Causal emergence from effective information: Neither causal nor emergent?

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.

Automated summary

The paper introduces a new information-theoretic measure called 'effective information', which argues that certain complex systems exhibit causal emergence where interventions at the macro-level are more informative than at the micro-level. However, the author concludes that this form of causal emergence only supports an epistemic interpretation, rather than a truly exciting new concept.