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.
Erik,
All of them, as far as I can tell.
Let’s start here. I asked:
What are your answers?
This works as a thought experiment, but would be difficult to pull off in real life.
Put aside the difficulty of erasing memories, there are difficulties in erasing all traces of financial transactions.
This kind of problem features in detective fiction. Physical history is interconnected in many ways. I hesitate to invoke the butterfly effect, but sometimes it’s true that trivial events linger.
Of course it’s also true that they can become lost in noise.
Meanwhile, keiths ignores the simple switch.
petrushka,
Of course. Like many thought experiments, it isn’t supposed to be realistic.
It does what it is designed to do, which is to show that money has no existence or causal power apart from its physical manifestations.
Keiths, as I said immediately the first time you asked it, you are not in a position to ask the question. On your presuppositions, to erase someone’s memory you have to remove some part of their brains. And for people to remember something, some part of brain must be added to them. This is not how memory works in reality, does it? Not that you would care of course.
To prevent talking past each other, I always go into definitiions. Since you haven’t even defined top-down causation and you haven’t explained how physical causality is like billiard balls bumping into each other while the brain gets nudges from itself, you have made no case that we could meaningfully discuss.
Gee, keiths. Why not just dismiss Erik too?
Depends on what you mean by physicalist. As long as you have not defined it, you are not in a position to say what you are. Babies don’t know what babies are, but they are babies nevertheless. You may want to be called something else, but that does not change what you are by definition.
If we accept my definition, then you are a hardcore physicalist. If you don’t accept my definition, state your reason. If you don’t state your reason, then fine, stay as you are, without reason.
Erik,
Where did you get that bizarre idea? As a physicalist, I hold that memories involve physical changes to the brain, but that hardly implies the wholesale addition or removal of “brain parts”!
To get the ball (that you dropped) rolling again, I’ve asked some simple questions about money:
What are your answers?
You agree that money has purchasing power, correct? What can you purchase with your purely non-physical $6,300.51 that isn’t recorded anywhere, isn’t remembered by anyone and has absolutely no physical correlates? it might as well not exist — and in fact, it doesn’t.
Money is a physical phenomenon.
This is perfectly sufficient to make my point. Now all you have to do is find a neuroscientist who identified a physical change in/on the brain with a specific memory that can be erased.
In your story here, you equate money with the fact of it being recorded somewhere. According to you, if it’s not recorded in memory or bank accounts or any other physical correlates, it doesn’t exist. That’s just as good as saying that the distance between New York and Los Angeles in miles does not exist, unless there are mileposts at every mile. This is not how distance works, does it?
Similarly, money does not work just by the fact of it being recorded. Money is conceived (conceptually, mentally) first, then recorded. Recording of it is posterior, conceiving is prior, so if we posit a causal relation between mind and matter, it seems to be going from mind to matter in this case.
Or did dollars exist first, and then people thought, “Let’s use these things as exchange value. Eureka!”? I’m saing that what money really is is exchange value, and different stuff can be used as that. To conflate the two is a category error.
Unless you have some other definition of causation. More likely, you don’t know what “definition” means because you are consistently failing to give the definitions I have been asking for top-down and bottom-up causation.
Erik,
No, all I have to do is provide evidence that memory is a physical function of the brain. That’s easily done, and we’ve already discussed a vivid example: petrushka’s uncle, who due to a brain hemorrhage could not form new long-term memories and woke up every morning thinking that his adult, married children were still eight and ten years old.
Regarding petrushka’s uncle, you wrote:
I responded incredulously:
Indeed, it is ridiculous.
Meanwhile, what evidence is there that memory is non-physical? You haven’t provided any.
You’ve just made the silly argument that unless I can point to a particular “nerve or synapse” to be “erased”, then we must conclude that memory is non-physical:
Let’s hear your argument for the claim that memory is non-physical.
Erik,
That’s right. It can’t have physical effects without being physically instantiated itself. A chain of physical events effecting the transfer of money has to occur before the dealer physically hands you the physical keys and you drive off the lot in your new physical car.
It’s nothing like that. Distance can be measured in many ways besides via mileposts, and in any case money is not merely a measure of value — it has value itself. We’ve already been over this.
Mind itself is a physical phenomenon. If you shut the physical brain down, the mind will not conceive of money.
