Thanks so much for reading Jim. It's a great question about how this relates to various physical phenomena: as I've said in some other comments, right now it's more a mathematical theory based on information theory and causal analysis. But you're totally right in that there are a few really good places to look for it in nature, maybe quantum decoherence due to environmental noise is such a one.

In regards to teleology requiring purpose: it's subtle but purpose is in a sense present in the analysis. Non-purposeful actions wouldn't really be deterministic or path-independent. But this doesn't mean the teleology, or its accompanying purpose, has any grand meaning at all.

It's a great question to ask how causal emergence relates to autopoietic and teleological causal relationships. I tried to generalize the causal emergence findings a bit here, to say there is an even more general phenomenon of causal fitting. This can be seen when, for instance, a microscale causal relationship immediately decays but a macroscale causal relationship is stable across time. So I think they are interrelated, all facets of the same underlying discrepancies between the microscale and the macroscale causal structure. Additionally, such a lack of "causal fit" due to the system being autopoietic and teleological primes it for causal emergence, so that's another relationship.

All the best,

Erik P Hoel

Dear Erik,

Now that we both agree on indeterminism, I mean on limited determinism, can we take on specific mechanism of emergence of quantitatively more information associated with macrostate than what exists in the complete description of microstate that reflects in the same macrostate? This was one of the original contention.

When I said, I will hold till you agreed / disagreed whether misunderstanding is resolved, I meant, no new points will be raised till then.

Rajiv

Erik,

"But you're totally right in that there are a few really good places to look for it in nature, maybe quantum decoherence due to environmental noise is such a one."

In "Life on the Edge," Al-Khalili explores environmental noise and quantum coherence for photosynthesis, saying "the noisy interior of a living cell might act to drive quantum dynamics and maintain quantum coherence in photosynthetic complexes .." It's quantum biology I hadn't seen before.

Hope you get a chance to comment on mine.

Jim

Hi Erik,

Indeed it is very interesting essay and I enjoyed reading it. I agree with you that all phenomena are Ontological and are not theological in their evolvement-occurrence.

Yet, you state:"They (the agents,Y.A) maintain their identity over time while continuously changing out their basic constituents." What keeps them from holding their self-organization? How they perceive their unique singular identity?

You rely on Causality principle on your hierarchical mapping from lower lever systems to higher one, and for predictions in a causal perception it works to some degree, but we find in reality that its limited. This is why we (humans) at a place and state were we are - in suffering, pain and confused.

I see reality evolving differently and causality is a special case in the occurrence of phenomena. (see my essay). Yes, we are evolving in the present continuous and continuously changing while holding to our unique self.

Your essay is challenging but raise more questions, which is good.

I hope we get high exposures to our potential readers.

With thanks

yehuda atai

Erik,

An absorbing analysis, well written and described. Also one of few consistent with my own but from an interestingly different perspective.

You do a good job on what you cover but don't go into mechanism itself, either for causal interactions or to construct how Romeo responds to finding a wall and overcomes it. I hope you may study and comment on the 'scenario test runs' and 'feedback loops' I invoke, and hierarchical levels within our cortices.

I agree entirely with your hierarchy, well represented and employed. But I suggest that contrary to many assumptions these are ubiquitous throughout nature. From Einsteins 1952 STR concept of "spaces in motion within spaces" down to fractal and perturbation theories and on to the rules of brackets in arithmetic and identically 'layered' (see my last essay) propositional dynamic logic (PDL). Even the macro 'extra spin state' of the Higgs process is analogous! You refer to 'rungs'. Do you perceive underlying 'hidden likenesses' with any of these?

I did struggle to follow yours at first read (and I promise mine returns the compliment!) but I think unravelling density and complexity is essential so that's a positive attribute. Mine also goes on the to identify an extra 'layer' of information hidden in quantum interactions disguised as noise. My 2013 IQbit essay precursed this years which decodes it to get Classic QM. (thought that'd need understanding of 'spooky' QM then overcoming major dissonance to perceive!). More details of the mechanism are in my string with Stefan of 4/3.

I'd greatly value your comments on mine, which is testament to the quality, value and (my opinion!) veracity of yours. Thank you for the informative and enlightening new view of compatible conceptions.

Best of luck in the contest.

