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.
Human memory is multifaceted along several dimensions, including semantic, declarative and implicit/procedural components, priming, sensory memory, working memory and the phonological loop, long term memory, biographical memory, networks of associations, and on and on.
The neurophysiology that underlies this functional complexity is equally diverse, spanning reentrant connections within the hippocampus and the projection of same onto the cerebral cortex, midbrain and cerebellar structures that marshall and organize learned motor plans that underly procedural learning, temporal lobe networks that situate semantic meaning and abstraction, prefrontal areas that are crucial to the ability to sustain information in working memory and operate upon it – all utilizing processes that include long term potentiation, the strengthening of synapses and the activation of genes to increase protein synthesis within neurons.
Brain disorders and traumatic brain injury result in mosaics of intact and lost function that make it utterly clear that human memory is instantiated in this physical architecture.
Those who characterize memory as a non-physical phenomenon have their hands full accounting for this functional and clinical diversity. If that functional diversity doesn’t reflect the physical complexity of the brain, then where does it originate?
KN,
The idea that everything is reducible to physics is a provisional claim. I’m unaware of anything that isn’t physically instantiated or due solely to physical causes, or that exercises its own causal influence by any means other than the physical. I stand ready to abandon my physicalism when provided an example of such a phenomenon.
No, there’s no such commitment. There will surely (and hopefully!) be successful physical theories that are more fundamental than quantum mechanics and general relativity, but they will still qualify as physics. The claim here isn’t that current physics is the “bottom” level of reality — it’s that there is no downward causation from higher levels to the level of physics.
No, I don’t think it’s a viable project, and that’s why the special sciences are here to stay. No one is going to disband the econ, psych and biology departments and fold them into the physics department. We need to operate at higher levels of abstraction when discussing these fields, due to our cognitive limitations.
What matters is not whether we — primates at a certain stage of evolution — can achieve the reduction. It’s whether the reduction is possible in principle. Or for the purposes of this thread, the question is whether downward causation is real. I see no evidence that it is.
keiths,
I’d still like to know why you think that “levels of reality” is the right way of understanding the relationship between fundamental physics and the special sciences. But that might be better taken up in a different thread.
As far as this thread is concerned, I agree that there is no “downward causation”, but that’s only because I regect the “levels picture of reality” to begin with.
KN,
I don’t. I think “levels of description” is the right way of looking at it, not “levels of reality”.
If downward or upward causation were real, then “levels of reality” might make sense, but otherwise it doesn’t.
As I see it, the real difference between fundamental physics and the special sciences is that the laws of fundamental physics hold universally, throughout all of space-time. As Ladyman and Ross put it, a hypothesis belongs to fundamental physics if any measurement taken at any point in the history of the universe could confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis. By contrast, all of the special sciences (as well as all the parts of physics that don’t belong to fundamental physics) only model some restricted domain of space-time. (E.g. biology only applies to the parts of the universe that contain organisms.)
I’d like to know more why you want to use “levels of description” instead of unrestricted scope/restricted scope as a way of understanding the difference between fundamental physics and the special sciences. The result is the same — nothing in the special sciences can violate any principle of fundamental physics — but without shouldering the burden of “in principle” reduction.
I like this thought, but I’d put it the other way around: it is only if the concept of “levels of reality” makes any sense at all that the concepts of “downward” (or “upward”) causation would make any sense.
The main thing I am arguing against is the image of realty as having any hierarchical structure at all — an image shared by both emantionism (whether Neoplatonic or Christian) and by emergentism (which is the only version of non-reductive physicalism that makes any sense). I prefer the “flat” or non-hierarchical ontology developed by Spinoza, and which Deleuze (and Deleuzeans like Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers, Manuel De Landa and John Protevi) brought into conversation with contemporary empirical science. In other words, naturalism as as epistemological position supports a non-hierarchical, process metaphysics.
.
Presumably the anti-materialists would say that they don’t need to provide any competing explanatory model, since they have an a priori argument for why neuroscience can never account for psychological and phenomenological phenomena.
