"Causation, Implicit Actions and Counterfactuals "

1/28/1997: 2:00 PM
[location not recorded]

Abstract: Causal models, regardless of how they are acquired or represented, provide reasoning agents with the powerful capability of predicting the outcome of an enormous number of implicit actions, too numerous to be specified explicitly, each involving a perturbation or a reconfiguration of the agent's environment. Such capability explains why the acquisition of causal models by humans is accompanied with the sense of gaining "deep understanding" or "being in control", and how humans can process sentences in which actions appear as modalities (e.g., do(p), "increase taxes", "make him laugh") or sentences phrased counterfactually (e.g., "B would be better if A were different") I will describe a simple formalism which permits us to reason with actions as modalities and to answer counterfactual queries.

Last updated: Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 2006