In a recent OP at Uncommon Descent, Vincent Torley (vjtorley) defends a version of libertarian free will based on the notion of top-down causation. The dominant view among physicists (which I share) is that top-down causation does not exist, so Torley cites an essay by cosmologist George Ellis in defense of the concept.
Vincent is commenting here at TSZ, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to engage him in a discussion of top-down causation, with Ellis’s essay as a starting point. Here’s a key quote from Ellis’s essay to stimulate discussion:
However hardware is only causally effective because of the software which animates it: by itself hardware can do nothing. Both hardware and software are hierarchically structured, with the higher level logic driving the lower level events.
I think that’s wrong, but I’ll save my argument for the comment thread.
It depends on what one means by “software”.
My view would be that software is non-physical (abstract, fictional). It exists only by virtue of physical representations. However, it is the physical representations that do all of the work.
Software is abstract, because the way we talk about it requires that it be abstract.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that our visiting theists seem committed to the proposition that minds are immaterial. Unless I have missed something, this is the central difference between the evolution “side” and the ID “side”.
A lot of IDists are willing to concede an old earth, and common descent, but draw the line as to why it occurs. On one side of the line you have what I used to call monists or pantheists or physicalists or something like that.
And on the other side, you have a belief in a non-material mind causing things to happen, either by designing the process, or by tweaking it.
I’m not much into complex thought erections. To me, the theist must believe in immaterial minds, because such are necessary for life after death. Everything else follows that motive.
Minds are metaphorical. You cannot get more immaterial than that.
Yes, but where was the metaphor stored before you typed it into the computer?
That question is immaterial.
Well, never mind. It doesn’t matter.
It’s one thing to say that programs are an abstract description of what computers do. That doesn’t entail that a program is some “abstract entity”.
Likewise, I am not too sure how helpful the concept of “mind” is, except as a generic term that describes some aspects of what animals (including human persons) do.
The interesting questions in philosophy of mind concern how to relate the person-level descriptions and explanations of animal behavior (including perceiving, thinking, and acting), and especially the specific kinds of perceiving, thinking, and acting common to rational animals, with the subperson-level descriptions and explanations of cognitive machinery, some of which (but not all) are implemented in neurophysiological processes.
If you prefer, the person/brain (personal/subpersonal) problematic has replaced the mind/body problem.
Sellars was (in my view) the first philosopher to see things this way, but it becomes fully explicit with Rorty (in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) and then Dennett (in The Intentional Stance). Andy Clark (in Being There and Surfing Uncertainty) and Michael Wheeler (in Reconstructing the Cognitive World) take up Dennett’s ball and run with it.
Given where we are now (in 2016), I think that the really interesting questions are
(i) how do neurocomputational mechanisms, whether according to the predictive processing model or some related model, contribute to the causal implementation of skillful, embodied coping of animals with regard to the salient affordances and solicitations in their environments and
(ii) how do the emergence and acquisition of natural languages transform embodied coping into discursive practices whereby rational animals can construct models of objectively valid processes and not just of salient affordances and solicitations?
You’re just such a joy, keiths. My very first post in the thread asked you to define what you mean by top-down causation. Did you ever say, or are we still supposed to be guessing?
Don’t be silly Mung. Think Mung! (And a new slogan is born.)
Isn’t imitation the sincerest form of flattery?
Mung,
I responded in the very next comment:
Since then we’ve also discussed Noble’s and Talbott’s articles. Did you understand any of them?
Right, that’s what you two are arguing about. It would be better to settle it. “I am not sure” is a non-answer, and not a sensible stance to have when arguing about anything.
Keiths’ stance is mechanistic, atomistic, physicalist. This is what any denialist has to reduce oneself to upon reflection. And he happens to be a reflective person. Reflectiveness good, denialism bad.
Erik,
What do you see as the object of my denialism?
Also, can you cite any examples of what you would consider to be top-down causation?
