Recognising Top-Down Causation by George F. R. Ellis

Avtar Singh

Dear George:

Excellent paper and clearly written to provide a wholesome perspective of reality provided by the top-down causation. In other words, the sum of parts is not the Whole, which could be more than and different from the linear sum of parts.

The theme of your paper is vindicated by the fact that a top-down causation model with simple boundary conditions is shown to predict the observed expansion of the universe and galaxies without any bottom up causation used in the standard model or particle physics. As described in my posted paper - "From Absurd to Elegant Universe", the current paradoxes, singularities, and inconsistencies in the standard cosmology are shown to be artifacts of the absence of the top-down wholesome approach. The proposed Relativistic Universe Expansion (RUE) model based on the top-down conservation of the relativistic mass-energy-space-time continuum accurately predicts the observed universe accelerated expansion, dark energy or cosmological constant, and galactic star velocities without the concept of dark matter. It also predicts the dilation and creation of mass without any anti-matter and eliminates black hole singularity without the need for any super luminous inflation. The model also explains/predicts the inner workings of quantum mechanics and resolves paradoxes of the measurement problem, quantum gravity and time, and inconsistencies with relativity theory.

The evidence presented in my paper directly and mechanistically vindicates the following statements regarding the top-down causation in your paper:

" ...the foundational assumption that all causation is bottom up is wrong, even in the case of physics."

"The key feature is that the higher level dynamics is effectively decoupled from lower level laws and details of the lower level variables:......you don't have to know those details in order to predict the higher level behavior."

My paper also proves as true the following concluding statement in your paper:

".... recognizing this feature will make it easier to comprehend the physical effects underlying emergence of genuine complexity, and may lead to useful new developments, particularly to do with the foundational nature of quantum theory. It is a key missing element in current physics."

I am delighted to read your paper as it mirrors the overall theme and results of my paper. I would greatly appreciate and welcome your comments on my paper.

Sincerely,

Avtar Singh

Here is the link to my paper:

Please visit the From Absurd to Elegant Universe.

or,

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1317

[deleted]

Dear George Ellis,

I found your essay very comprehensible, succinct and eloquent, as others have also found. It was enjoyable to read. The subject matter is interesting to me. I was also interested to see, in your comments, that you have written another essay in which natural selection is discussed. I have just touched on this kind of pattern control at the end of my essay and if there had been space I would have liked to have discussed it further. So it was really good to see your essay here because you have done a really thorough and clear job of getting the very important concept across.

One complaint often given by intelligent design supporters is that complex forms or functions can not arise by random chance. I think we are both saying that the outcome is not chance but a consequence of the organisation that already exists -and- the rules of physics and biology. Your photoshop example made me think of how an egg shell is formed. Calcium carbonate from ground up oyster shell or cuttle fish bone may be input to a bird (organised structure) and a beautifully formed eggshell is output. That egg form would not occur without the complex bird organism.It is a product of the organisation and rules not just self assembly of atoms.

I really like that you have considered this over many different scales from the smallest to the largest. There seems to be organisation at whatever scale is investigated and I think we agree that to concentrate on the smallest scales, and to expect all of the answers to come from there, is "myopic".It is also really good that you have explained your work in this discussion thread. I have found your comments helpful and think your full participation and patience is admirable.

You are sure to have many more appreciative readers.Good luck in the competition.

George Ellis

Dear Georgina Parry

many thanks for that. I like your eggshell example - yes it is a nice illustration. For an in depth discussion of top-down causation in developmental biology, the book by Gilbert and Epel ("Ecological developmental biology") is excellent.

The key point about adaptive selection (once off or repeated) is that it lets us locally go against the flow of entropy, and this lets us build up useful information. In this regard, I can't resist the following comment: it is often said that you can't unscramble an egg. Yes you can. How? By feeding the omelette to a chicken! (you get less egg than you started with:that's the Second Law in operation)

Good luck to you too.

George Ellis

Typo: you can't unscramble an omelette

George Ellis

"Reality, I suggest, can be thought as an axiomatic system in which fundamental aspects correspond to axioms and non-fundamental aspects correspond to theorems."

- a very old dream, and one that is probably unattainable both because of Godel's theorem (on the logical side, showing th eproblems with axiomatic systems) and because of the issues Laughlin raises (on the physical side, showing the limits of bottom up deduction; see his quote in the appendix to my essay).

In any case suppose it were true, this raises a whole new set of issues:

* in what way do these axioms and theorems exist, and where do they exist? Are they Platonic forms for example?

* what decides the form they have? (there are various possible forms of logic: who chose this one?)

* how do they have the power to create any physical entity whatever?

Actually axiomatic systems are rather limited in their powers and in their ability to represent reality. I suggest you take a look at Eddington's book On the nature of the physical world regarding our use of mental models, and the limits to their use. They are partial representations of reality, and should not be confused wit reality itself.

George Ellis

The FQXI essay a few years ago was on the nature of time. I don't want to go into that again here. Yo'll find an in depth presentation of my view there.

