such models are used to estim...
Costa and Shrapnel ([2016]) have recently proposed an interventionist theory of quantum causation. The formalism generalizes the classical met...
Abstract Time has a fundamentally different character in quantum mechanics and in general relativity. In quantum theory events unfold in a fix...
General relativity allows for the existence of closed time-like curves, along which a material object could travel back in time and interact w...
What would it be for a process to happen backwards in time? Would such a process involve different causal relations? It is common to understan...
A recent series of experiments have demonstrated that a classical fluid mechanical system, constituted by an oil droplet bouncing on a vibrati...
In this work, we have developed an optimization framework for digging out common structural patterns inherent in DNA binding proteins. A novel...
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