Well I'm very puzzled. I wrote a response to your essay and thought I'd posted it over on your thread. Seems not to be there - I wonder what happened.
George
Recognising Top-Down Causation by George F. R. Ellis
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As I argue in my essay, if the source of all information is the point at infinity (which exists at every point of four dimensional spacetime), we have local and simultaneous access in principle to everything in Wheeler's world built of information alone, though the act of measurement orders recorded events into our unique worldline.
One recalls the arithmetic theorem that a single point may simultaneously approach any other set of points provided that the point is far enough away.
Tom
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"Also 'a world that is not completely deterministic' is the standard view, is it not?"
"A world that is not completely deterministic" is "one of the other assumptions that are implicit in our reasoning leading to the inequality" which the results of the Leggett experiment (resulting in a violation of Leggett's inequality) might be regarded as having put at hazard ... made subject to "breakdown" as the experimenters put it. Along with other stuff I find personally find somewhat easier to live without ("Aristotelian logic, counterfactual definiteness" even "absence of actions into the past").
In other words, the experimental outcome brings forward the possibility of a world that IS completely deterministic. Zeilinger copped to that somewhere, as I recall, but stated that he personally found it unimaginable. Of course there'd be no possibility at all of "free will." Which isn't the standard view or else 't Hooft wouldn't be particularly controversial.
A lot of double negatives, agreed.
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Dear George Ellis,
Apropos of nothing other than the topic of your essay, I just now stumbled upon another delightful quote which I think you might appreciate in the event you've not already seen it.
"We seek reality, but what is reality? The physiologists tell us that organisms are formed of cells; the chemists add that cells themselves are formed of atoms. Does this mean that these atoms or these cells constitute reality, or rather the sole reality? The way in which these cells are rearranged and from which results the unity of the individual, is not it also a reality much more interesting than that of the isolated elements, and should a naturalist who had never studied the elephant except by means of the microscope think himself sufficiently acquainted with that animal?" - - Henri Poincare, 'The Value of Science,' originally published in 1913, translated by George Bruce Halstead, Cosimo Classics, ISBN: 978-1-60206-504-8, p.21.
Cheers,
jcns
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Hi J.C.N Smith,
Its another good one, well found.
I find it interesting that increasing in scale and complexity of pattern also affects how the arrangement is able to interact with its environment.The variety of ways in which it can interact seems to increase with complexity. The size of the impact on the immediate environment increases with scale. (Though shape (as form is related to function) and populations also need consideration.)
Dear George:
Thanks for replying to my post on Free Will. I have responded to your comments on my paper under my posting - " From Absurd to Elegant Universe". Please let me know if I addressed all your comments/questions satisfactorily.
I agree with your statement -" ..I do not believe it is manifested by particles in themselves. Quantum uncertainty is not the same as free will". Quantum uncertainty is caused by measurement error or incapability to measure a quantum phenomenon, while Free Will is only possible because of the certainty of the universal laws. If the laws were uncertain, no free will is possible because it will be all chaos without certain laws. Often, the certainty of the laws is confused or mistaken with Determinism or fixed fate. Both the free willed input and laws determine the outcome or fate, which is not fixed in advance.
Regards
Avtar
Dear George:
Thanks for replying to my post on Free Will. I have responded to your comments on my paper under my posting - " From Absurd to Elegant Universe"
Please let me know if I addressed all your comments/questions satisfactorily.
Regards
Avtar
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Thank you for your interesting article, it is some days that I thinking to it.
I think that the top-down causation can be a strong experimental-theoretical instrument to analyze the quantum effect in a macroscopic structure; I think to amplify the little scale effect using the cooperative effect like an instrument (cooperative microscope).
It is only an idea (I speak not like an expert), but I think it is possible to measure the halo of the strong force in a single stable heaviest atomic nuclei (narrow atomic layer) using neutron beams (with different energy).
In alternative, I think that can be possible to use the superfluid liquid helium to measure the strong force in an indirect way, measuring the large scale effect of some macroscopic quantity; if the mathematical model is correct, then the macroscopic measure must be correct: the model must be include the large scale effect, and the little scale effect.
