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

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

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.

Here is the link to my paper:

Please visit the From Absurd to Elegant Universe.

or,

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

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

George,

That's understandable. Thanks for the reply.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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

JCN

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

Paul

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....