Hi Erik,

I am back again. I had an earlier post here but figured it would be much easier to converse if I started a new one. I have been studying the essay and some of your earlier work regarding macro over micro when it comes to causal emergence. I am not sold on IIT overall, but some of the measures you have is very useful to quantify such phenomenon.

I have an idea and wanted to get your thoughts on it. I will start by clarifying some of the terms so that there is no confusion. In my submission, when I talk about higher-lower level in the cerebral cortex hierarchy, I am referring to the layers 1-6 of the cortex at the same macrostate level. Layer 1 is where inputs come in and layer 6 is the 'higher' most deepest level. I had argued that this is the level where deeper goals/intentions should arise in the brain. Now in your submission you talk about causal emergence as one goes from a microscale to a macroscale. Would you agree that this could happen within a 'scale' if there is some kind of coarse graining within a particular scale across many layers? You might see where I am going with this. In a heirarchical predictive coding model from layers 1-6, I think we can show that as you go up the layers, a signal processing phenomenon called slow-feature analysis is performed across the layers. This is a form of coarse graining in the input mappings, from level 1 (lower) acting like a 'microscale' to level 6 (higher) behaving as the 'macroscale'. Thus there should be causal emergence as you go from lower to higher layers and with that intentional agency. I would be interested in your thoughts on this.

Cheers

Natesh

    Erik,

    Thank you for the clear and logical essay on how agents and goals emerge from the underlying microphysics. I thought the discussion and examples on autopoiesis were especially well explained.

    Your essay references micro and macroscales throughout, so I thought you might be interested in my essay, The Cosmic Odyssey of Matter, which formally defines precise formations of matter (PFMs). The sequence of PFMs identified in my essay nearly matches Fig. 1 in your essay.

    The objective of my essay is to simply define and identify the progression of these precise forms, it does not address the hard problem of emergence of agents and goals per your own essay. Just the same, formally describing the progression of precise forms may provide some context of how living organisms and human social groups relate to the broader universe.

    link to The Cosmic Odyssey of Matter

    Regards, Ed Kneller

      Thank you for commenting Ed. I'm always interested in scale - and you certainly take a more cosmic perspective on scale in your own essay. Thanks for sharing,

      Erik P Hoel

      Hi again Natesh, thanks for stopping by again.

      In general, IIT is about consciousness - specifically, how to measure its level and content. Causal emergence doesn't make any claims about consciousness, so the two in theory are separable. However, both have a root: the connection between information and causation. In IIT, we've done work showing that causal emergence is precisely why integrated information can be greater at higher scales.

      About the layers of the cortex: usually, inputs to the cortex go actually to the middle layers (like layer 4, where in V1 most of the afferents from the LGN terminate). However, I agree that goals and so on probably occur "deeper" in the brain, although spatial direction might not vary with deepness in that sense. I also agree that the brain is a great place to look for causal emergence: it's highly redundant, processes information, and must have a very complex causal structure. Predictive coding is definitely a very interesting concept - it's certainly possible that things like feature detection implicitly rely on (or lead to) causal emergence, if the features you're detecting are macro-variables. So in general I think something like this should end up bing very relevant for neuroscience, but, as usual, the devil ends up being in the details and we just don't know enough about the brain yet.

      Thanks so much for your comments and thoughts!

      Erik P Hoel

      Erik,

      Since it nears the end, I have been returning to essays I have read to see if I've rated them and discovered I rated it on March 19th.

      Hope you have enjoyed the interchange of ideas as much as I have.

      Jim Hoover

      Dear Erik,

      thanks a lot for your detailed answer (and sorry for my late reply).

      Actually I had seen your paper (Hoel et al. 2013) but as you discuss effective information which

      I believe had been introduced in the context of IIT I was under the wrong impression the Hoel et

      al. 2013 was dealing with IIT as well.

      The paper was pointed out to me by a jesuit monk and philosopher whom I met a few months ago on a gathering of scientists and theologians. He claimed the paper would show that IIT features "strong emergence" which I was very sceptical about. After reading your FQXi paper I now understand that what you call "underfitting" would correspond to "strong emergence" (which as you say would be possible only from a local perspective) while overfitting would correspond to weak emergence.

      Would you agree with this interpretation?

      >Took me a second to find what you're talking about (which is the arrow on the second to bottom

      >step in the ladder in Figure 1). Yes, the picture is infinitely more complicated than shown! I

      >certainly can't draw out all the supervenient arrows also because scientists don't spend a lot of

      >time looking for what Ernest Nagel called "bridge laws." In retrospect I could have just put

      >"elementary particles in the standard model" which covers more bases.