Saluti
Domenico
Dear J.C.N.Smith,
very nice, thank you. Here's another one for you, one of my favourites:
"All Truth is shadow except the last, except the utmost; yet every Truth is true in its own kind. It is substance in its own place, though it be but shadow in another place (for it is but a reflection from an intenser substance); and the shadow is a true shadow, as the substance is a true substance."
Isaac Pennington (1653).
Somehow that seems to state things very nicely.
George
Dear Georgina
indeed - one of the characteristics of truly complex systems is that higher level variables are not always just coarse grainings of lower level variables; they are sometimes crucially related to the details of the structure.
Hence in highly ordered structures, sometimes changes in some single micro state can have major deterministic outcomes at the macro level (which is of course the environment for the micro level); this cannot occur in systems without complex structure.
Examples:
(i) a single error in microprogramming in a computer can bring the whole thing to a grinding halt (got that at the moment in my laptop);
(ii) a single swap of bases in a gene can lead to a change in DNA that results in predictable disease;
(iii) a single small poison pill can debilitate or kill an animal, as can damage to some very specific micro areas in the brain.
This important relation between micro structure and macro function is in contrast to statistical systems, where micro changes have no effect at the macro level, and chaotic systems, where a micro change can indeed lead to a macro change, but it's unpredictable.
Cheers
George
Dear Domenico
I agree with your idea that in superfluidity and similar quantum phenomena, in general "the model must include the large scale effect, and the little scale effect" (this is what Laughlin wrote about in his Nobel lecture). What I am not sure about is the strong force examples you give. One might expect that if this was so, then the formulae for superfluidity would involve parameters related to the strong force, and I don't think that is the case (but I am not an expert).
Worth thinking about.
Saluti,
George
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Dear George and Georgina,
On the topic of complex systems, certainly among the most interesting of complex systems are those which have the attribute which we call sentience. If we may take a flight of fancy for a moment it is interesting to consider this topic, which certainly seems germane to the topic of this essay.
Sentience clearly is an emergent quality; it appears to require an awareness of an environment and, ideally, an ability to react to that environment. This awareness and ability to react are not possible in the absence of ensembles of atoms sufficiently complex to function as sensors and as (at least) rudimentary data processors and actuators. In other words, they "emerge" only from complex ensembles of atoms.
It seems that necessary (but not sufficient) requirements for an ensemble of atoms to have the attribute we call sentience, therefore, are the following: it must be sufficiently complex to include a sensor, a data processor, and (desirable but not absolutely necessary) a servo-mechanism to act on the output from the data processor. A traffic control device embedded in the road at a traffic signal has these three attributes, but we would not call it sentient. What more is required? The ability of the ensemble to react to its environment in novel, unpredictable, and creative ways to preserve the integrity of its own being, perhaps?
Regardless, sentient portions of the universe (e.g., people, for example) afford the universe a form of partial self-awareness. The actions of sentient portions of the universe represent the universe influencing its own future in purposeful ways. Can this somehow afford the universe, when viewed as a whole, some sort of "advantage," whether evolutionary or otherwise, relative to a totally non-sentient universe? It is difficult to envision how this could be the case, or, even if it were the case, how it could matter.
The universe, whether or not it includes some sentient portions along with the non-sentient portions, is whatever it is. On the other hand, however, a universe which includes sentient beings is a universe in which some of its component parts may be concerned about their own future, and, by extension, about the future of their immediate environment, and, by extension, about the future of the universe as a whole. How this could be construed as an "advantage," however, is not immediately clear to me. But enough with flights of fancy.
Thank you, George, for the excellent Pennington quote!
Cheers,
jcns
Well to reply to this properly would be a very long article, maybe a book .. instead, seeing we are in this area, I'll just give you two illustrations of top-down effects in the brain.
Illustration 1: How does reading work? Here's a remarkable thing.
• Yu cn red this evn thogh words are mispelt,
• and this thuogh lwtters are wrong,
• And this though words missing.
How can it be we can make sense of garbled text in this way? One might think the brain would come to a grinding halt when confronted with such incomplete or grammatically incorrect text. But the brain does not work in a mechanistic way, first reading the letters, then assembling them into words, then assembling sentences. Instead our brains search for meaning all the time, predicting what should be seen and interpreting what we see based on our expectations in the current context.