Everything non-physical. For example in the How and Why thread, you say about personalities and economies, “They aren’t physical objects, but they are ultimately physical phenomena… Same thing with intangibles like money.” To further clarify the depth and intensity of your denialism, feel free to give your view of mathematical objects and abstract concepts.
From will to behaviour. From the mind to physicality. E.g. when you move your hand, which physical entity is moving your hand?
Could you provide an example of how mathematics would exist in the absence of matter? In the absence of things, what would the concept of number mean?
As for the hand moving, can you describe the non-physical entity that moves it?
Brain.
Glen Davidson
Just try to explain mathematics in the absence of number, or number in the absence of something to count. Or provide an example of a mind not associated with a brain.
Only keiths’s answer is relevant, thanks.
Wrong. Only Keiths answer is requested, but all these answers are relevant even if you don’t feel like responding to them.
Flint,
Indeed.
keiths:
Erik:
And I explained why:
Do you have any evidence that these three phenomena — personalities, economies, and money — have an existence, or causal power, that is independent of their physical instantiations?
Erik:
They are physically instantiated (in brains, computers, books, etc.), and their causal efficacy is entirely dependent on this physicality.
keiths:
Erik:
What is the evidence for a non-physical entity driving behavior? By what specific mechanism(s) does this non-physical entity reach into the physical world and alter the course it would otherwise take?
A very long causal chain leads to the motion. But assuming you are speaking of deliberate motion, a convenient place to start the analysis is in the brain. The brain forms the intent to move, and it carries out the motion by sending nerve impulses to the muscles involved.
When you move your hand, which non-physical entity is initiating the motion, and exactly how does it do so, in your opinion?
Nobody has ever seriously (or successfully) argued that they are dependent on their physical instantiations. For example, money can be instantiated in dollars, pounds, euros, but is money itself dependent on any dollar, pound, euro, or any other instantiation? You can ask yourself the question: Which came first, money or instantiation of money? You can ask this question about any idea – Did the idea first get physically instantiated and then imagined or first imagined and then physically instantiated? If you say that imagination is physical instantiation, then this would be a hardcore example of denialism – denialism of a stock example of the non-physical.
And now please explain how this is not an extreme case of denialism, of eliminative materialism.
I take it that you accept that, physically, causation works like billiard balls – one gives nudge to another, having first received a nudge from a prior one. So, where did the brain receive the nudge? And where does it keep getting them from?
keiths:
Erik:
I’m doing so right now. Suppose we erase your, and everyone else’s, memory of the $6,300.51 in your checking account. We erase all the computer records and all the paper records at the same time. Will your $6,300.51 still exist? If yes, in what sense? It will have lost all of its causal power due solely to physical changes in the universe.
Are you talking about the concept of money or about money itself? Either way, the answer is that any causal power — whether of the concept or of the thing itself — is purely physical.
keiths:
Erik:
I do deny the existence of the non-physical, but that is not the same as eliminative materialism.
From itself and its environment. Physical causes, physical effects.
Now please answer my questions:
What is the evidence for a non-physical entity driving behavior? By what specific mechanism(s) does this non-physical entity reach into the physical world and alter the course it would otherwise take?
When you move your hand, which non-physical entity is initiating the motion, and exactly how does it do so, in your opinion?
Which particular nerve or synapse would you erase so that anyone’s memory of the particular “the” would be erased? No neuroscientist ever detected any particular thought or memory in anyone’s brain. Let’s see you outdo them.
And the difference is…? And it’s not denialism because…?
Until then, you are eliminative materialist and denialist.
From itself? Why don’t billiard balls do that? How are brains different from billiard balls? My explanation would be because it’s not the (physical) brain doing it, but because the (non-physical) will is the real cause behind it.
Will is the cause when the will is there. When the will is not present, all occurrences are just mechanics. I suppose we roughly agree on the latter point, except that you say there’s no will in the first place and it’s mechanics all the way down. Now, given no will, how does mechanics cause itself and amplify itself? Billiard balls don’t do it, so why do brains do it?