If you have an a priori argument for why no empirical explanation could possibly be right, why would you need an alternative to those explanations?
In the 1990s, the real debate between Chalmers and Dennett was precisely over this issue: Chalmers’s argument against functionalist explanations of consciousness was grounded in two-dimensional semantics, which belongs to formalistic, truth-conditional semantics. It’s not an empirical research project — it’s a project in purely a priori considerations about the nature of meaning, post-Kripke. Dennett is a direct descendant of the analytic pragmatism of Quine and Sellars — he has no patience for the Kripkean revolution. Instead Dennett thinks the only way to see if functionalism will fail as an explanation of consciousness is by trying it out. In my view, Dennett’s approach, as further developed by Alva Noe and Andy Clark, is far more illuminating.The latter approach has been developed by philosophers of cognitive science, whereas the former approach still dominates in philosophy of mind.
How could one provide you with such an example when you’ve excluded it in principle?
I wonder if the Chalmers/Dennett discussion regarding consciousness is really generalizable to memory, the clinical syndromes we observe subsequent to specific instances of brain damage and the determination that specific brain structures underly specific aspects of memory and the impairment of same. Memory performance can be operationally defined and neurospsychologically investigated empirically without getting ensnared in that debate because they are more similar to the “easy” problems of consciousness, upon which we can get plenty of empirical purchase, than to the “hard” problem that concerned Chalmers. At the same time, philosophically nonphysical approaches get no traction whatsoever these empirically observable facts and relationships, and contribute no understanding of them that I can discern.
Reciprocating Bill,
No, you’re right — it doesn’t generalize. Chalmers could happily accept that functionalism can explain memory, if we ever figured out the neurocomputational underpinnings of memory and other cognitive functions. It’s phenomenal content or “qualia” that he thinks cannot be explained even in principle by structure and function of any sort whatsoever.
The purpose of those approaches to not to make any contribution to our understanding of empirically observable facts and relationships, but to insist on a limit to what can be understood in empirically observable terms.
As we’ve already seen amply demonstrated in this thread, the anti-materialist has a very real fear that if there is no form of understanding different from and superior to empirically confirmed models of causal structures, it would be the end of all possible law and morality.
Oddly, if “we” are non-material, “we” cannot be harmed, and morality has no particular traction.
Oddly that doesn’t follow at all
KN,
1) To emphasize this asymmetry: the phenomena of the special sciences supervene on the phenomena of physics, but not vice-versa; and
2) to emphasize that the special sciences don’t just share a common base in physics, they fit into hierarchies of their own, with — for example — psychology being more abstract than physiology, but less abstract than economics.
It isn’t the same. The former doesn’t rule out downward causation, but the latter does.
keiths:
KN:
They’re interdependent, but neither one gets off the ground unless the physical description is causally incomplete and the gap can be filled by positing another level of reality.
I see the hierarchy as a property of the descriptions, but not of reality.
P.S. Did you mean “emanationism”?
keiths:
Mung:
Where did you get that bizarre idea? My physicalism is provisional.
keiths,
Your physicalism is untestable and is based on faith
It is provisional in name only. It cannot be challenged.
Any sensation you may have is physical and therefore has a physical cause. It follows that nothing you could ever sense could be non-physical. Therefore everything is physical. QED.
How is it your physicalism could be challenged even in principle?
Don’t know about keiths, but I would take notice if anyone demonstrated a reliable psychic phenomenon. ESP, telekenesis, remote viewing, levitation, etc, under controlled conditions.
That’s a start in defining how physicalism could be challenged.
Mung,
Don’t confuse your poor reasoning with my position.
Well, it would be a start, but only a start. There would certainly be a lot of work to try to find something causing those “psychic phenomena” that would fit into, say, thermodynamics and other rules of physics.
But then if it could only be found to relate to the psyche without any apparent reliance upon energy and mass, you might be on to something beyond what we’ve known previously. Whether or not it would be “physics” would depend on what you mean by physics.
