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

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

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

George,

That's understandable. Thanks for the reply.

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....

" a very old dream, and one that is probably unattainable both because of Godel's theorem"

Gödel's incompleteness theorems are often invoked as an argument against the possibility of complete and consistent axiom set from which all interactions at all scales of physical reality can be derived. The problem is, the incompleteness theorem apply to the formulation meta-mathematical statements about systems (arithmetic principally). But one has to remember that while, aside from basic rules of composition, there are constraints to the making of such meta-mathematical statements, theorems, (nothing prevents false statements or statements that can't be derived from any given finite axiom set), physical reality strictly constrains any system so that it must be consistent with the fundamental laws that govern forces and other interactions. So does Gödel's incompleteness theorems really preclude any possible answer to Hilbert's 6th problem?

If the Universe is made of a finite set of fundamental objects which combine in accordance to a finite set of laws that a finite number of fundamental interactions to produce physical reality, then it follows that Gödel's first incompleteness theorem is, at least in its present form, wrong when applied to reality. Also, if you believe that the fundamental components and laws are a consistent and that the Universe is a coherent system, then a physical interpretation of Gödel's second incompleteness theorem must also be wrong.

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

We need to distinguish the axiom from the fundamental aspects of reality they would stand for. And by definitions, axioms cannot be proven. They are merely defined. Once that is done, the axiomatic system may be put to the test. If the axiomatic system is complete and consistent, then all that interactions should be derivable from it. It should also enable the emergences of falsifiable predictions.

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

That is the tricky part. Any choice must be made based on a number of assumptions. There can be a number of viable axiomatic systems that may be used, but whatever the choice, it must be self-consistent an all interactions must be either derivable from or reducible to it.

"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."

If the Universe is found to be both consistent and complete, that is, the fundamental particles and the laws that govern them are consistent (consistency) and all that they produce remains part of the Universe (completeness), then all physical processes are emergent. It can then be shown that it is possible to create an axiomatic system that represent the fundamental aspects of reality and that representation of all interactions can be derived within such axiomatic system. If the Universe is a consistent and complete, then axiomatic representation can certainly be powerful enough to represent it.

Though a work in progress, I believe that I have shown that an hypothetical universe that is comparable to our Universe in complexity can emerge from an simple axiomatic set. My essay, titled "Questioning the Assumption that Space is Continuous" shows one way that can be done (my essay is based on a larger work, part of which can be freely).

Correction. I meant to write:

[...]But one has to remember that while, aside from basic rules of composition, there are ***no*** constraints to the making of such meta-mathematical statements,[...]