And, given no will, what’s the explanation for e.g. guilt in a crime and judicial punishment for it? Is it just our idle imagination and has no place in the “real” world? My explanation is that we operate based on the assumption that human agents have will to choose good and evil. During social cataclysms (anarchy) this assumption is inoperative and we know how that feels (at least I do, having survived a few regime changes). On what basis do you prefer social disorder over order? Convince me how it would be beneficial for anyone to accept your point of view. (Convincing should be easy – just type more words physically and the cumulative effect should do its job.)
It’s not mechanical in the first place, this is the very crux of the matter. And I foresee a debate over the definition of “evidence”. You only accept physical/empirical evidence. I accept, in addition to empirical evidence, also logical proof, and I reject fallacies.
keiths:
Erik:
Who said anything about a “particular nerve or synapse”? Do you disagree that memory is a brain function, and that physical changes to the brain can affect it? Do you know what dementia is?
Now, how about answering my question?
But we are talking here about causal powers. Do you think that the existence and nature of causal powers can be established by logical proof alone? Or do you accept that some empirical evidence is always necessary to establish any specific claim about some particular causal powers?
If the latter, then yes, you do need to provide some empirical evidence for your claim that the will is non-physical and causally efficacious. Note that the issue here is about causal efficacy per se and not about whether there are “abstract objects”. Numbers may be “abstract objects” (whatever that means), but they do not have causal powers.
Sometimes I really am not sure of what I think I ought to believe. Not everyone is as dogmatic as you are. The more I read about the different issues that interest me, the more clear it becomes to me that having a fully satisfactory view is extremely difficult (to say the least).
The issue between keiths and myself here is not about metaphysics per se but about the epistemology of metaphysics: what justifies our account of what is real?
Keiths and I agree in being naturalists. For a long time I struggled with a non-vacuous definition of naturalism, and here’s the best I have so far: naturalism holds that our best currently available cognitive grip on objectively valid phenomena consists in empirically well-confirmed models of causal structures. (I suspect that keiths will not like my use of “objectively” there, but I have a much more deflationary concept of “objective”: on my view, objective validity consists in nothing more than the capacity to distinguish between how one takes something to be and how it is, such that one can ask, “are things really are they seem?” and hence “are my beliefs true?”)
But keiths and I disagree as to whether this sort of “big tent naturalism” entails that the causal structures modeled by the sciences other than physics (e.g. economies, ecosystems, developmental trajectories) are in any “reducible” to the causal structures modeled by physics. He thinks that they are “in principle” reducible. I deny this, because I think that we’re not entitled to post “in principle” reducibility unless we can specify how the reduction might go. And it would have to be a reduction that makes sense for us to do, not from a God’s-eye point of view or that of Laplace’s demon.
That is, I do not think that fundamental physics (general relativity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics) tells us what is really real, whereas the other sciences (molecular biology, behavioral ecology, paleontology, sociology, economics) tell us what is not really real, or less real, or real only in an honorific or second-hand sense.
In the sciences, all that matters is whether there are empirically well-confirmed models of causal structures. It doesn’t matter whether those structures are quantum fields, thermodynamic flows, organismal developmental trajectories, markets, political institutions, ecosystems, or galactic superclusters. I don’t think that any of these have ontological priority over any others, whereas keiths thinks that everything is reducible to physics.
Denying that we have any strategy for achieving cognitive grip on objectively valid phenomena better than that of constructing empirically well-confirmed models of causal structures does not entail that some subset of those models has any epistemic or ontological priority over any others.
In other words, rather than make a positive case for emergence, I’m denying that there’s even a need for emergence. We might need something like “emergence” only if we were in the business of integrating all the sciences into a single comprehensive worldview. But I am not interested in doing that.
This seems to assume that “real” has some meaning other than our own meanings. That is to say, the question seems to depend on theistic presuppositions.
I’m struggling to try to work out what that means, if it means anything at all.