      Yes, "elementary particles" would be more correct, since the quark configuration is absolutely

      identical in different molecular structures (such as 2 CO O_2 versus 2 CO_2) while the

      electron configuration is responsible for the rather different properties (poisoneous versus harmless).

      >You can have plenty of averages, or let the law of large numbers work, without causal >emergence.

      >For example, rolling a die over and over won't give you any causal emergence. However, >regularly

      >in science experimenters treat higher scales as causally-manipulatable variables. This can be

      >reflective of causal emergence. For instance, assessing the causal relationship between two

      >neurons (not their underling elementary particles). Causal emergence explains why that's not >just

      >about using a simpler representation. You're possibly gaining something in this scenario: extra

      >information about the causal structure that's not available at the microscale, because at the

      >scale of neurons there is error-correction, whereas at the scale of elementary particle physics

      >there is no error-correction. If you believe the hypothesis I lay out of the ladder of science

      >being reflective of each step causally emerging from the one below it, causal emergence should >be

      >incredibly common, especially in the special sciences (like biology).

      I agree with your dice example (no causal emergence). What I meant was to use the averaging out

      of statistical fluctuations on the micro scale to establish an idealization: such as assuming

      a soccer ball to be actually a sphere in order to calculate its behavior.

      Would you agree that this is causal emergence?

      >As for quantum physics being less determined than classic physics - well, that's a good scale to

      >look for causal emergence at.

      As we have argued in our contribution, time itself may be emergent in quantum gravity. As there is no causality without time I was wondering whether in this case one could actually say that any kind of causality would be emergent. Would you agree?

      "One may argue that pure information-based conecpts such as the "bill of rights" or the "contents of the bible" are totally substrate independent, and that agents exist somehow in between such imaterial objects and material physics. Would you agree with this interpretation?"

      >It's a nice idea but I wouldn't agree. First, I don't think anything is actually fully

      >substrate-independent, more like things are substrate-constrained to greater or less extents. >Second, I

      >don't think there's some immaterial world that anything is closer to.

      I agree with you that probably nothing is totally substrate independent and that there is a continuum of how strongly concepts are substrate dependent or independent. If the bill of rights would be encoded in neutrinos it probably wouldn't have many consequences. But I still would say information is immaterial. So the bill of rights is more substrate independent and defined by its information content than e.g. a brick. This is what I meant with "closer to the immaterial world". Now since both emergent causality and substrate independence seem to be related to idealization I still believe there is some connection: When you idealize you abstract from the substrate and rely on information content regarding to these idealized macroscopic properties. Since this information is not directly linked the properties of constituents it is more substrate independent and thus can be realized in various concepts: the information aspect dominates the matter aspect. At the same time this description allows for more causal emergence.

      Once more thanks for your essay. Even if I don't understand all details yet and may not agree with

      everything it is in some respects a eye opener.

      Heinrich

      hahah nice to hear a jesuit monk was interested!

      I'd differentiate strong and weak emergence from causal emergence, only because there's a lot of philosophical baggage that comes with saying either of those terms. For example, a lot of philosophers have argued that strong emergence violates supervenience, whereas causal emergence doesn't. At the same time, a lot of philosophers have argued that weak emergence is epiphenomenal due to the exclusion argument, which also isn't true for causal emergence.

      I do think you're right that the example of causal underfitting may actually be pretty close to what has been traditionally meant by strong emergence, because it implies that the causal structure doesn't locally supervene. However, at some point these things become semantic and I'm not entirely convinced that philosophers have been arguing over two unitary and coherent phenomena in the form of strong and weak emergence. Philosophers have a habit of trying to carve out the conceptual space of problems prior to any particular theory that can address those problems. The weakness with this approach is the "unknown unknowns" that can be brought to light in scientific investigation.

      Btw this doesn't mean I think the philosophers aren't doing anything - there's a lot of conceptual work being done, a lot of it very good - but I also don't expect the final theory of emergence to easily be slotted into the conceptual schema they mapped out before knowing the theory.

      "As we have argued in our contribution, time itself may be emergent in quantum gravity. As there is no causality without time I was wondering whether in this case one could actually say that any kind of causality would be emergent. Would you agree?"

      I'm not enough of an expert enough to know if it's true that time emerges from quantum gravity. However, it is an interesting avenue of investigation to ask: what properties are necessary for causal relationships, and what is the lowest scale they exist at in nature. Your proposal sounds like a good hypothesis for this.

      Thanks so much for posting again,

      Erik

      Erik,

      Wow. I'm not sure I have anything to say or any questions left to ask. This is a very well-written. thorough, and complete essay. Well Done.

      The only possible comment of interest I might have concerns Romeo and his motivations ... I don't think his brain was involved:-)

      Best Regards and Good Luck,

      Gary Simpson

        Dear Sirs!

