[FRIAM] Downward causation

Sun Nov 19 11:49:01 EST 2017

Ahh!  Thanks Roger.  That blows some life into it for me.  Is watching a bean plant grow in time lapse an example of coarse-graining?  So let’s imagine we are watching such an image and we notice that the plant “reaches for the sun”.  (I.e., we move the light around and the plant follows it as it grows.)    Now let’s also imagine (ex hypothesis, mind you!) that the plant puts out extra roots on the opposite side to stabilize it.  I would call that top-down causation, I guess. 

I dunno.  Anything that comes out of SFI is kind of ink-blots for me.  

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2017 3:01 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

I looked at the abstract and thought, of course, if you "coarse grain" the visual field, then you synthesize objects out of groups of pixels that cohere together in time and space.  In time you might even come to blame the imputed objects for their presumed effects in the world.  Perhaps it's an illusion, or a hallucination, or a tautology, but once you summon a coarse grained entity into existence it will have coarse grained consequences, including changes of behavior in the summoner which are explained as reactions to coarse grained observations.

So I didn't read as hard as Nick, I just took the operational view laid out in the abstract and imagined it.  Causation is at root a tool that helps an organism to live long and to prosper.  The observation and reaction which saves a life or facilitates reproduction or helps progeny mature is primary.

-- rec --

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 11:25 PM, Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net> > wrote:

Hi, Roger, 

Can you say what you thought was “nice” about it.  (As you know, it makes me nervous to disagree with you about stuff).  I struggled with the article.  I thought at one point she confused aggregate with emergent properties. Emergent properties are properties of the whole that are dependent on the temporal or spatial arrangement of the parts.  Thus the enzymatic properties of proteins, which depend on the arrangement of their amino acids, are emergent properties.   Also, the standard definition of materialism is the believe that everything real consists of matter and its relations.  So entertaining the notion that relations are not material (and therefore incapable of being causal) is … well … silly.   Finally, I have always suspected that downward causation is an example of a “mystery” i.e., confusion that arises when words are applied to a situation where they aren’t equal to the task.  (“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”)  I think whenever we talk about causes we are trying to do with physical events what we do with social and legal ones … we are trying to assign responsibility for event so we can blame or praise the thing that “caused” it.  It’s a form of animism.  To say that A is a cause of B is only to say that variations in A have been shown, experimentally, to be necessary and or sufficient for variations in B.  Causal statements ALWAYS come with an “other things being equal” clause, ceteris paribus.  To the extent that emergent properties can be shown to be necessary or sufficient for some change in the property of some parts of the whole, we have downward causation, no?   Now the shape of the hemoglobin molecule is an emergent property of that molecule which determines whether it binds oxygen in its active site.  Whether or not it has oxygen bound to its active site determines its shape.  Surely one of these is downward causation.  I am just no sure which. (};-|)

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> ] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Saturday, November 18, 2017 6:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

Nice.

-- rec --

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 12:29 PM, Carl Tollander <carl at plektyx.com <mailto:carl at plektyx.com> > wrote:

Of interest, also the whole issue... http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/375/2109/20160338

C

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