{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/reconciling-emergences-an-information","title":"Reconciling emergences: An information-theoretic approach to identify causal emergence in multivariate data","arxiv_id":"2004.08220","date":"2020-04-17","proceeding":null,"authors":["Fernando E. Rosas","Pedro A. M. Mediano","Henrik J. Jensen","Anil. K. Seth","Adam B. Barrett","Robin L. Carhart-Harris","Daniel Bor"],"abstract":"The broad concept of emergence is instrumental in various of the most challenging open scientific questions -- yet, few quantitative theories of what constitutes emergent phenomena have been proposed. This article introduces a formal theory of causal emergence in multivariate systems, which studies the relationship between the dynamics of parts of a system and macroscopic features of interest. Our theory provides a quantitative definition of downward causation, and introduces a complementary modality of emergent behaviour -- which we refer to as causal decoupling. Moreover, the theory allows practical criteria that can be efficiently calculated in large systems, making our framework applicable in a range of scenarios of practical interest. We illustrate our findings in a number of case studies, including Conway's Game of Life, Reynolds' flocking model, and neural activity as measured by electrocorticography.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.08220v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.08220v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"reconciling-emergences-an-information","repo_url":"https://github.com/pmediano/ReconcilingEmergences","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"BSD-3-Clause"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2004.08220","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2004.08220","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}