Actually words by themselves may not make sense without their context. Consider:
• The horses ran across the plane,
• The plane landed rather fast,
• I used the plane to smooth the wood.
- what `plane' means differs in each case, and is understood from the context. Even the nature of a word (noun or verb) can depend on context:
• Her wound hurt as she wound the clock
This example shows you can't reliably tell from spelling how to pronouce words in English, because not only the meaning, but even pronunciation depends on context.
The underlying key point is that we are all driven by a search for meaning: this is one of the most fundamental aspects of human nature, as profoundly recorded by Viktor Frankl in his book Man's Search for Meaning. Understanding this helps us appreciate that reading is an ongoing holistic process: the brain predicts what should be seen, fills in what is missing, and interprets what is seen on the basis of what is already known and understood. And this is what happens when we learn to read, inspired by the search for understanding. One learns the rules of grammar and punctuation and spelling too of course; but such technical learning takes place as the process of meaning making unfolds. It is driven top down by our predictions on the basis of our understandings, based in meaning..
Illustration 2: Vision works the same way, as demonstrated by Dale Purves in his book "Brains: How They Seem to Work". The core of his argument is as follows (from the abstract of his article on visual illusions):
"The evolution of biological systems that generate behaviorally useful visual percepts has inevitably been guided by many demands. Among these are: 1) the limited resolution of photoreceptor mosaics (thus the input signal is inherently noisy); 2) the limited number of neurons available at higher processing levels (thus the information in retinal images must be abstracted in some way); and 3) the demands of metabolic efficiency (thus both wiring and signaling strategies are sharply constrained). The overarching obstacle in the evolution of vision, however, was recognized several centuries ago by George Berkeley, who pointed out that the information in images cannot be mapped unambiguously back onto real-world sources (Berkeley, 1975). In contemporary terms, information about the size, distance and orientation of objects in space are inevitably conflated in the retinal image. In consequence, the patterns of light in retinal stimuli cannot be related to their generative sources in the world by any logical operation on images as such. Nonetheless, to be successful, visually guided behavior must deal appropriately with the physical sources of light stimuli, a quandary referred to as the "inverse optics problem". "
The resolution is top-down shaping of vision by the cortex, based in prediction of what we ought to see. Visual illusions are evidence that this is the way the visual system solves this problem.
Intriguing, isn't it?
George
And just for completeness here is one from the latest [link:www.frontiersin.org/integrative_neuroscience/10.3389/fnint.2012.00038/abstract?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Neuroscience-w31-2012] neuroscience literature[\link]:
Cognitive functions of the posterior parietal cortex: top-down and bottom-up attentional control
Sarah Shomstein*
Department of Psychology, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA
Although much less is known about human parietal cortex than that of homologous monkey cortex, recent studies, employing neuroimaging, and neuropsychological methods, have begun to elucidate increasingly fine-grained functional and structural distinctions. This review is focused on recent neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies elucidating the cognitive roles of dorsal and ventral regions of parietal cortex in top-down and bottom-up attentional orienting, and on the interaction between the two attentional allocation mechanisms. Evidence is reviewed arguing that regions along the dorsal areas of the parietal cortex, including the superior parietal lobule (SPL) are involved in top-down attentional orienting, while ventral regions including the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) are involved in bottom-up attentional orienting.
Oh dear botched that up but the link works!
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George,
Indeed, it is intriguing.
You wrote, "The underlying key point is that we are all driven by a search for meaning: this is one of the most fundamental aspects of human nature . . . ."
Agreed. Relating this to my comments about the nature of sentience as a property of certain complex systems such as humans, this search for meaning apparently becomes possible only when the complexity of a sentient being has reached some critical tipping point. Or, alternatively, perhaps not a single critical tipping point as much as a more gradual transition across a broader spectrum separating humans from so-called "lower," i.e., less capable, sentient beings such as chimpanzees, for example? At what point does "the search for meaning" kick in? And could this be the point at which two curves showing the relative importance of bottom-up vs. top-down causation meet and cross?