        New Cartesian Physic based on the identity of space and matter. It showed that the formula of mass-energy equivalence comes from the pressure of the Universe, the flow of force which on the corpuscle is equal to the product of Planck's constant to the speed of light.

        New Cartesian Physic has great potential for understanding the world. To show it, I ventured to give "materialistic explanations of the paranormal and supernatural" is the title of my essay.

        Visit my essay, you will find there the New Cartesian Physic and make a short entry: "I believe that space is a matter" I will answer you in return.

        Sincerely,

        Dizhechko Boris

        Dear Erik,

        thanks for the well-written essay. I agree with Gary, there is not much left to ask. Your argumentation reminds on evolution.

        Here, there are two processes, mutation and selection. Mutation produces new information (=species) and selection is a global interaction among the species giving a goal to the process. In a more refined model of Co-evolution, the selection itself is formed by the interaction between the species, so again you will get a direction or goal. So, I think from this point of view, your model perfectly fitz.

        Maybe I have one question: you are an expert in neural science and I wrote about a brain (using methods from math and physics). Please could you have a look on my essay?

        Thanks in advance and good luck in the contest (I gave you the highest rating)

        All the best

        Torsten

          Thanks so much Gary! Also, your comment made me laugh - yes, there are many... types of teleological causation.

          EPH

          Thank you Torsten! I'll read your essay now.

          EPH

          Dear Erik,

          With great interest I read your essay, which of course is worthy of high rating. Excellently written.

          I share your aspiration to seek the truth

          «I argue that agents, with their associated intentions and goal-oriented behavior, can actually causally emerge from their underlying microscopic physics.»

          «being open to the environment is not sufficient for goals, although it is necessary ... there must be some set of conditions in the interactions with the environment in order for agency and goals to appear.»

          I agree with you

          «We can all wave our hands about emergence until the end of time but until you really drill down and give proof of principle examples.» And I tried to do it on examples.

          I wish you success in the contest.

          Kind regards,

          Vladimir

          Dear Erik Hoel

          You gave me new knowledge about top-down causation.

          Here I am interested, if top-down causaton can be proved by some software simulation, like artificial life? Such simulation is simpler than simulation of animal evolution.

          My opinion is that such theory does not yet directly explain free-will. I think so because all examples which you gave are also logical gates. But it is similarly with these logical gates as with some software. A software works according to logical gates, it has not free-will. For instance I think that red lines on your figure 3 are also logical gates.

          I speculate that the laws of Newtonian physics, (without quantum physics) does not give top-down speculations. Probably this is not true, what do you think?

          my essay

          Best regards, Janko Kokošar

            Thanks for reading Janko.

            In regards to directly explaining free will - you're right, this doesn't, by itself, give a full argument for free will. This is because free will can be broken into several related problems. However, one of those problems is shown to be moot by this line of reasoning. That is the problem of having an underlying explanation for your own behavior at a much lower scale. So for instance, if someone says "you only did x because your are a collection of [fundamental particles], and it was those [fundamental particles] that actually did x." You hear a more causal form of this argument when someone says "my brain made me do it." However, if someone claims consciousness is itself epiphenomenal, or makes an argument from fatalism, causal emergence does not directly address that (although given a theory of consciousness it may be able to prove that consciousness is causally efficacious). But, regardless, the first step in getting to a [scientifically adult version of free will that probably won't be everything we want but ends up being good enough] is showing macro-level causation. So I think of this as a first step.

            As for quantum physics - well, I actually think causal emergence is pretty common, even in things like cellular automata, which have very different "physics" from our own world.

            EPH

            Hi Eric...

            I've considered this a little more, and also discovered why I was confused about the meaning of "supervenience"... apparently it was used early on to describe loosely what you call "brute emergence" and only later settled into the technical definition you use.

            I don't think my hesitation affects your argument about causal emergence, based on discrete finite systems, which is clearly a relevant description from the level of deterministic physics on up. In fact, your essay really should be included in the published collection of work from this contest, since it takes a significantly different approach to emergence from the other best essays here, and one I'll be thinking about for a while.

            Still, it's not at all obvious that in the quantum realm "there is some microscale that is the case." The closest we get to describing the state of the microscale is the wave-function. As I understand it, not only is that a matter of probability, but they're probabilities of possible measurement results, rather than of possible microstates. If you don't specify what kind of measurement will be made on it, you don't even have a specific wave-function for a system. So there's reason to be suspicious of philosophical arguments that "all higher scales must supervene on lower ones."

            This is just to say that emergence happens differently at different levels, so no one approach gives the whole picture.

            Thanks again - Conrad

            Thanks for commenting again Conrad - and I'm very glad to hear it had an impact.

