We have argued elsewhere that natural selection is not a cause of evolution, and that a resolution-of-forces (or vector addition) model does not provide us with a proper understanding of how natural selection combines with other evolutionary influences. These propositions have come in for criticism recently, and here we clarify and defend them. We do so within the broad framework of our own ‘hi...

This paper argues that functional states, and states defined in terms of them, cannot be causally relevant to the output or state transitions in terms of which those functional states are defined, or to intervening mechanisms or to anything to which their output is in turn causally relevant. Functional states therefore cannot be correctly invoked in what I call "simple causal explanations". Exp...

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Clark Glymour is Alumni University Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, and Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition and John Pace Eminent Scholar at the University of West Florida. He is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and books, including “The Mind’s Arrows” (2001), “Computation, Causation and Discovery” (1999), and “Thinking Thi...

Certain quantum gates, such as the controlled-NOT gate, are symmetric in terms of the operation of the control system upon the target system and vice versa. However, no operational criteria yet exist for establishing whether or not a given quantum gate is symmetrical in this sense. We consider a restricted, yet broad, class of two-party controlled gate operations for which the gate transforms a...

This survey presents some of the main principles involved in discovering causal relations. They belong to a large array of possible assumptions and conditions about causal relations, whose various combinations limit the possibilities of acquiring causal knowledge in different ways. How much and in what detail the causal structure can be discovered from what kinds of data depends on the particul...

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Environmentalist concerns have moved centre stage in most major religious traditions of late and Buddhism is no exception to this rule. This paper shows that the canonical writings of Indic Buddhism possess elements that may harmonise with a //de facto// ecological consciousness. However, their basic attitude towards the causal process drastically reduces the possibility of developing an authen...

We present a general conceptualization of causal relations that pivots on the distinction between causality, a law-like relation between types of events, and causation, the actual causal relation that holds between individual events. This distinction finds its formal characterization and embedding within DOLCE, in terms of a number of dependences between (types of) quality changes. Finally an a...