johnswentworth comments on The Telephone Theorem: Information At A Distance Is Mediated By Deterministic Constraints

johnswentworth 20 Sep 2021 21:27 UTC
3 points
These are both correct. The first is right in most applications of Markov blankets. The second is relevant mainly in e.g. science, where figuring out the causal structure is part of the problem. In science, we can experimentally test whether $M_{2}$ mediates the interaction between $M_{1}$ and $M_{3}$ (i.e. whether $M_{2}$ is a Markov blanket between $M_{1}$ and $M_{3}$ ), and then we can back out information about the causal structure from that.