The past few years have seen several novel information-theoretic measures of causal emergence developed within the scientific community. In this paper I will introduce one such measure, called ‘effective information’, and describe how it is used to argue for causal emergence. In brief, the idea is that certain kinds of complex system are structured such that an intervention characterised at the macro-level will be more informative than one characterised at the micro-level, and that this constitutes a form of causal emergence. Having introduced this proposal, I will then assess the extent to which it is genuinely ‘causal’ and/or ‘emergent’, and argue that it supports only an epistemic form of causal emergence that is not as exciting as it first seems.

中文翻译：

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来自有效信息的因果涌现：既非因果也非涌现？

在过去的几年里，科学界已经发展出几种新的因果出现的信息理论测量方法。在本文中，我将介绍一种这样的度量，称为“有效信息”，并描述如何使用它来论证因果出现。简而言之，这个想法是，某些类型的复杂系统的结构使得宏观层面的干预比微观层面的干预更具信息性，这构成了因果出现的一种形式。在介绍了这个提议之后，我将评估它真正“因果”和/或“涌现”的程度，并认为它只支持一种并不像最初看起来那么令人兴奋的因果涌现的认知形式。