Glen Davidson
I think of naturalism as an epistemological position rather than a metaphysical one: I define naturalism as the position that our best currently available cognitive grip on objectively real phenomena consists in empirically well-confirmed models (i.e. models that have survived iterated testing involving measurements) of causal structures.
Under that construal, refuting naturalism would involve showing that some other reliable method — intuition, revelation, a priori demonstration, etc. — offers better cognitive grip on objective phenomena than what we get from empirically well-confirmed models of causal structures.
But I think that the metaphysics we get from naturalism is a non-hierarchical ontology of relatively stable dynamic processes that can be characterized at many different degrees of spatio-temporal resolution: as galactic super-clusters, as economies, as cognitive agents, as ecosystems, as metabolisms, or as quantum fields. The metaphysics of science is as open and revisable as science itself. The scientific metaphysician can only ever articulate what the metaphysics of science looks like from her particular historically embedded perspective in the evolution of inquiry.
The remaining problem, however, is that you are loudly positing existence as an empirical category and it cannot logically be that, because no category whatsoever is posited empirically, only logically.
If metaphysics is not logically sound, then you don’t really have metaphysics. If you think physics is all there is, you definitely don’t have metaphysics, i.e. you have no distinction between existence and non-existence. Lacking metaphysics, you don’t have anything to say about fundamental existence.
Your clear answer in this area is “I don’t know.” Since you enunciate it so clearly, the rest of what you say logically deserves no attention, but mysteriously you still think you have some claim to truth.
The deeper problem is in that the guy whose main message is “I don’t know” thinks that someone else is wrong. In the world of humans, those who don’t know have homework to do. They have to learn, not teach others.
Your “more complicated account” is just convoluted and self-contradictory at the very basics. First you said we don’t perceive dreams. Then you said we “have” dreams. This is as self-contradictory as it gets.
I can concede that self-contradiction is a complication, but I cannot say that it’s somehow a virtue over clarity. Self-contradictions, no matter how complicated, certainly don’t explain anything. You think they do. This is a deeper problem with you.
Actually, Chalmers’ keyword is “experience”. If you can figure out what it means and how it differs from qualia, it will be a big step forward.
This is a point where we have a fair amount of mutual understanding. Indeed, I think intellect and consciousness have no essential relation to any particular language, history, the body, etc. If it did, the particular languages, bodies, etc. would have no ability to connect to each other and to be translated one into another, be analyzed and synthesized. But they can be, so there is something that transcends them that enables the connection and translation.
Just like space transcends objects and enables both the connection and separation of objects, consciousness transcends the body. Would someone argue that space is a physical object or a physical phenomenon? Probably you would, but there is no rational way to argue that space somehow emerges from objects, that objects are primary and space is secondary.
The relationship of space and objects is intricate. The relationship is definitely there (because all objects are in space and there is no object without space), but from the space’s point of view it’s not a necessary connection (because there can be space without objects, space ultimately having no concern whether there are any objects in it or not). Similarly, consciousness has an intricate relationship with bodies, enabling both external perception and internal self-awareness, but it has no necessary connection to any particular body.
“…the intellect is essentially related to all of those, inseparable from them and unintelligible in abstraction from them…” Quite to the contrary. Intellect has the capacity to transcend any particular body, language, and culture. You cannot rationally argue that this is an inessential characteristic of the intellect. It’s a distinguishing and definitional characteristic of the intellect. The concept of intellect becomes intelligible by the realisation of this transcendence. It becomes a unifying factor of humanity and acquires the capacity to comprehend the universe. Whereas if identified with the body, if temporal and contingent, intellect should have no reason to go beyond the reach of one’s own fingertips and we should not be having this discussion, because it’d be an “unintelligible abstraction” to you. From my point of view, however, going beyond oneself is the very point of the intellect, an essential characteristic of it, meaning that its connection to any particular anything is inessential, even though it’s somehow connected to everything, because all-pervasiveness is another of its essential characteristics.
Erik,
As I no longer believe you are capable of arguing in good faith, I shall be ignoring you from now on. Make of that what you will.
Actually, the assertion that space is a function of objects is pretty much standard physics. The big bang iis an expansion of space.