Regardless of the exact point at which the search for meaning kicks in, it seem to be the case that once it does kick in, it has, thus far at least, offered an evolutionary advantage to creatures having this trait. (This unfortunately might be undone or at least seriously set back, of course, by an injudicious application of powerful tools made possible by the search for meaning as embodied in applied science.)
Intriguing indeed.
jcns
For completeness here is a hot off the press set of talks on cultural neuroscience: top-down effects from society to the wiring to the individual and her brain. As I said at the start of the essay, the effect is obvious there: "Culture is now seen as an important macro-level phenomenon that affects a whole range of psychological processes." The question is if it is also important in physics; and I claim it's also there in many places when you look for it.
typo: to the individual and the wiring of her brain
Dear George Ellis,
I agree with your remark on page 1 that "the foundational assumption that all causation is bottom up is wrong, even in the case of physics".
In my PhD project I have developed a formal axiomatic system, that is potentially applicable as a foundational framework for physics under the condition that there is a matter-antimatter gravitational repulsion.
Seven non-logical axioms of this system describe what happens in the individual processes that take place at supersmall scale; in each of these processes then a choice is made (at elementary particle level thus).
As part of the research I have developed a physicalist approach to the mind-body problem from the perspective of this framework; this yielded a mechanism for mental causation which demonstrates that observers have a free will in this universe, that is, in the universe governed by these principles.
The point is that choices in the elementary processes are then imposed by the choice made at macroscopic scale by an observer. So this is an example of top-down causation; in my dissertation this is formalized in an expression.
This discussion is not mentioned in my essay (topic 1336): the essay focuses mainly on the initial considerations in the development of my theory.
Best regards, Marcoen Cabbolet
5 days later
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Unlike Paul Davies' popular books, which often read like good detective stories, the Walker/Davies piece "The Algorithmic Origins of Life" is kind of tough sledding. At least for me.
Take the statement, "To say that information is 'instructional' (or algorithmic) and 'coded' represents a crucial conceptual leap -- separating the biological from the non-biological realm -- implying that a gene is 'for' something."
Even though I strongly subscribe to the view -- as I believe both Ellis and Davies also do -- that the universe is suffused with meaning and consciousness, I just can't get my mind around what the statement above logically entails: that " ... coded instructions are useless unless there is a system that can decode. interpret and act on those instructions."
In fact, we don't have a warrant to believe that the world is algorithmically compressible. If it isn't, there is no posssible non-arbitrary demarcation between organic and inorganic life. Self-replicating systems, demonstrably, are sustained on the concept of adaptation alone. In my local ecosystem, a mosquito is useless to me, while globally, my continued existence may depend on the mosquito larvae on which the fish feed and on which I in turn feed. I agree with the authors that analog systems are less adaptable than digital-switching memory processing, such as a CNS-endowed creature possesses; however, analog processes in complex systems allow robust network switching of useful resources for required task performance. So I have to disagree that " ... in informational terms ... analog systems are not as versatile or as stable as digital systems and as such likely have very limited evolutionary capacity." In fact, the evolutionary capacity of the complex system is measured in variety and redundance of resources. Nature trades efficiency for creativity, and those created products are manifestly analog systems which provide new input for creating more novel digital mechanical systems producing new analog creations.
I don't know how -- with this piece -- Davies escapes joining the side of biological determinism (The "gene machine" of Dawkins) which in *The Matter Myth* he and John Gribbin criticized: "Many people have rejected scientific values because they regard materialsm as a sterile and bleak philosophy, which reduces human beings to automatons and leaves no room for free will or creativity." Personally, I still regard myself as a materialist and reductionist, though like Gell-Mann, I find no conflict between a continuum of consciousness (quarks to Jaguars) and free will. If one refrains from drawing boundaries between life and non-life, algorithmic subroutines that define life and imbue its creatures with free will are not discontinuous with the complex system by which such life is sustained, though which itself is not demonstrably algorithmically compressible.
I support the "information narrative." I think I'm more prone, though, to accept an approach that treats the narrative *itself* as an evolutionary continuum, such as Gregory Chaitin's newly published *Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical.*
As always, though, Davies is a stimulating and provocative thinker. Thanks for providing this link to the Sara Walker--Paul Davies paper.
Tom