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

Tom,

thanks for that reference - I'll look for it.

Anonymous,

not sure what the point is. The universe is a particular realization of what is potentially possible. It is changeable in that it is evolving, but it then takes on a definite form. We understand that form quite well, but we are basically guessing when we try to understand *why* it takes the form it does. It depends what you mean by "understood".

Elizabeth,

Einstein's great discovery in this regard is that the effects of acceleration and of a uniform gravitational field are identical: local experiments can't distinguish them. To show this he considered a closed laboratory at rest in the Earth's Gravitational field of 1g, and the same laboratory in a rocketship far from any gravitational field but now accelerating at 1g due to the rocket motors. In both cases if you drop an apple you'll measure it to accelerate towards the floor at the rate of 1g per second per second. Thus acceleration and gravity equivalent in terms of their physical effects. What this means is that gravity is a different force from all other forces. The underlying reason is that the inertial and gravitational mass of a body are the same, no matter what the body is made of (Galileo's great discovery); if this was not true you could distinguish gravity from inertia by dropping objects made of different matter.

For more in depth discussion, you can look at my book Flat and Curved Spacetimes, written with Ruth Williams.

George Ellis

Understanding the complexity certainly seems to depend a lot on the existence of Protons in Bondi's Bus Ticket. In a sense, by usual geometric standards, protons should be just as pointlike as electrons. In other words - Dirac should have been right, if one believes that a Clifford Algebra is the last word on physically reasonable geometry. But since protons are not that pointlike, something in the Odd sector of the algebra must be different from Dirac algebra, while leaving the Even sector as is. One might then suspect that Einstein could have some serious problems whenever the internal structure of protons becomes an issue at crazy densities in collapse or the early Bang, where one might expect quark-gluon plasma. In some sense the structure of 3-space breaks down, or the rotational invariance that Pauli assumes breaks down. Maybe in the most extreem case, instead of the Pauli matrices forming a vector, we get something like 3 uncoordinated oscillators, and even pointlike electrons are broken up. So a Black Hole could have all the oscillators that fell into it, they would just not 'self organize' into electrons and protons, unless space is big enough for rotational invariance to hold. Another possibility comes from seeing that Pauli Algebra can be generated by +++ or +--. The latter is not a Pauli spin vector, but is algebraically reasonable - perhaps only inside a black hole, or "before the Bang".

Re both the last postings:

this is getting into deep territory and interesting that is outside my proper domain of expertise.

Just one comment: "It probably cannot be explained geometrically, but needs details of what the vacuum actually is": this is of course the kind of thing that is involved in the landscape of string theory: the very nature of particles is dependent on the context of the specific string vacuum in which they are realised. This theory may or may not be true, but in any case it is an example of the kind of contextual effect I have been talking about.

George

Returning to an old theme:

"An Extended Synthesis for Evolutionary Biology" by Massimo Pigliucci confirms how the present understanding of evolutionary theory emphasizes how "emergent properties of biological systems provide an additional (not a substitute) mechanism to generate potentially adaptive complex phenotypes.... This accommodation by a developmental system of perturbations originating from either the external or the internal (genetic) environment is a necessary consequence of the inherent plasticity of living organisms."

In other words top down causation changes the nature of the organisms selected by evolution. It's a key part of adaptive selection in biology.

George

Hello George,

If you have the time and desire, might you respond to this (reproduced from a post at my essay site)?

While browsing *The Demon and the Quantum* by Robert Scully and Marlan Scully (good book - recommended)I came across (p. 148)a marvelous quote by George Ellis. Robert Scully relates that at a conference, Ellis was asked: "Do we need quantum mechanics to ensure free will?" Ellis is reported to have answered in a Zen koan-like manner: "On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I think not. On Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, I think so."

Scully used the quote to support his contention that nobody knows " ... is classical chaos enough to provide freedom of choice, i.e., free will?" I think he missed the point of George's reply (which I am going to ask George himself to confirm or deny, in this forum) for the following reason:

Just a short number of pages prior (pp 130-132), Scully had noted that the quantum eraser proposed by Marlan Scully and Kai Druhl that when published in 1982 'shook the physics community' in the words of Aharonov and Zubairy " ... underscores the statement (that) information is a physical quantity. That is, information is real and the utilization of information is what the quantum eraser is all about."

In his figure 9.6, p 131, Scully shows the wavelike correlation between erased potential and detected information (which corresponds to figure 2 in my essay).