Peter

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    • Post #79

    Dear Erik

    regarding our discussion on supervience, I have come up with the following aphorism:

    "Bottom-up action enables top-down realisation to take place".

    which actually captures part of what is going on. The other part ifs

    "Top-down realisation puts in place the relations between elements that participate in Bottom-up action".

    Regards

    George

    Hi Erik -

    In the context of this contest, your essay is outstanding for the careful clarity with which you address a specific version of the problem we're supposed to be thinking about. I now have a much clearer notion of "supervenience" and its limitations, thanks to you, and the concept of "causal emergence" fits nicely into the wider perspective you indicate in Appendix E.

    I have a question, though, about how the concept of supervenience fits into our current empirical understanding of the world. Your Figure 1 implies that quark clouds cause atomic structure, and ??? causes the quark clouds. I realize these labels are just short-hand, and this doesn't represent your view of the world. Yet it hardly seems plausible here that "all the information and causal work seems to drain away down to the microscale." The domain of particle physics is both vastly more complicated than that of atomic structure and radically less determinate. As to ???, the speculative quest for a deeper-level physics hardly gives a picture of "lower-level properties from which all the higher-level properties necessarily follow." On the contrary, most features of the Standard Model are currently explained by random "symmetry-breaking".

    You note that formulating "the problem in terms of higher and lower scales puts aside the details and complications of physics." But am I wrong in thinking that supervenience only seems plausible because we're used to the simple logic and precise determinism of classical physics?

    This is not to deny that the physical world is deterministic, to a very close approximation... so there's still the question of how higher-level structures come to play an important role in the macrophysical world... and there's still a very interesting network of answers involving multiple realization, error-correcting codes, etc.

    In Section 3 of my own essay, I consider the fact that deterministic physics seems itself to be a higher-level structure not reducible to its less determinate lower-level components, and that the process of quantum measurement is analogous in important ways to much better-understood evolutionary processes. Sadly, this work is at the other end of the scale of logical rigor from yours, but I hope you'll find it of interest.

    Thanks - Conrad

      Thanks so much Conrad these are really great questions.

      To your question of: "But am I wrong in thinking that supervenience only seems plausible because we're used to the simple logic and precise determinism of classical physics?"

      So suprevenience turns out to be a surprisingly flexible way of talking about systems and scales. It doesn't actually imply that the microscale must be simple or deterministic. Noisy systems, or those with complex interactions or functions. Here I use it solely over discrete finite systems. For any such system there's some definable set of supervening scales {S}, which may be extremely large.

      I'll note first of all that for most of what we consider physical systems this holds: for example, given a group of cells, those cells will have some supervening scales the definition of which seems, at least to me, pretty non-controversial. Same with say, the logic gates of a computer all the way up the supervening program of a web browser. In theory there is some mapping between the web browser and the underlying circuits, even if that mapping is *enormously* complex and unwieldy.

      To your point that: "the speculative quest for a deeper-level physics hardly gives a picture of 'lower-level properties from which all the higher-level properties necessarily follow.' On the contrary, most features of the Standard Model are currently explained by random "symmetry-breaking.""

      Perhaps the word necessary is confusing here. By that I mean, given the state of the microscale, the state of the macroscale *necessarily* follows. For instance, in the case of symmetry breaking, given the infinitesimally small flucations of the system, some macrostate follows. This may appear as arbitrary to an observer, but there is some microscale that is the case. Philosophers have thought before about supervenience and emergence. There's one notion of "brute emergence" where somehow properties come into being that *don't* supervene on the underlying properties (or states on the underlying states). A lot of people have argued that this is nonsensical - in other words, that all higher scales must supervene on lower ones. But these are great questions, because applying this to the details of our own physics has not been done yet.

      All the best! Erik P Hoel

      Np George - did that myself earlier.

      Interesting aphorisms! I think the field is so early that conventional language has a problem mapping to its contours. For instance, what's the difference between something being a "top-down realization" and just a "realization"? If a bunch of NOR gates realize some logic function, is that automatically a top-down realization? These are really interesting questions.