And now I am having trouble understanding what it means to say that “how one takes something to be” can be different from “how it is”. This again seems to depend on theistic presuppositions.
I can agree that there’s a difference between “how I take something to be” and “how we (the community) take something to be.” I don’t know how to go beyond that (as you seem to want to do), without theistic presuppositions.
Now that I’ve commented in this thread, let me comment on the OP.
I’ve previously avoided that, since it is far from clear what “top down causation” is supposed to mean. So I will, instead, comment on what we might call “intentional causation”.
As best I can tell, the only meaning that science has for “causation” is that of intentional causation. We test our scientific accounts of causation by testing what we are able to intentionally cause in the laboratory. And then we extend by means of logical implication, perhaps using our scientific theories (which are themselves intentional constructs).
I know some people deny that we can intentially cause anything, and insist that intentional causation is an illusion. But it seems to me that they should then assert that all causation is illusory, and that at most we can have constant conjunction (as Hume put it).
KN,
For the purposes of this thread, what matters is whether a detailed description at the physical level can, in principle, be causally complete. If it can, then there is no need to refer to a higher-level cause or causes to explain the behavior at the physical level. The higher-level descriptions are (at best) redescriptions of the lower-level phenomena, though in more abstract terms. They’re for our convenience and they do not identify any causes that are not already present at the physical level.
Why not? This thread is concerned with top-down causation. When a purported higher-level cause can be reduced — even if only in principle — to a lower-level cause at the same level as the effect, then interlevel causation is not taking place.
Whether humans can or cannot actually accomplish the reduction is irrelevant to what we are trying to discern, which is the presence or absence of interlevel causation.
It isn’t that higher-level descriptions are necessarily less real, but they are less fundamental and often less accurate.
Neil,
Huh?
Scientists did not “intentionally cause” those two black holes to collide, creating the gravitational waves that were detected by LIGO.
The difference is that the former implicitly acknowledges human error, while the latter implicitly denies (or at least ignores the possibility of) human error. No theistic presumptions need apply.
Easy one. Top-down causation. I read he OP. Where, by the way, you didn’t bother to say what you mean by top-down causation.
How are they relevant?
You’ve demonstrated one of two things:
1. No one has any real money in their bank account.
2. You agree with Erik about the nature of money.
My mother has dementia. She no longer speaks. Do you think that’s because she has forgotten how to speak?
ok. how many causal powers are there?
keiths claims to have been quite clear about what he means by top-down causation.
So you are shifting goalposts. Thus far you were talking how everything is physical because everything is physically instantiated. Now you refuse to point out how memory is physically instantiated.
If it’s not in a particular nerve or brain synapse, then where is it, physically? I say that memory is not physical and therefore it will, as a matter of principle, never be found in any nerve or synapse. Evidence of neuroscience is on my side here. Normally you are the first to declare that scientific evidence matters.
Let’s conclude that your thought exercise “suppose we erase the memory…” failed at its first premise.
Yes on both counts. Memory is a mental function, not a brain function. Mental functions and brain processes are related, but distinguishable from each other – and distinguished necessarily. Failure to distinguish between them is a profound scientific, logical, and moral error.
Dementia is a good example. A person may have dementia due to degenerating brain, but he may also have awareness of their dementia, and insofar as this is so, he still counts as a person. If the person is overcome by dementia and has no awareness of dementia, he is internally a vegetable and ceased to be a person.
We, as human beings, make a distinction between voluntary behaviour and involuntary behaviour, between rationality and insanity. Physically there is no distinction, but logically, socially, morally, and legally there is a distinction. In terms of physical (“natural”) sciences there is no distinction, but in terms of psychology (and psychiatry) there is a distinction, so I say that there is a scientific distinction too. You may disagree as you wish, but disagreement will define you as someone with anti-social and anti-human preferences.
Nah. I will simply note that you completely sidestepped my questions about the distinction of billiard balls and brains, about the nature and reality of will, about guilt and judicial punishment, social order, etc. Thanks for the discussion.
