Teleological Inference in Structural Causal Models via Intentional Interventions

TL;DR

This paper extends structural causal models to incorporate teleological questions by introducing intentional interventions, enabling the modeling and detection of agent intentions within causal systems.

Contribution

It introduces intentional interventions and structural final models, allowing causal models to represent and analyze agent intentions and goals.

Findings

SFMs can empirically detect agents' intentions

Intentional interventions relate observed outcomes to counterfactual scenarios

The approach generalizes causal modeling to include goal-directed behavior

Abstract

Structural causal models (SCMs) were conceived to formulate and answer causal questions. This paper shows that SCMs can also be used to formulate and answer teleological questions, concerning the intentions of a state-aware, goal-directed agent intervening in a causal system. We review limitations of previous approaches to modeling such agents, and then introduce intentional interventions, a new time-agnostic operator that induces a twin SCM we call a structural final model (SFM). SFMs treat observed values as the outcome of intentional interventions and relate them to the counterfactual conditions of those interventions (what would have happened had the agent not intervened). We show how SFMs can be used to empirically detect agents and to discover their intentions.