            As to your point, I actually generally agree with you on this. It may *not* be the case that all of science can be described in terms of a non-broken hierarchy of supervenience. Perhaps very strange stuff is going on at the microscale and causal structure of any kind can only exist at some level above the ultimate microscale anyways. However, causal emergence is relative to levels; so for instance, if biology does supervene on chemistry, biology could causally emerge from chemistry (regardless of whatever is going on beneath chemistry). It's also very probably that causal emergence can apply to non-strictly supervening scales - because again it's just comparing the macro to the micro causal structures. So these are really great questions - I'm not going to a priori ruling anything out. This is just the clearest way to present the idea without getting into all sorts of caveats about whether and where supervenience holds and how strict it is; which is, in a sense, a different (although just as interesting) problem. Certainly in the systems I'm working with supervenience always holds, which I view as the most difficult scenario in which to make a strong case for emergence, so that's why I always enforce that.

            EPH

            Hello Erik Hoel,

            I enjoyed your paper and I think that the ideas in your paper are a step in the right direction. But I do not think that your argument is sound. You assume in your first paragraph that agents have 'goals, intentions, and purpose', which, I believe, is the end point of the question as asked. I do not see how you link mindless mathematical laws to aims and intension.

            I do not think that supervenience is the right concept. There are at least two hierarchies: the physical hierarchy and the conceptual hierarchy. The physical hierarchy starts at the Plank distance and extends at least 70 orders of magnitude to the size of the observable universe. The physical hierarchy is the realm of physical process behavior as summarized by mindless physical-mathematical laws . The conceptual hierarchy of the sciences is a human semantic overlay on the physical hierarchy. In either case, the guiding mathematical laws or science of the higher levels to not necessarily reduce to those at the lower levels - the rules of organic chemistry does not really reduce to sub-atomic physics; and the rules of baseball do not reduce to biology. What can be said is: the lower levels implement the higher levels, and things that appear at the higher levels are not predictable by the laws of the lower levels.

            I think that implementation completes the emergence story. Emergence brings into being the parts that implement the next level up, but I think that implementation does a more natural job of 'carving nature at its joints'. Implementations are assemblies of parts selected from collections of what emerges from below.

            Thanks for the good read.

            Cheers,

            Bruce Amberden.

              Dear Sirs!

              Physics of Descartes, which existed prior to the physics of Newton returned as the New Cartesian Physic and promises to be a theory of everything. To tell you this good news I use «spam».

              New Cartesian Physic based on the identity of space and matter. It showed that the formula of mass-energy equivalence comes from the pressure of the Universe, the flow of force which on the corpuscle is equal to the product of Planck's constant to the speed of light.

              New Cartesian Physic has great potential for understanding the world. To show it, I ventured to give "materialistic explanations of the paranormal and supernatural" is the title of my essay.

              Visit my essay, you will find there the New Cartesian Physic and make a short entry: "I believe that space is a matter" I will answer you in return. Can put me 1.

              Sincerely,

              Dizhechko Boris

              Hmmm, let me try to clear some of this up.

              "I do not think that your argument is sound. You assume in your first paragraph that agents have 'goals, intentions, and purpose' which, I believe, is the end point of the question as asked."

              As I outline in the essay, the question is not whether agents can be described as having goals, intentions, and purpose. You do that every day, I do that every day, every human describes agents this way throughout their lives. Many scientific and quantitative fields also describes agents in this way, and even have associated mathematics and formalisms, as I point out. The real question is not whether some physical systems (agents) can be described as having goals, intentions, and purposes, because clearly they can, but whether those things are actually causally efficacious. That is, are they epiphenomenal, or can they be reduced to the mindless mathematical laws and relations of the microscale?

              "I do not think that supervenience is the right concept."

              Supervenience means that if you fix the properties x at a lower scale you then fix y at a higher scale. Your example of baseball not being reducible to biology isn't capturing that. Obviously, given the set of fundamental physical properties that underlying a baseball game being played, whether or not someone is on first is fixed by those fundamental properties. Imagine fixing the fundamental makeup of a computer; that fixes the higher scale of the logic gates in the computer. That's supervenience. It sounds to me like you are talking about reduction between laws rather than supervenience between scales: do the laws of organic chemistry reduce to the laws of sub-atomic physics? This is actually a different question than: if you fix the set of fundamental physical properties in a system, do the higher level properties of that system follow? In fact, your very definition, that "lower levels implement the higher levels" implies supervenience (why else would implementing higher-level property y via lower-level properties x bring about y unless fixing x meant fixing y?). When talking about these issues it pays to be precise, and unfortunately special jargon is needed, and thus careful attention must be paid while reading to understand the definitions.

              All the best,

              EPH