      If I remember correctly, you've also used the word "constraint" to describe some of these issues before. I really like that. Constraint is nice because it can exist at a single timepoint and thus we can get really precise about space and time, supervening levels, etc. I also used "constraint" as a mathematical descriptor in a paper about causal emergence, and we showed that at time t, the supervening macroscale constrains the future (t+1) to a greater degree than the underlying microscale constrains that same future. One might then say, in english, something like: "The macroscale constrains the future of the microscale." What do you think of that phrasing? Do you feel it matches up to what you're talking about?

      Thanks so much George!

      Thanks so much for commenting Peter. I appreciate the kind words.

      To be honest I'm not sure why it would matter exactly how Romeo overcomes in the wall - in fact, the very point of having a multiply-realizable causal path is that the mechanistic details don't matter. However, I take your point that there must be some underlying biological mechanism that accomplishes it, although, given how I'm saying that the causal relationship is "out of our heads" in this manner, perhaps the term "biological mechanism" doesn't actually cover it.

      I certainly agree with you though that "[hierarchies] are ubiquitous throughout nature." In fact, there's a sense in which nature is itself a big hierarchy! I'd be interesting in more examination of this: most scientists don't spend a lot of time making sure scales actually fit together.

      Erick, I see you will be the winer of this first essay contest... congratulatios, I already read your essay and rated it.

      Please, consider to have into account my essay which main proposal is:

      "A book that could revolutionize the future of Cosmological Physics: Aristotle, Newton, Einstein,..."

      The Dynamic Laws of Physics (and Universal Gravitation) have varied over time, and even Einstein had already proposed that they still has to evolve:

      ARISTOTLE: F = m.v

      NEWTON: F = m.a

      EINSTEIN. E = m.c2 (*)

      MOND: F = m.a.(A/A0)

      FRACTAL RAINBOW: F = f (scale) = m.a.(scale factor)

      Or better G (Gravity Constant) vary with the scale/distance due to fractal space-time: G = f ( Scale/distance factor)

      (*) This equation does not correspond to the same dynamic concept but has many similarities.

      Dear Erik,

      I noticed that you didn't see my answer, I think, so I reproduce it here: Y

      Yes, sure, there are causal relations! That's why I put arrows, to indicate the diraction of chemical reactions. Also, because also tried to highlight structures that are stable with time. I wanted to speak about the mRNA, but I also wanted to talk about evolution... So, I ended up talking about the signals that pattern most of the animals.

      If you have anything more to say, please, do it! I am also here to learn and enrich my ideas with the ones of other people!

        hi erik,

        a very interesting technical essay that, unusually in this contest, actually endeavours to answer the questions that have been asked. you make mention of hierarchy and that there is, by consideration of all levels, something to be learned (a pattern emerges) which is fantastic. i also note you mention the critical importance of the role of corrective feedback.

        i'm curious to know if you would consider whether, at a lower level in any given higher-level of a hierarchy which clearly can be demonstrated to exhibit goal-orientated behaviour not relevant to the lower level(s), the lower levels can *still* exhibit their *own* (defined type of) goal-orientated behaviour... *again* not relevant to the *higher* levels.

          Dear Erik,

          Amazing essay, thought-provoking and absolutely on topic! I already knew about the work of Tononi and his collaborators on IIT, but it is when I read your description of causal emergence that I truly realized the potential of this general line of work to further our understanding of the fundamental nature of the world we live in! I used to believe that quantum mechanics and general relativity were the main areas of physics that were "foundationally relevant", but I now realize that thermodynamics, and its intricate and subtle relationship with information, is also hugely relevant. I found particularly enlightening your discussion of agents being stable at higher spatiotemporal scales and maintaining their identity over time while continuously changing out their basic constituents.

          By contrast with yours, my essay is very metaphysical and philosophical: I play with the hypothesis that we can ultimately account for the lawfulness that we observe in our universe by the "co-emergence" of conscious agents and the laws of physics from the "infinite set of all abstract computations". This process would require "emergence to work both ways": consciousness would emerge out of a physical level of description that obeys the "mindless" laws of physics, but these laws would be at the same time an emerging consequence of the existence of a community of conscious observers that share between themselves a coherent story about a lawful and stable world. Maybe such a "strange causal loop" cannot be made to make sense, but if it ultimately does, I think that your concept of causal emergence will have some essential role to play.

          Congratulations for having written such an interesting and deservedly well-received essay. Good luck in the contest: I am rooting for you to come up with one of the top prizes!