That is the single message of classical chaos, Wheeler delayed choice, and the quantum eraser: Information is real. I think that the opportunity Scully missed is in realizing that George's comment could only have come from a physicist so steeped in relativity that no other answer than "yes" is possible. We need the continuous measurement function equally with discrete quantum detection to have complete information -- and objective knowledge -- of the evolving state. What do you think, George?

All best,

Tom

Hello George,

On your comment "Actually rather than octonions I'd go for geometric algebra", perhaps you should read my essay; The Algebra of "Everything". I just squeaked in as a finalist at #33. You might change your mind about Octonion Algebra. You will see that Electrodynamics from potential functions through conservation equations are covered exactly as expected within an Octonion structure, as a subset of the presentation. The algebra demands this once you accept the simple fact that there is no preferred structure amongst the 16 ways to roll out a normed division algebra with consistent H subalgebras. This realization requires what I call algebraic invariance, and it not coincidence that all differential equations explaining physical observables are algebraically invariant when cast in an Octonion construction. This I call law without apology. This law demands the full set of entries in the Octonion equivalent of the stress-energy-momentum tensor divergence, nothing in the 14 pages it consumes when written out is inserted by hand, and nothing more is likely needed. The law with the proper form of differentiation I call the Ensemble Derivative demands the form of Lorentz covariance we all know and love with the simple requirement that both pieces of each EM field component velocity transform in kind.

Me, I am not big on coincidences. If someone thinks all this might be, then as Ricky said to Lucy: "Lucy, you got some 'splaining to do".

You do not get any of this from geometric algebra. I like the symmetry of multiplication and division, something else you do not get with geometric algebra which is not a division algebra.

This all fits into your top-down premise. The Algebra drives the lower level from above.

Rick

George, you have good intuition. The Jung-Pauli letters (Atom & Archetype) is a book I have owned since it was first published here in the States, and though I have browsed it, I cannot say I have read it. I acquired it at a time when I thought that I was through with philosophy, and issues of free will and consciousness, forever. I had studied Damasio, and became convinced that Cartesian dualism is successfully falsified. I was impressed with Marvin Minsky, and reconciled to a belief that a computer made of meat is not the worst thing to be.

Long ago -- I cannot remember where, nor all the details -- I read a story about Pauli who, when his death was imminent, got into a discussion with another prominent scientist about what lay ahead and whether a personal god might exist. At the end of the conversation, Pauli was convinced of the belief that he held prior -- no, no personal god -- yet unconvinced, IIRC, that the journey was over. As Einstein said at Godel's death, that "stubbornly persistent illusion" -- the one that seems to tell us that a life, and time itself, has an ordered beginning, middle and end -- has no real place in physics.

If information is real, though, we're all already as dead as we're ever going to be, and consciousness cannot be excluded from physical reality. If "all physics is local" (Einstein) and if " ... life would not be possible without a well established local arrow of time" (Ellis) -- there is no dead physics either. "Do not send to ask for whom the bell tolls," as the great metaphysical poet John Donne put it.

Thanks for the reference to your earlier post. I'm finding it hard to keep up. I think your summary paragraph is bang on:

"One of the deepest questions underlying physics is 'Why variational principles?' If the dynamics is viewed as resulting from such a process of selection of a particular path from the set of all paths, there is a glimmer of hope for an explanation of this foundational feature, based in adaptive selection. This is one of the key forms of top-down action from the context to the local system, because selection takes place on the basis of some specific predetermined selection criterion, which is therefore (because it determined the outcome) at a higher causal level than that of the system behaviour being selected for."

I very strongly agree. I think a whole lot of complex systems thinking is going this way, and most importantly, the result settles the question of local realism -- for a robust simply connected network does not require all of its elements to be "switched on" everywhere at once to be functional. Because a fully relativistic system is self limiting both locally and globally, local arrows of time are self similar to the global; there is no distinction, no boundary between self limiting topological networks (local behavior selected for) and "the experiment not done" described by Peres as nonlocal. There just can't be any nonlocal information in a fully relativistic theory; all measure results are metaphysically real. Probabilistic quantum theory that assigns value to nonlocality can only either 1) assume perfect information in a mystical way, or 2)refuse to deal with the issue at all and accept incompleteness.