George Ellis

Paul

I really don't want to go into the issue of time here, it is a separate issue than what I am focusing on in my essay. Nevertheless I'll respond this time:

* I agree with your first main paragraph, interpreted as regards the passage of time along world lines in spacetime

* IN the third paragraph, you state " this involves a vanishingly small degree of change and duration, but it must be so." This is a physics assumption that may or may not be true. Many assume spacetime is quantised, in which case there is a minimum unit of time, and what you say is not true.

George

George Ellis

Dear Joe

Thanks for that. Your comments on identity strike to the heart of what I say about multiple realisability. You are right, the keyboard letters are never exactly identical: yet the abstract letter "A" represented by them is still the letter "A" despite all the variations you mention.

It is also the letter "A" if

* you change font (Times New Roman to Helvetica)

* you change to bold or italic

* you change size of the font

* you change colour of the font

* you change the medium from light on a computer screen to ink on paper

One of the key problems in Artificial intelligence is to assign all these different representations to the same abstract entity that they all represent. This way varied lower level representations of a higher level entity occur is characteristic of top-down causation: what matters is the equivalence class of all these representations, which is the characteristic of the higher level entity, not which particular representation has been chosen.

So all those different appearances all represent the same thing. And our minds easily handle this and recognize the higher level abstract thing all these phenomena represent, whether it is the letter "A" or the plan for a jumbo jet airliner. Those higher level entities (such as the plan for the airliner) really exist as entities in their own right. Proof: Jumbo jet airliners exist. It could not do so unless the abstract plan, with all its multiple represntations, were real.

Paul Reed

George

My problem here is that the very way in which physical reality occurs, which is what I am really writing off, albeit generically, involves an implication for time, ie the lack of it therein. And an understanding as to what timing is reveals the same point. Anyway, there is no "passage of time", in the sense that time is 'something'. Physically, there is alteration, in a sequence, and one aspect of that is the rate at which that occurs, for which we can use timing to calibrate. But that concerns difference between realities, not a feature of a reality. Spacetime is an invalid model of physical reality. Time, or more precisely, timing, is extrinsic thereto.

That was not a "physics assumption". All we can know, and physical reality is what we can know of it, is that there is something independent of sensory systems, because they receive it (it being the result of a physical interaction between other pyhsically existent phenomena) and when such inputs are compared, difference is identifiable. A unit of time is, by definition, the fastest change to occur, because timing is rating change, per se.

Paul

Paul Reed

Joe

Exactly, as I have said elsewhere to you, and this is my fundamental point. As at any given point in time (as in timing), there is a specific physically existent state. To discern it, we would have to identify the particular state of the properties, and the relative spatial position, of every elementary particle involved. An impossible task, but our inability to do that does not detract from the fact that that is what constitutes physical reality (aka the present)as at that point in time. Even your A is more than one of these physically existent states. Misconceptualising this, leads to problems. Neither does sensory detection have any impact on that, because it occurred before it was sensed (something which the Copenhagen interpretation does not recognise).

Paul

[deleted]

George,

That's understandable. Thanks for the reply.

Alan Lowey

They *haven't found the Higgs though! CERN may have found exotic Higgs 'impostor' particle. Easy mistake to make.

[deleted]

Dear George,

The paper to which you referred me, 'Top down causation and emergence: some comments on mechanisms,' did indeed help to answer my earlier question about squaring your ideas with natural selection. Thank you.

I'd like to comment on the point you made in your example illustrated by the question: "Why is an aircraft flying?" You wrote, "And why was it designed to fly? Because it will potentially make a profit for the manufacturers and the airline company! Without the prospect of that profit, it would not exist. This is the topmost cause for its existence."

I question whether there may be an even higher level cause: some human somewhere along the line posed the question "If birds can fly, why can't I?" And then our fellow humans refused to stop seeking until they found a satisfactory answer. Human curiosity about the way things work.

We might ask why all these essays have been written and submitted to the FQXi essay competition. Was it primarily because all these authors hope to win some easy money? I suspect not. More likely it is because they all have thought about the workings of the universe and have developed their own ideas and explanations that they believe are sensible, and they seek to share their ideas with similarly thoughtful people and, hopefully, perhaps to receive validation in the form of recognition and appreciation, regardless of any potential monetary reward.

Is it possible that human curiosity and creativity and eagerness for constructive collaboration are among the top of the topmost causes?

jcns

[deleted]

jcns,

With George's point about planes existing because they make a profit for airlines and manufacturers, it is a top down logic of careful analysis of the situation and how it might be incrementally expanded. With your observation about flight being a consequence of human curiosity, it leans more toward a bottom up evolutionary striving, where all possible options get tried and those which succeed are the most repeated. Obviously there is no clear line between the two, but a constant feedback between experimentation and planning.

One might define the basis or bottom, as simple, while the elevated state is simply more complex, rather than "higher." So that initial question, "If birds can fly, why can't I?" is not so much a higher cause, but a more elemental cause. George's top down position is rather a vantage point from where one might plan on how to push even further up.