Is water a function of waterdrops or are waterdrops a function of water? Highly debatable, to say the least. And no, you are not asserting standard physics there. Physicists knowledgeable of their own field would be aware that they entered the realm of philosophy or of semantics or at least of pure math at this point.
I thought it was an expansion of the universe. If it were an expansion of space, where would the space expand to?
Your best response would be that people who have no clue of categories cannot commit category mistakes. I would have no answer to that.
I suggest you read some physics before pontificating about what physics talks about.
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/104-the-universe/cosmology-and-the-big-bang/expansion-of-the-universe/623-what-is-the-universe-expanding-into-intermediate
I believe that Erik is arguing in good faith.
I do not see a contradiction between:
arguing in good faith;
being hopelessly wrong;
being unaware that one is hopelessly wrong.
Yup, expansion of the universe as I suspected, not of space. You see no distinction between the universe and space? Maybe keiths should have no problem with top-down causation either, because why would anyone care to distinguish it from bottom-up causation.
The minute you get a theist out his Aristotle-Aquinas comfort zone he’s automatically mind-fucked. Physics? Expansion of space? Math? Infinity? *brain melts down*
No Erik, space itself is expanding, and accelerating. At some point space itself will expand faster than the speed of light, so it will be impossible to “see” anything at all
The web page I linked to brings up the 1,2,3/2,4,6 analogy. Kind of fun to see many ideas linked.
This will date me, but the first man in space occurred when I was in 10th grade.
My English teacher was a bright guy. He was about 22 years old, but had graduated from Columbia University at age 17.
He said he knew the Russians were lying about having a man in space, because the cosmonaut described being able to see features on the earth. My teacher argued that he was going 17,000 miles and hour, and everything would whiz by too fast, and would just be a blur.
I asked if he has ever looked out the window of a car or train. He was not impressed by the analogy.
I wish I had a name for this syndrome. Since that high school experience I have never been surprised to find people incapable of stepping outside their intuitions. In fact — depending on the topic — it seems universal.
My own take is that when a large body of experts — say physicists or biologists — tell me that my intuition is wrong, I need to work on understanding what they have to say.
I do not think physics has an answer to what it is that space expands into, but I think physics asks better questions about this than does traditional philosophy. I think that philosophers who are not informed by modern physics are wasting their time.
Same with the other sciences. Philosophy and theology can ask questions that go beyond science, but the questions must be constrained by science, or they are a waste of time.
LOL, true, here’s the excerpt:
I like the part about it being “simple math”… still too much for Frankie and the likes, haha
Yes, you are usually hopelessly wrong and you are always unaware of it.
That is true. But although I do think that Erik is both hopelessly wrong and unaware that he is hopelessly wrong, I do not think he is arguing in good faith.
Two points: he thinks that there is a contradiction in my saying both that we have dreams and that we do not perceive dreams. It does not occur to him that perhaps there is a subtle difference in ordinary language that he does not detect because English is not his first language. Rather than say, “hmm, perhaps there’s some subtlety here that I’m not picking up on — I’ll ask what that is!” he says, “you’re hopelessly confused and self-contradictory!” That is not arguing in good faith because he deliberately chooses the least possible charitable interpretation of what I say.
Likewise, Erik insists that Chalmers is talking more about “experience” and less (or not at all) about “qualia”. However, The Conscious Mind has an extensive thirty-page chapter about the different kinds of qualia that his theory of consciousness must address, and he is explicit in saying that he treats talking of subjective experience, consciousness, and qualia as all roughly synonymous (Conscious Mind p. 6). Here too Erik insists that he must be right and that I must be mistaken without taking a single moment to consider that perhaps — just maybe — I really do know what I’m talking about, and that he is the one who is mistaken. I do not regard that attitude as consistent with arguing in good faith.
Actually, Erik is a Neoplatonist, neither an Aristotelian nor a Thomist. It’s because of his Neoplatonism, and especially the Neoplatonic conception of the intellect, that he thinks that philosophy arises from a privileged insight into the nature of reality that is logically, ontologically, and epistemologically prior to and more fundamental than any empirical science. The idea that philosophy could be constrained by science is utterly antithetical to his entire approach (whereas it is central to mine).