I have found a tremendous amount of meaning in Yaneer Bar-Yam's theory of multi-scale variety: "In considering the requirements of multi-scale variety more generally, we can state that for a system to be effective, it must be able to coordinate the right number of components to serve each task, while allowing the independence of other sets of components to perform their respective tasks without binding the actions of one such set to another." ("Multiscale Variety in Complex Systems." Complexity vol 9, no 4, pp 37-45 2004). Distributed control -- lateral information introduced into the system -- increases variety. Increased variety increases the coordination strength of the network, so vertical information (hierarchical up and down) isn't sufficient to overcome the problem of bounded rationality. If one might find it useful to the discussion, I covered these issues in a 2007 conference paper and powerpoint

Do we need quantum mechanics to ensure free will?

"On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I think not. On Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, I think so." How could it not be? Our brains process information discretely, yet we -- and the participating universe, as Wheeler says -- experience life continuously.

Sorry for being so longwinded.

Best wishes,

Tom

Correcting the powerpoint link

Correction: I should know by now not to trust my memory. Einstein's "stubbornly persistent illusion" remark was on the death of his friend Michele Besso, not Godel.

Tom

Is the quantum gravity problem or pseudoproblem?

Dear George,

After initially struggling with the idea, I've been thinking a bit about how your top-down causation idea might look from the perspective of nonmanifold models of fundamental spacetime structure that emphasize the role of causality. It seems that top-down causation might provide an interesting new perspective on such models. For definiteness and simplicity, I use Rafael Sorkin's causal sets approach as an example.

Causal sets, as currently conceived, are by definition purely bottom-up at the classical level. Causality is modeled as an irreflexive, acyclic, interval-finite binary relation on a set, whose elements are explicitly identified as "events." Since causal structure alone is not sufficient to recover a metric, each element is assigned one fundamental volume unit. Sorkin abbreviates this with the phrase, "order plus number equals geometry." This is a special case of what I call the causal metric hypothesis.

In the context of classical spacetime, top-down causation might be summarized by the statement, "causal relationships among subsets of spacetime are not completely reducible to causal relations among their constituent events." In this context, the abstract causal structure exists not at the level of spacetime itself, but at the level of the power set of classical spacetime, i.e., the set whose elements are subsets of spacetime. Discrete models very similar to causal sets may still be employed, with the exception that the elements would correspond not to events, but to families of events. Two-way relationships would also come into play.

Initially this idea bothered me because of locality issues, but such a model need not violate conventional classical locality, provided that appropriate constraints involving high-level and low-level relations are satisfied.

This idea is interesting to me for the following reasons:

1. The arguments for top-down causation presented by you and others are rather convincing, and one would like to incorporate such considerations into approaches to "fundamental theories," particularly those emphasizing causality.

2. One of the principal difficulties for "pure causal theories" is their parsimony; it is not clear that they contain enough structure to recover established physics. Top-down causation employed as I described (i.e. power-set relations) provides "extra structure" without "extra hypotheses" in the sense that one is still working with the same (or similar) abstract mathematical objects. It is the interpretation of the "elements" and "relations" that becomes more general. In particular, the causal metric hypothesis still applies, although not in the form "order plus number equals geometry."

3. There is considerable precedent, at least in mathematics, for this type of generalization. For example, Grothendieck's approach to algebraic geometry involves "higher-dimensional points" corresponding to subvarieties of algebraic varieties, and the explicit consideration of these points gives the scheme structure, which has considerable advantages. In particular, the scheme structure is consistent with the variety structure but brings to light "hidden information." This is analogous to the manner in which higher-level causal structure is consistent with lower-level structure (e.g. it does not violate locality), but contains important information that might be essential in recovering established physics.

4. As far as I know, this approach has not yet been explicitly developed.

I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on this. Take care,

Ben

Thanks, George. Perhaps you will find time to say hello to Bar-Yam yourself, while in Boston. And it's a particularly great time to be in New England -- the Fall leaves should be peaking in color about now.

Have a pleasant flight.

Tom

Dear George Ellis,

As the thermo-dynamics of universe prevents the universe from gravitational collapse, gravity is the causation that is descriptive in top-to-bottom approach, in that the thermo-dynamics of the matters of universe and the gravity of universe are in balance. This implies Homeomorphic segmental-fluctuations of universe in causality cycles and thus Holarchial clustering of matters is ascribed in Coherently-cyclic cluster-matter paradigm of universe. In this paradigm the flow of time that correlates the dynamics of matters of universe, is in references with the discrete-times that emerge from Eigen-rotational quanta of strings in the Holarchy of universe, in that the nature of reference-time is expressional as cyclic.

With best wishes

Jayakar

Prof. Ellis, are physics and causation fundamentally limited to vision or visual experience?