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

Dear George Ellis,

In a comment above, you state, "Proton-coupled electron transfer seems fascinating. I'd be really interested to know how it relates to quantum state vector reduction."

I do invite you to read my current essay, The Nature of the Wave Function, as I address the issue of "quantum state vector reduction" and I would very much appreciate your thoughts on my approach.

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear George,

re the placebo I should have said; nothing to do with a pharmacological effect of the treatment, not nothing to do with the treatment. As the treatment might include the lengthy and concerned consultation, diagnosis and prescription which can make a person feel important, valued and cared about and so affect neurotransmitter levels, their balance and so psychology.

The brain has executive control of the body including maintenance of health. The function of the organs and tissues and biochemistry of the body can be affected by changes of activity within the very complex neural networks of the brain. Which is altered by changes in neurotransmitter availability and balance.It seems to me, the interaction of the complex external environment and social interaction upon the -complex organised brain- and its body interaction, causes the change in health and not the simple sugar pill and mere (abstract) belief in its power.

As you have pointed out the effect is relevant to your top down control concept.I think even more so than you have intimated- I think it is a good example of a specific effect (output) arising from complexity and organisation, not from very simple inputs. It can't be explained as the result of the simple "sugar pill" input.

The placebo effect and the rabbit story may also be explained in terms of hidden variables, may they not? Just as correlation is not necessarily causation, information is not necessarily knowledge.

At the end of the day, the questions we mean to answer -- Is treatment no better than a placebo? Does diet affect well being? -- depend on suppressing some information in order to validate contradictory information.

A self organized universe, on the other hand, does not demonstrably suppress information. It appears to be an uncontrolled experiment and infinitely creative. In terms of theory, then, a hierarchical structure (vice laterally distributed information) would seem to impose, a priori, a restriction on causality that leaves nature no choice. If conscious IGUS (information gathering and utilizing systems) are co-creative with self organized nature, however, their choices are co-variant with evolving nature and a hierarchical structure would seem to be superfluous.

Tom

Tom,

Information shouldn't be suppressed to add validity other information. To be valid it is necessary to have studies where as many parameters are controlled as possible and those that can not be controlled are pointed out. All of the rabbits had to be kept under identical conditions except for the dietary difference under consideration. As they were not the study was invalid.If the rabbits had not been expected to become unwell then it is unlikely the error would have been spotted.

The result of such a study shows what happens to rabbits under those conditions not what will happen to human beings living under very different and far more variable conditions. The answer to those questions "Is treatment no better than a placebo? Does diet affect well being?" has to be it depends. The answer is far more complex than many respectable scientific papers and pseudo science papers would suggest, IMO.

Tom, you said "A self organized universe, on the other hand, does not demonstrably suppress information". I'm probably not thinking about information as you are but if there is deposition or accumulation of material then couldn't the information within be considered as suppressed (even if not entirely hidden) because interaction happens mainly at surfaces, that is where the information is accessed. Surfaces are particularly important in biology.

I agree with George that some things can't happen if the organisation does not exist to give the output. Complex proteins such as enzymes are assembled within cells because there is the DNA code for them, the mRNA copies that are read and the ribosomes where the proteins are assembled. The complex enzyme proteins do not spontaneously assemble as an uncontrolled experiment.

I think I can understand what you mean about IGUS' being co-creative with nature and their choices co-varying as nature "evolves" but I don't understand what you mean about "the hierarchical structure" being superfluous in that case.

Hi Georgina,

"Information shouldn't be suppressed to add validity (to) other information."

Ah, but that's what a controlled experiment does, in principle. There's no way to tell that one has controlled for all possible variables. We can only do so to a reasonable certainty. Compare a controlled experiment to a theoretical prediction, e.g., Einstein's adjustment to the precessionary orbit of Mercury, or gravitational lensing.

"I think I can understand what you mean about IGUS' being co-creative with nature and their choices co-varying as nature 'evolves' but I don't understand what you mean about 'the hierarchical structure' being superfluous in that case."

I mean, that any hierarchy (such as a human being, the corporation of cooperating cells in which the brain has executive control, as you put it) may be undermined by an unexpected event. In Darwinian evolution, this might be a random mutation. A mutation may be beneficial, harmful or neutral -- however, we cannot know which except in the larger context of perfect information, to which we do not have access. I was impressed many years ago, in reading Kurt Vonnegut's *Breakfast of Champions* that the protagonist mused over a glass of champagne, wondering if the yeasts -- who consumed sugar and excreted alcohol until they drowned in their own excrement -- had any consciousness of what they were creating. (In the same respect, consider Emily Dickinson's poem: "My candle burns at both ends; it will not last the night. But oh my friends, and ah my foes, it makes a lovely light!")

Tom

I forgot to credit Murray Gell-Mann and Jim Hartle for coining the acronym IGUS.

Hi Tom ,

I take your point about having to simplify what is considered. My original point made to George was about wrongly attributing causal relationships. If only a few parameters are considered a very simplistic view of what is occurring can be fabricated that is just incorrect. Serious effort must be made to avoid that if the science is to be good.