Exactly. And he’s said that kind of thing over and over throughout threads around here.
You’re under no obligation to continue to regard Erik as arguing in good faith after months of him consistently choosing the least charitable interpretation of what you (and others) write, especially not when you have set the good example of trying so hard to understand him and make allowances for his language.
I imagine it’s been a worthwhile learning experience for you so far. Sounds like a good time, though, to move on.
I see. Thanks for the clarification
https://www.google.com/search?q=grass+leaf+types&espv=2&biw=998&bih=687&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi_8qffwv_KAhXD7yYKHQ1dAn8Q_AUIBigB#tbm=isch&q=+leaf+shapes
Each and every shape an archetype.
posted to wrong thread.
The loss of subtleties of the English language in my interpretation process occurs to me constantly, but this would be a minor issue compared to not knowing what categories are, which is your self-admitted problem. People who don’t know what categories are have incessant danger of missing of nuances and even of major points, of conflating and committing category errors. Such people cannot do philosophy, not properly anyway.
There’s a different language issue that I have on this site. There seems to be a queer definition of “good faith” that is particular to this site. It’s so queer that even the mods themselves argue about it. For example, a while ago, patricking was debated. Patricking rests on hammering a wilful misrepresentation, but somehow it was not straightforwardly condemned as bad faith so that there would be clarity.
In my view, bad faith (in debate or discussion) is wilful misrepresentation of the interlocutor’s position and failure to accept correction when the position is clarified. You accuse me of bad faith, but I did not misrepresent you. You said you did not know what categories are. Are you denying it? Did you reconsider? Did you read up meanwhile? Does it make sense to ask you to elucidate the subtleties of anything immediately after you have declared that you don’t know what categories are?
The other option is that bad faith means something entirely different, but it’s pointless to expect any of the mods here to clarify this issue. They are utterly unclear on it themselves.
Three points here. First, “roughly” has a meaning in Chalmers’ statement. You may want to read “qualia are synonymous to consciousness” but this is not what Chalmers says. Instead, he says, “I will use all these phrases in talking about the central phenomenon of this book, but “consciousness” and “experience” are the most straightforward terms, and it is these terms that will recur.” And this is the second point – there is a reason why his preferred terms are consciousness and, most often, experience. The reason is that only these terms convey properly the subjectivity (or internality) which is absolutely crucial to everything he has to say on this matter.
Third, you may have read the book, but it’s another matter to prove that you understood it. You deny any value to subjectivity, even though subjectivity is both epistemologically and ontologically central to Chalmers. You also deny any value to universality and transcendence. There are certain paths the mind tends to take when it’s inclined to empiricism and reductionism – which you are. Plus you are self-admittedly inclined to have plenty of uncertainty.
I never got the impression KN and Erik were actually communicating in the first place. Sort of like trying to communicate with keiths. Or Neil.Or dazz.
Pretty sure they all have me on ignore, even though they like to pretend otherwise.
ETA: May as well include petrushka, who thinks I hate science.
Yes, he has.
However, I still take him as arguing in good faith, while remaining skeptical of much of what he says.
No, I don’t have you on ignore. I don’t have anybody on ignore.
I do, of course, ignore a lot of what you post. But not without a first quick scan.
Don’t have you on ignore, and I think you are married to science.
What led you to conclude I have you on ignore? I regularly reply to your posts. I only skip (most of) Frankenjoe’s posts, but I don’t have anyone on ignore, mainly because I use the wp-admin comment page and posts there show up even if the user if in the ignore list
I don’t think people have me on ignore. I think they ignore what I write. They read what is before them and see something completely different.
The perennial victim.
I read what I see and have no idea what you stand for other than some undefined variety of theism, and some undefined opposition to some undefined version of mainstream biology.
Anyone out there who can offer a defensible example of downward causation?
Lindsay Lohan’s career?