[deleted]

It should be noted that complexity tends to multiply, until it becomes unstable, which is where our banking system currently is. The reason for this particular exponential complexity has been the advantage it provides those managing banking to drain resources from the rest of the economy. Obviously this is not to the benefit of society, or even the long term health of banking, which is built on trust, so the question it brings up is as to whether there is such a thing as a "top," from which one might look down, or is that always just a completely subjective point of reference?

[deleted]

John,

You have raised some interesting points. Rather than comment directly on them myself I'd prefer to get George's own views; he clearly has given this topic far more thought than I have, and probably far more than both of us combined.

It certainly is a fascinating topic. David Deutsch has offered what strikes me as a classic comment on the topic in his book 'The Fabric of Reality' as follows (apologies for the odd spacing; I know not how to fix it):

"For example, consider

one particular copper atom at the tip of the nose of the statue

of Sir Winston Churchill that stands in Parliament Square in

London. Let me try to explain why that copper atom is there. It

is because Churchill served as prime minister in the House of

Commons nearby; and because his ideas and leadership contributed

to the Allied victory in the Second World War; and because it is

customary to honor such people by putting up statues of them;

and because bronze, a traditional material for such statues,

contains copper, an so on. Thus we explain a low-level physical

observation-- the presence of a copper atom at a particular

location-- through extremely high-level theories about emergent

phenomena such as ideas, leadership, war and tradition.

There is no reason why there should exist, even in

principle, any lower-level explanation of the presence of

that copper atom than the one I have just given."

jcns

Paul Reed

JCN

But this is not a physical explanation as to why it is there, is it?

Paul

[deleted]

jcns,

Alot of it could be described as wave action. To compress the analogy somewhat, the stokers on an old coal ship may not know, or at least it doesn't matter if they know, where the ship is going. Even the cells in your arm don't understand the higher order functions of you writing at the computer. Yet in some ways, even those further up the conceptual food chain might be oblivious even higher order intentions, even to the point of those seemingly at the top. To use the banking analogy, there is the personal motivation of making money among bankers, yet there is a higher order function of circulating value within the economy. It is when the bankers start primarily focusing on their own intentions of making money and losing sight of that higher order function, that the wave crests, or goes into a terminal bubble phase. This might go back down the scale; when those cells in your arm stop serving some higher order function and only want nutrition, your arm would cease to function, either due to exhaustion, disease, etc.

We could take this analogy much further up the chain and suppose life on this planet was trying to form a functioning central nervous system, with human civilization as its particular medium, the copper of the statue, so to speak. Yet it would presume some even higher order purpose, such as seeding the universe, then you get back down to the foundational functions of basic life and how it propagates, like fungi coming together to scatter spore. There are those endless feedback loops....

George Ellis

Dear jcns

I agree very much with your first posting: the topmost level in the human motivational system is purpose or meaning. One should carefully distinguish two things here: in Jaak Panksepp's book "Affective Neuroscience", he identifies the SEEKING system as one of the genetically determined primary emotional systems; this drives us to search for understanding and meaning as a primary drive. The kinds of meaning we attribute to ourselves, to life, and the universe are higher understandings that arise out of an emotional basis but are themselves of an intellectual nature; they are formulations of what is meaningful to us, embracing ethical and aesthetic issues and our purpose in relation to them. For many people this highest purpose is indeed money! But for many others it is the kind of higher ethical purpose you refer to. This is the highest level in our hierarchy of goals for it is such ethical understandings that determine what lower level goals are desirable or acceptable.

So you ask "Is it possible that human curiosity and creativity and eagerness for constructive collaboration are among the top of the topmost causes?" These are hugely important in terms of motivation, yes; but the issue of whether they trump economics or not is an ethical decision or stance (some people let the one rule their lives, others the other). So I'd place that highest.

The quote from Deutsch is great. I had not read it before. It is about how the ethical level (the level of Telos, or purpose) drives the rest in a top-down way. And of course this applies to scientists too, for the basic issue there is why do they do science? Why spend one's life on that pursuit? And on what kind of science (blue sky or applied)? It is one's purpose - a non-physical entity - that shapes it all.

George

Paul Reed

George/JCN/John

All the above may be correct from the perspective being taken (ie non physical). But, at the physical level, there is no influence on the next state which will exist (commonly known as future), because it does not exist. What happens is that a state occurs which is different from what which would otherwise have occurred. Nothing has been changed, physically, because nothing existed physically to change. In terms of sequence, what might be seen as 'oscillation', 'reaction', etc, is just re-occurrence. For example: A B C B D, is not, physically, some form of 'return' to B, but a re-occurrence of B. And for those who would ask the next question, what if it was A B C B D D D E. The answer is that D continued to exist for more than one point in time, that being, by definition, the level at which the sequence is fully differentiatable, because it is the fastest at which any change occurs, and D was a state which did not alter at that speed.

Paul

[deleted]

What sort of role might Erdos-Renyi networks play here? The sort of nearest neighbor approach with probability weights is a neural model of sorts. These networks are the basis for percolation theory and mean field theory. When the number of connected nodes reaches some threshold the properties of the system can change. In the case of percolation theory this can lead to a rapid failure of a material.

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