OK I think I see what you mean. Small change - big effect. I gave the example of dwarfism in my essay. Some other examples: Island population wiped out by volcanic eruption: Molecular change to DNA in egg giving non-viable embryo. Yes an individual or population can become superfluous to the universe as the result of a seemingly random event. I don't think being organised gives invulnerability but it does allow some things to happen in the universe that could not otherwise occur. So its not -just- top down control but not just bottom up either.

Hi Georgina,

I think George has it right, that causality is top down. We just don't always know where the top originates, so we assign boundary condtions.

Given that limitation, I agree with you.

Given no boundary conditions, however, the top of the hierarchy is in "the mind of God." Getting inside that mind is what I mean by co-creation and covariance with nature. The means of such co-creation and the covariant results it generates, is in theoretical language, the abstractions of which George speaks -- the true "top" of the hierarchy -- independent of hierarchical subsystems for which we prescribe boundary conditions.

Tom

Tom,

that isn't very clear to me. If you mean we explain things by chopping them up into smaller systems we can understand, then yes I agree.Is that what you mean by assigning boundary conditions? Ultimately everything is is at the mercy of what is happening in the whole universe -at all scales-, it seems to me. If our star was to explode the organisation of the living beings and machines on Earth would become totally irrelevant.If sub atomic particles and atoms did not have the properties they have the universe would not be what it is.

It isn't necessary to use galactic or universal explanations, or explanations involving complexity, or sub atomic explanations for every occurrence. It is possible at various scales to see factors or processes that are having a particular disproportionate influence on output. For example its more helpful to describe the cause of a rate of photosynthesis to be its current limiting factor,(CO2, water, Light). Taking for granted that there is a plant in which photosynthesis can occur, and not bringing into account the universal conditions that have allowed complex plant life to evolve on Earth or the properties of different chemical elements.

Maybe all causation stories are a distillation and sticking together of available information by humans for specific human purposes, not what is really happening in universe independently of that information processing.I might be agreeing with you, but saying it in my own way.

Tom,

Does assigning boundary conditions mean specifying or at least deciding what will and will not be considered as part of the problem, the limit of the particular investigation? If so then I agree we do do that. Though we could have open ended investigations where gradually more and more parameters and variables are added to the boundary of the investigation, giving further complexity to the answer. Gaps could also be filled at different scales and linked, until theoretically everything is causally linked to everything else. Like a universal, physical and biological, ecosystem. Except we would hit lots of boundaries, which are not assigned by choice, but are the limits of our capabilities as a species.

Georgina,

"Does assigning boundary conditions mean specifying or at least deciding what will and will not be considered as part of the problem, the limit of the particular investigation?"

No. It means arbitrarily limiting a continuous function to an interval of analysis that does not result in infinities or singularities.

"If so then I agree we do do that. Though we could have open ended investigations where gradually more and more parameters and variables are added to the boundary of the investigation, giving further complexity to the answer."

That's the problem, though. One cannot extend boundaries with sufficient ad hoc parameters (adjustable variables) to assure a unique solution. Consider the various climate change models in this context -- there's a raft of parameters that produce a great number of predictions; however, the outcomes are all dependent on which variables are physically manifest. Information doesn't increase knowledge -- (the source of Einstein's aphorism "Imagination is more important than knowledge") -- knowledge is realized in the correspondence of theory (what we imagine) to physical result (what happens).

"Gaps could also be filled at different scales and linked, until theoretically everything is causally linked to everything else."

We already know that everything is causally linked to everything else -- at least, we assume so. If there are uncaused effects, the implication is that some force external to nature ("God of the gaps" argument) tinkers with creation at either random or unknown intervals. We can't treat such a case by scientific method, even if it should happen to be true. Science depends on replication of results in an objective way.

Suppose I have a pain in my stomach, and a physician determines that a signal from my brain is causing the sensation. She gives me a chemical to block the signal. No pain -- yet can we assign the cause of the pain to a random brain impulse? Probably not -- suppose an infection has created pressure on nerve endings in my gut -- the pain is a symptom, created by positive feedback between nerve endings and brain. The brain is not controlling the activity causing the pain; it is relaying information that compels the body to create a negative feedback loop, bringing into play a range of responses that release various chemicals and white cells to attack the infection and restore normal function. Any treatment intervention is only an extension of this negative feedback. If the body's reponses and treatment fails, a unbroken positive feedback loop leads to extinction of the organism.

Locally, positive feedback is always disagreeable. Consider the "squeal" of a positive feedback loop between a microphone and amplifier. We cannot identify the cause of the squeal (microphone or amplifier) though we know the effect is not uncaused.

By top-down causation, I think George Ellis implies that any ultimate cause must result in negative feedback -- i.e., there exists a universal control mechanism that accounts for the coherence and comprehensibility of the universe as we experience it. (I suggested in my ICCS 2007 paper, "Time, change and self organization" that gravity itself qualifies as such a mechanism, because it operates in but one direction, toward the center of mass.) The subsystems of the universe (such as we creatures) therefore must be endowed a priori with the means of cognitively choosing a direction that escapes the positive feedback loop that leads to extinction. As George says explicitly, "... life would not be possible without a well-established local arrow of time." The property of consciousness cannot be separated from all of the properties of life itself, whether organic or inorganic.

