Month: September 2022

TOP DOWN CAUSATION. “These, however, do not extend to truly complex systems such as a single living cell. It seems that developing very complex systems such as those occurring in biology requires top-down causation, needed in order to build up the necessary biological information.” https://lnkd.in/dnngg6a View in LinkedIn

THE CELL. “This information cannot be derived in a bottom-up way, because it implicitly embodies information about environmental niches. It would be different in a different environment. Hence, higher level conditions influence what happens at the lower levels, even if the lower levels do the work. This is what I characterize as top-down causation.” https://lnkd.in/dnngg6a View in LinkedIn

TWO CAUSATIONS. “Both bottom-up and top-down causation occur in the hierarchy of structure and causation. Bottom-up causation is the basic way physicists think: lower level action underlies higher level behaviour, for example physics underlies chemistry, biochemistry underlies cell biology and so on.” https://lnkd.in/dnngg6a View in LinkedIn

COMBINED CAUSATION. “It is the combination of bottom-up and top-down causation that enables same-level behaviour to emerge at higher levels, because the entities at the higher level set the context for the lower level actions in such a way that consistent same-level behaviour emerges at the higher level.” https://lnkd.in/dnngg6a View in LinkedIn

GRANULARITY. “A key concept here is coarse-graining of lower level variables to give higher level variables, with consequent loss of detailed information, thus enabling higher level behaviour to emerge from lower level properties.” https://lnkd.in/dnngg6a View in LinkedIn

LOSS OF DETAIL. “One averages lower level properties and thereby determines higher level properties, for example the pressure and density of a gas emerge from the underlying molecular spatial and velocity distribution.” https://lnkd.in/dnngg6a View in LinkedIn

MIND THE GAP. “Some physicists and philosophers claim that from a fundamental viewpoint, higher levels are ‘nothing more than’ an aggregation of lower level phenomena, i.e. they will all emerge by coarse-graining. However, some higher level causally effective variables cannot be obtained in this way, as they are demonstrably not coarse grainings of lower level variables.” https://lnkd.in/dnngg6a View in LinkedIn

BETWEEN STRATA. “Top-down’ causation is an interlevel concept: it applies between any two adjacent levels. Claiming such causation happens is agnostic as to whether there is or is not a topmost or lowest level.” https://lnkd.in/dnngg6a View in LinkedIn

DATA SUPPORTED. “Five essentially different classes of top-down causation can be identified, and their existence demonstrated by many real-world examples.” https://lnkd.in/dnngg6a View in LinkedIn

INTERACTING CAUSALITIES. “The basic theme of this paper is that it is the interaction of bottom-up and top-down effects that enable the emergence of true complexity.” https://lnkd.in/dnngg6a View in LinkedIn