Space, Time, and Causality

Author(s):  
Marc J. Buehner

This chapter explores how the understanding of causality relates to the understanding of space and time. Traditionally, spatiotemporal contiguity is regarded as a cue toward causality. While concurring with this view, this chapter also reviews some boundary conditions of this approach. Moreover, temporal information goes beyond merely helping to identify causal relations; it also shapes the types of causal inferences that reasoners draw. Recent developments further show that the relation between time and causality is bi-directional: not only does temporal information shape and guide causal inferences, but once one holds a causal belief, one’s perception of time and space is distorted such that cause and effect appear closer in space-time. Spatiotemporal contiguity thus supports causal beliefs, which in turn foster impressions of contiguity.

Author(s):  
Fei Jin ◽  
Xiaoliang Liu ◽  
Fangfang Xing ◽  
Guoqiang Wen ◽  
Shuangkun Wang ◽  
...  

Background : The day-ahead load forecasting is an essential guideline for power generating, and it is of considerable significance in power dispatch. Objective: Most of the existing load probability prediction methods use historical data to predict a single area, and rarely use the correlation of load time and space to improve the accuracy of load prediction. Methods: This paper presents a method for day-ahead load probability prediction based on space-time correction. Firstly, the kernel density estimation (KDE) is employed to model the prediction error of the long short-term memory (LSTM) model, and the residual distribution is obtained. Then the correlation value is used to modify the time and space dimensions of the test set's partial period prediction values. Results: The experiment selected three years of load data in 10 areas of a city in northern China. The MAPE of the two modified models on their respective test sets can be reduced by an average of 10.2% and 6.1% compared to previous results. The interval coverage of the probability prediction can be increased by an average of 4.2% and 1.8% than before. Conclusion: The test results show that the proposed correction schemes are feasible.


2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 135-150

The springboard for this essay is the author’s encounter with the feeling of horror and her attempts to understand what place horror has in philosophy. The inquiry relies upon Leonid Lipavsky’s “Investigation of Horror” and on various textual plunges into the fanged and clawed (and possibly noumenal) abyss of Nick Land’s work. Various experiences of horror are examined in order to build something of a typology, while also distilling the elements characteristic of the experience of horror in general. The essay’s overall hypothesis is that horror arises from a disruption of the usual ways of determining the boundaries between external things and the self, and this leads to a distinction between three subtypes of horror. In the first subtype, horror begins with the indeterminacy at the boundaries of things, a confrontation with something that defeats attempts to define it and thereby calls into question the definition of the self. In the second subtype, horror springs from the inability to determine one’s own boundaries, a process opposed by the crushing determinacy of the world. In the third subtype, horror unfolds by means of a substitution of one determinacy by another which is unexpected and ungrounded. In all three subtypes of horror, the disturbance of determinacy deprives the subject, the thinking entity, of its customary foundation for thought, and even of an explanation of how that foundation was lost; at times this can lead to impairment of the perception of time and space. Understood this way, horror comes within a hair’s breadth of madness - and may well cross over into it.


1993 ◽  
Vol 08 (04) ◽  
pp. 653-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. BIMONTE ◽  
K.S. GUPTA ◽  
A. STERN

We apply elementary canonical methods for the quantization of 2+1 dimensional gravity, where the dynamics is given by E. Witten’s ISO(2, 1) Chern-Simons action. As in a previous work, our approach does not involve choice of gauge or clever manipulations of functional integrals. Instead, we just require the Gauss law constraint for gravity to be first class and also to be everywhere differentiable. When the spatial slice is a disc, the gravitational fields can either be unconstrained or constrained at the boundary of the disc. The unconstrained fields correspond to edge currents which carry a representation of the ISO(2, 1) Kac-Moody algebra. Unitary representations for such an algebra have been found using the method of induced representations. In the case of constrained fields, we can classify all possible boundary conditions. For several different boundary conditions, the field content of the theory reduces precisely to that of 1+1 dimensional gravity theories. We extend the above formalism to include sources. The sources take into account self-interactions. This is done by punching holes in the disc, and erecting an ISO(2, 1) Kac–Moody algebra on the boundary of each hole. If the hole is originally sourceless, a source can be created via the action of a vertex operator V. We give an explicit expression for V. We shall show that when acting on the vacuum state, it creates particles with a discrete mass spectrum. The lowest mass particle induces a cylindrical space-time geometry, while higher mass particles give an n fold covering of the cylinder. The vertex operator therefore creates cylindrical space-time geometries from the vacuum.


2007 ◽  
Vol 22 (29) ◽  
pp. 5237-5244 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. T. NIEH

Curvature and torsion are the two tensors characterizing a general Riemannian space–time. In Einstein's general theory of gravitation, with torsion postulated to vanish and the affine connection identified to the Christoffel symbol, only the curvature tensor plays the central role. For such a purely metric geometry, two well-known topological invariants, namely the Euler class and the Pontryagin class, are useful in characterizing the topological properties of the space–time. From a gauge theory point of view, and especially in the presence of spin, torsion naturally comes into play, and the underlying space–time is no longer purely metric. We describe a torsional topological invariant, discovered in 1982, that has now found increasing usefulness in recent developments.


Author(s):  
Keith C. Clarke ◽  
Ian J. Irmischer
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivian Zayas ◽  
Randy T. Lee ◽  
Yuichi Shoda

People’s behavior is characterized by stable if…then… profiles, or if in x situation then behavior a, but if in y situation then behavior b. But how do researchers conceptualize and measure if…then… profiles? Drawing from Cognitive-Affective Processing System (CAPS) theory, we discuss recent developments in assessing if…then… profiles, and how such profiles can provide a window for elucidating key aspects of the underlying personality system. Specifically, the Highly-Repeated Within-Person (HRWP) approach assesses how a behavior varies as a function of key features in a situation, and operationalizes if…then… profiles as regression betas. We illustrate how the HRWP approach can be applied to data from often-used social cognitive tasks, wherein an individual is exposed to a large number of situations that differ on a dimension that has been experimentally-manipulated by the researcher, and their behaviors to the situations are tracked. The HRWP approach allows researchers to more precisely assess a given individual’s if…then… pattern, make stronger causal inferences about a given individual’s personality system, and empirically investigate, rather than simply assume, if there are meaningful differences between individuals in the causal processes.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. e123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken Arroyo Ohori ◽  
Hugo Ledoux ◽  
Jantien Stoter

Objects of more than three dimensions can be used to model geographic phenomena that occur in space, time and scale. For instance, a single 4D object can be used to represent the changes in a 3D object’s shape across time or all its optimal representations at various levels of detail. In this paper, we look at how such higher-dimensional space-time and space-scale objects can be visualised as projections from ℝ4to ℝ3. We present three projections that we believe are particularly intuitive for this purpose: (i) a simple ‘long axis’ projection that puts 3D objects side by side; (ii) the well-known orthographic and perspective projections; and (iii) a projection to a 3-sphere (S3) followed by a stereographic projection to ℝ3, which results in an inwards-outwards fourth axis. Our focus is in using these projections from ℝ4to ℝ3, but they are formulated from ℝnto ℝn−1so as to be easily extensible and to incorporate other non-spatial characteristics. We present a prototype interactive visualiser that applies these projections from 4D to 3D in real-time using the programmable pipeline and compute shaders of the Metal graphics API.


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