This is bullshit. There are forms of memory loss in wihicha person can be aware of the loss, but there are scads of brain conditions of which the person is not aware and cannot be made aware.
Long term memories involve physical changes to the brain, some of which are visible as increased connections between neurons.
It is not difficult to block long term memory formation.
I had an uncle who suffered a brain hemorrhage and lived 25 years without forming any new long term memories. Every day he had to be informed that he had been sick. His children grew up, got married, but every morning when he awoke, he expected them to be 8 and 10 years old.
I’m sorry for your uncle’s and family’s loss.
Grimly serves to illustrate Erik’s motivated misunderstanding of neuroscience.
keiths:
Erik:
Your argument is as silly as claiming that my truck moves for non-physical reasons, because when you ask me to point to the particular spark plug that makes it go, I refuse.
It’s distributed across many neurons and synapses.
No, neuroscience undercuts you. If memory is non-physical, why is it affected by dementia or a blow to the head? How did a brain hemorrhage destroy the memory-forming abilities of petrushka’s uncle?
My simple question about money has you spooked, doesn’t it?
keiths:
Erik:
Your questions are easily answered, but let’s deal with them one at a time. You brought money into the conversation, quoting me:
Let’s hear your argument for why money is not ultimately a physical phenomenon.
But of course your truck only moves by the will of god (like everything else in god’s creation) so even if you pointed to the spark plug, you still wouldn’t have pointed out “what makes it go” 🙂
Or at least in Erik’s biased world, you wouldn’t have.
And there, but for the grace of God, goes the truck of keiths.
Existence of anything is established by logical proof. Then there’s such a thing as positing things, as opposed to establishing their existence. From our own recent discussion there is this example – you deny the existence of dreams and imagination. You say they are non-perception, even though undeniably, empirically, we perceive them.
By this example, you are in denial of (part of) your own perception. Instead of relying on your perception, you have reasoned yourself to the conclusion that dreams don’t exist. So, even though dreams can reasonably be posited (because of undeniable perception of them), you consider it established, after analysis, that they don’t exist.
Therefore logical proof matters more than empirical evidence. Sure, next you will say that you don’t actually believe that this is so, but your beliefs and statements, being self-contradictory and often at crucial points involving “I’m not sure…”, are not a reliable guide here.
Erik,
Firstly, I do not think that logical proof can establish any existence claims, since logic can establish only the compatibility or incompatibility of assertions. (For example, modus ponens holds that that p, ~q, and p –> q are incompatible.) In mathematics we so find existence claims, but those are more properly explicated in terms of set theory than in first-order predicate logic.
Secondly, I do not deny that we dream, can hallucinate, etc. That is an exceedingly uncharitable reading of what I said. We could use “exist” to say, interchangeably, that “we dream,” “there are dreams,” “dreams exist”. What I said is not that there aren’t any dreams, but that dreams are not a kind of perception, and dreaming is not perceiving, even though dreams are (of course) an exercise of sensory consciousness. My argument here is neither logical (in the strict sense) nor empirical (in the strict sense) but based on the phenomenological description of perceiving and dreaming.
You can follow the trail of causation. Wheels move because the transmission axis moves them. The transmission axis moves because the engine moves it. The engine moves because fuel is feeding the combustion process. The combustion process started because somebody turned the ignition key. It goes all the way up to the brain. Now, where did the brain get its nudge? “From itself” is unexplanatory, because, physically, nothing else works this way.
And cars move because it’s distributed across many cogs and wires. Add enough cogs and wires and it becomes alive. I guess this is what information theory and complexity theory teach. Similar metaphysically unsound principles drive Dembski too.
My own example was will to move the hand. If by some misfortune one has no hand to move, does it mean there is no will to move the hand? There may be a hand or not, but this has absolutely no connection to the willingness to move it.
