{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,11]],"date-time":"2025-10-11T02:23:10Z","timestamp":1760149390711,"version":"build-2065373602"},"reference-count":37,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"8","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2023,8,10]],"date-time":"2023-08-10T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1691625600000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"FQXi FFF","award":["FQXi-RFP-1814","CE170100009"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["FQXi-RFP-1814","CE170100009"]}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100000923","name":"Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["FQXi-RFP-1814","CE170100009"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["FQXi-RFP-1814","CE170100009"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100000923","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Entropy"],"abstract":"<jats:p>We ground the asymmetry of causal relations in the internal physical states of a special kind of open and irreversible physical system, a causal agent. A causal agent is an autonomous physical system, maintained in a steady state, far from thermal equilibrium, with special subsystems: sensors, actuators, and learning machines. Using feedback, the learning machine, driven purely by thermodynamic constraints, changes its internal states to learn probabilistic functional relations inherent in correlations between sensor and actuator records. We argue that these functional relations just are causal relations learned by the agent, and so such causal relations are simply relations between the internal physical states of a causal agent. We show that learning is driven by a thermodynamic principle: the error rate is minimised when the dissipated power is minimised. While the internal states of a causal agent are necessarily stochastic, the learned causal relations are shared by all machines with the same hardware embedded in the same environment. We argue that this dependence of causal relations on such \u2018hardware\u2019 is a novel demonstration of causal perspectivalism.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/e25081190","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,8,10]],"date-time":"2023-08-10T10:11:22Z","timestamp":1691662282000},"page":"1190","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":3,"title":["Physical Grounds for Causal Perspectivalism"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"25","author":[{"given":"Gerard J.","family":"Milburn","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Centre for Engineered Quantum Systems, School of Mathematics and Physics, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-8407-7176","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Sally","family":"Shrapnel","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Centre for Engineered Quantum Systems, School of Mathematics and Physics, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-0214-4748","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Peter W.","family":"Evans","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,8,10]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1093\/aristotelian\/13.1.1","article-title":"On the Notion of Cause","volume":"13","author":"Russell","year":"1913","journal-title":"Proc. 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