          Marc

            Dear Erik P Hoel

            I appreciate your essay. You spent a lot of effort to write it. If you believed in the principle of identity of space and matter of Descartes, then your essay would be even better. There is not movable a geometric space, and is movable physical space. These are different concepts.

            I inform all the participants that use the online translator, therefore, my essay is written badly. I participate in the contest to familiarize English-speaking scientists with New Cartesian Physic, the basis of which the principle of identity of space and matter. Combining space and matter into a single essence, the New Cartesian Physic is able to integrate modern physics into a single theory. Let FQXi will be the starting point of this Association.

            Don't let the New Cartesian Physic disappear! Do not ask for himself, but for Descartes.

            New Cartesian Physic has great potential in understanding the world. To show potential in this essay I risked give "The way of the materialist explanation of the paranormal and the supernatural" - Is the name of my essay.

            Visit my essay and you will find something in it about New Cartesian Physic. After you give a post in my topic, I shall do the same in your theme

            Sincerely,

            Dizhechko Boris

            Thanks for following up and letting me know Daniel,

            Erik

            Thanks so much Luke, glad to hear it.

            Your question is an extremely good one. It goes back to what I discuss briefly in the essay in terms of supersedence versus layering. Higher level goals can only really exist if the causal relationships they are part of (or composed of) really also exist, that is, aren't completely reducible to what's being done by the lower levels. But the same is true in reverse. Are the lower-level goals subsumed into higher-levels, or can they exist in harmony in some sort of layering? I think it depends a lot on overlap - what you want to do is avoid overdeterminism. So I don't actually have a proven answer to your question: it depends on how this research works out in the end!

            Thanks so much for your kind words Marc. So glad you found it interesting.

            I originally went to the Tononi lab to work on IIT, but my main focus was kind of this side problem concerning scale, which then bloomed into the whole notion of causal emergence. While causal emergence isn't necessarily related to consciousness, there's definitely causal emergence in IIT: in a recently paper we showed that integrated information can peak at higher scales because of causal emergence. There's a pretty good associated set of formalisms with causal emergence at this point, so I think it's important to expand it in terms of generality, so I'm particularly pleased you liked the notion of "causal fit" and how causal relationships can be stable over time or not depending on the scale.

            I just read your own essay and thank you for pointing me toward it. There's a lot of ground being covered, but you group all these issues together in a way that I think is very helpful. My own opinion is that things like the Maxiverse or David Lewis's modal realism come with a walloping problem: how many denizens of such an embarrassment of multiplicity come with true and justified beliefs about the Maxiverse or modal realism? If the consequence of your belief in x is that you have no good reason to believe in x, then you've "sawed off the branch you are sitting on," to quote Wittgenstein. Fundamentally, the main problem is with entropy: having true and justified beliefs about physics is an extremely low-entropy state. Even in general, given the full set of brain/world configurations, it is extremely rare for the beliefs of that brain to be true and justified. Reshuffle a minority of connections in my brain and I'm insane. I may believe, experience, all sorts of things, but I can no longer develop true and justified beliefs. Now imagine you reshuffle my brain's connections in every possible way and think of what a tiny percentage of that set could truly claim they weren't insane (if the brains even still worked to generate consciousness).

            What these "multiplicity beliefs" do is severe the connection between true and justified beliefs and our own conscious experiences. That's because the amount of order you need for a conscious experience (a brain in a vat) is sets of magnitude lower than the amount of order you need for true and justified beliefs (a well-put together brain that's stable across time in a relationship with a well-put together civilization or group that's stable across time, or at least long enough to develop physics and pose these kinds of questions).

            To sum up: if you believe that everything happens then the probability of your current conscious experience having true and justified beliefs is infinitesimally small which undercuts the original belief. Therefore, I file these kinds of thought experiments personally under "disproof by contradiction" and don't lose any sleep over them. The more interesting thing is to think of these as signposts of an incomplete physics.

            Thanks for the comment and the great essay,

            Erik P Hoel

            Dear Erik,

            You are close, but you are missing a few key connections. Between the quantum level micro-state and the next level is the large cliff of entropy and thermodynamics. Information theory needs the context of intelligence (intelligence is simpler and far more common than you might think). Please read my essay.

            Sincerely,

            Jeff Schmitz