Similarly, brain damage hampers one’s ability to give memory an expression, but memory is distinct from its expression. Memory is not a location in the brain, but a mental function occasioned by associations. There may be trouble recollecting things and making prompt and correct associations, but this would be a difficulty of mental functionality in general, not of memory in particular.
Neuroscience undercuts you, because neuroscientists have not located memories in the brain and, based on my assumptions, never will, whereas on physicalist assumptions neuroscientists should be direct mind-readers. If physicalist assumptions were true, neuroscientists should know people better by looking at their brains than people know themselves, because one cannot look at one’s own brain, but neuroscientists can.
And let’s again note that you have completely ignored my points about the essence of human being as having an internal personality, distinguished from mere physical processes. Nodding the head in a particular way may be an expression of the personality or it may be a symptom of Alzheimer’s. Physically they may look the same, but we make a non-physical distinction there, and this distinction is crucial because it’s definitional to being a person.
A comatose body is not a person, nor is a severe lunatic a person. We keep them alive in the hope that the person may return to the body, so we make a radical logical distinction between the physical and non-physical. A healthy body is not a person either, because physical health has no necessary connection to any particular personality trait whatsoever – body and personality are radically distinct. We also make a legal distinction here for moral reasons that evidently have no place in this world under physicalism. Physicalists are metaphysically not living on the same planet.
We would first have to define money. I’d define it as the measure of economic value, just like length is the measure of a physical dimension. Length can be measured in metres or miles or whatever. Does this sound like a physical phenomenon to you? It looks like a conceptually discerned characteristic to me. The units, metres or miles or pounds or yens, are arbitrary and abstract, not physical phenomena by any definition of those words I know of. Unless you consider a physical dollar coin a “physical phenomenon” even though it’s more like a physical object, representative of the abstract economic unit. And representing something is different from being something. A life-size photo-realistic painting of a dog very well represents a dog, but it’s not a dog. It’s a painting.
But you, inhabiting a different metaphysical planet, of course know better.
When I said that you were going to say this, I was gently suggesting to you to refrain from saying it. Because it’s metaphysically unsound and by saying it you are demonstrating that you don’t care about soundness at all.
You see, existence is a metaphysical category. If we don’t agree on this, we have nothing to say to each other.
ETA: As to dreams, you said (and you repeated again) that they were non-perception. This is the same as saying they have no empirical basis. Yet existence of dreams is posited precisely on the empirical basis – because we perceive them. So there. It will be possible to be more charitable as soon as you get the basics straight.
Erik:
Erik:
E.P.
I have no idea what you mean by “existence is a metaphysical category”. I don’t know what a “metaphysical category” is, or how it is different from a “category” that isn’t “metaphysical”, or even what a “category” is, if there are any at all. Thus while “existence” is a perfectly useful notion, I find that “existence is a metaphysical category” doesn’t seem to mean anything at all. If you can tell me what you mean by “existence is a metaphysical category”, then I can tell you whether or not I agree.
We do not posit dreams; we have dreams. And they are, as I happily allowed, modes of sensory consciousness. What I am saying is simply that although perceiving does involve modes of sensory consciousness (and I doubt that there is unconscious perceiving, though I could be wrong about that), to perceive is not merely to be an exercise of sensory consciousness.
In perceiving we perceive objects that are intertwined with our bodily capacities for movement. We implicitly and unproblematically understand that if you and I are both perceiving an object that is between us, then the sides of the object that I cannot see are those you can see, and conversely, My awareness of you as a subject is intertwined with your awareness of me as a subject and with each of aware of both ourselves and the other as perceiving objects that can be perceived by others, though there are aspects, qualities, properties, and relations that are perceivable by others though not by oneself, and conversely,
In other words, perceptual experience itself already contains interlinked subjective, intersubjective, and objective dimensions. Dreams don’t have this structure; in dreaming we do not share a world with others but retreat into our own private micro-world. In order to make this distinction clear, I deny that dreams are a kind of perceiving.
The Legacy of Patient H.M. for Neuroscience.