Tom

Tom,

thank you for trying to help me understand. Was I talking about continuous functions?

You said:"information doesn't increase knowledge". I think data acquisition is one important aspect of science but utilising the data to give solutions or comprehension of what is going on is another different aspect. There is perhaps a rush to interpret data and give it meaning or significance it doesn't have- because that seems like its creating new knowledge.

I thought about giving an analogy of tuning a very out of tune piano, but its long and complicated. When its right though the whole thing, which could be 120 strings, works together. Thats what science should be like eventually.I think it is possible to build up understanding. Certainly food chains or other kinds of ecological webs can be constructed staring by looking at a few species interactions and niches and then adding more and more. It would be possible to have two different partial webs that have one of the same species in them, but are otherwise totally different. Both can be correct. I don't think that is a problem unless it is assumed that because these studies have been done scientifically each one is by itself the absolute truth.

Tom I think I'm agreeing with you and George. There is a control at the largest scale, passage of time (as J.C.N Smith and I have been describing it) necessary for anything else to happen but not able to create the complexity of the universe alone, there also has to be continual motion of matter and particles (and I say in my essay and elsewhere that that is the cause of gravity not curvature of space-time.) Yes I think George is talking a lot of sense but what you have quoted also seem to me really obvious things said eloquently. Which isn't a bad thing. Maybe they need saying and saying well.

Hi nmann,

" ... we don't yet have an Infodynamics on the order of Thermodynamics."

Yes, we do. Shannon's information entropy is perfectly modeled by the same mathematics as thermodynamic entropy. Applied to a network of communication nodes, a dynamic system emerges.

Tom

Hi Tom,

What we don't have is an understanding of informational transduction. There's a sense in which energy comes coded too (for example, you can't make a computer operate directly on any form of energy other than electrical) but we've identified and defined electrical energy and understand how it as well as kinetic energy, thermal energy, mechanical energy etc. are linked and are able to be converted from one form to another.

But how does the electrochemical information coursing around in your brain relate to the symbolic information your brain outputs, as represented for instance by your post? How many transduction processes are involved, and what the heck are they?

Hi nmann,

Certainly, computers operate on as many varieties of energy as are available -- a computer as simple as an abacus uses mechanical energy, and one can conceive of constructing a more complex computer with, e.g., water or another fluid substituting for electricity flowing through logic gates.

" ... how does the electrochemical information coursing around in your brain relate to the symbolic information your brain outputs, as represented for instance by your post?"

George answered that in a reply to Georgina: "The placebo effect is fascinating; of course from my viewpoint it's a case of top-down action from beliefs (abstract entities) to physical systems (human bodies)." This can be generalized; the relation between thought and action is mediated by cognitive differentiation, between states of being, which is how a computer -- though by programming rather than cognition -- converts differential equations (difference equations, actually, because the computer is a finite state machine) to discrete output (information). The information can then be used as new input.

"How many transduction processes are involved, and what the heck are they?"

I don't think we need transduction to explain information processes. Though some favor the view that humans are only computers made of meat, I think that nature is more subtle, incorporating a structure by which information is continuous and infinite, which makes the meat computer -- the finite state -- view untenable. My essay in this contest explains why.

Tom

George,

Thanks for these links. Having read the first, I am impressed that the top down model driving " ... transition from a group of independent low-level entities to the emergence of a new higher level (collective) entity" is a much more robust model of evolution than the linear "warm little pond" myth that our generation were taught in school.

The description embodied in figure 2 also supports a dynamic self organized model of growth self-limited by boundaries of scale. Marvelous.

Tom

George

Excellently written piece, well argued and very agreeable. I see scale as a full 2 way causal street. But I have questions;

1. Has anybody argued otherwise? I agree few think about it, and need to, but you don't falsify a counter argument. I wonder if there even is one?

2. The point about complexity is anyway, I agree, worth eeking out and considering. I've suggested one step more, in that simply, because there are so many small particles, complexity is so great is resembles 'chance' to us. If we were the size of a proton might we not find nature simple, as we do macro nature now?

3. This suggests the 'bottom' may be only assumed the one way source of causality as we see, so feel we 'better' understand the top end. Do you agree?

4. Can mathematics using just 'point' particles really properly describe the effects of evolution of interaction between waves and 'real' particles over non zero time when negotiating a medium boundary in relative motion?

5. As a relativist, do you consider that understanding the quantum universe better will allow us to unite physics? - by providing a quantum mechanism to produce the macro effects we term relativity?

I've derived a 'two way' mechanism discussed in my essay. The motion of one medium or 'system' within another will give rise to quantum effects, which then in turn implement the postulates of special relativity and curved space time. This seems to resolve a number of astronomical anomalies, and a causality issue with assumptions about refraction not previously identified.

I'd be extremely grateful if you were able to read my essay and give your views.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1330

I've thrown is some kinetic theatre to break up the density.

Best wishes

Peter