Again, we’ve been through this before. You wrote:
I responded:
Again:
You agree that money has purchasing power, correct? What can you purchase with your purely non-physical $6,300.51 that isn’t recorded anywhere, isn’t remembered by anyone and has absolutely no physical correlates? it might as well not exist — and in fact, it doesn’t.
Money is a physical phenomenon.
You assume it only based on interviewing the person. In terms of neuroscience, i.e. actually physically observing the function, you don’t know that.
So, keeping to the same standards, trust me – memory is not a physical function of the brain. I say so and that’s it. Keep your standards consistent.
ETA: If you cause the same hemorrhage in another person in the same place of the brain, would you get the same result? If the result is different for a different person and sometimes there’s no result at all regardless of the physical traces, then how relevant is hemorrhage as the cause? People forget and remember stuff all the time quite independent of hemorrhages.
Sure, I agree that money has purchasing power. But I disagree that this is essential or definitional to money. The relevant question is what money is.
Dogs have legs and a head. See the point? Of course you don’t. People who don’t know what categories are cannot make category errors…
Actually, changes to brains can be microscopically observed that coorelate with learning.
Erik,
You’re determined to avoid my question, aren’t you?
What can you purchase with your purely non-physical $6,300.51 that isn’t recorded anywhere, isn’t remembered by anyone and has absolutely no physical correlates? it might as well not exist — and in fact, it doesn’t.
Money is a physical phenomenon.
Erik,
I repeat my incredulous question:
Seriously? You think petrushka’s uncle actually remembered that his kids had grown up and married, but that he couldn’t “express” that memory, instead expressing the thought that they were 8 and 10 years old, day after day, month after month, year after year?
He remembered it, but just couldn’t get his mouth to form the words?
That’s ridiculous, Erik.
I have demonstrated that you don’t care about your gaping category error.
I have also demonstrated that you don’t care to distinguish top-down causation from bottom-up causation. You don’t care to define any relevant terms, because you probably don’t know what “definition” means. You definitely don’t care what “relevant” means.
In your terms, maybe I am indeed avoiding your question. But your terms have proven to be silly. You need better terms to have a relevant discussion.
Erik,
What category error? Money does, in fact, have purchasing power.
What can you purchase with your purely non-physical $6,300.51 that isn’t recorded anywhere, isn’t remembered by anyone and has absolutely no physical correlates? it might as well not exist — and in fact, it doesn’t.
How is it known that he remembered those things before, but then lost the memory? I assume it’s because he was asked and he told about it. If so, my point stands – memories are not known to third persons by looking at the brain, but by interviewing, which is a subjective method by definition. If this be your method, you have no reason to disbelieve me either.
But if his memory and loss of it was known purely by looking at the brain, then your point stands. I am sticking around for a while so petrushka can confirm which way it is.
Good one.
Erik,
So you are actually suggesting — seriously, with a straight face — that petrushka’s uncle was aware that his children were grown up, and that he was thinking about it, but that through some bizarre malfunction he was unable to form the words, and instead formed sentences that directly contradicted what he actually believed?
And that he wasn’t able to say “Wow, this is weird, I’m trying to say certain things about my children but the words won’t come out of my mouth?”
Seriously?
And all of this to avoid admitting the obvious fact that memory is a physical phenomenon?
Erik,
Are you aware that banks create money when they make loans and that money is destroyed when the loans are repaid? How does this work if money is non-physical? Is there some ethereal central bank, perhaps chaired by God, that keeps the non-physical money supply in line with its earthly, physical manifestations?
Yes, I’m aware of that. I’m also aware that purchasing power can drop or increase drastically, so defining money via purchasing power is irrelevant. I’m also aware that a currency can be replaced by another in a monetary reform, as in instituting euro in EU, so defining money as any specific currency or amount is irrelevant too. Did you know that euro existed as ECU prior to becoming materialized as euro?
I need no further proof of your failure to distinguish relevant from irrelevant and inability to define anything. You have totally convinced me.
Erik,
Keep going. How does this work if money is non-physical? Is there some ethereal central bank, perhaps chaired by God, that keeps the non-physical money supply in line with its earthly, physical manifestations?
And back to the original question: Suppose all memories and all records of the $6,300.51 in your checking account disappear. All the physical manifestations are gone, but the non-physical money still belongs to you, right?
What can you buy with it?
How does having $6,300.51 in non-physical money differ from having $6,300,000.51 in non-physical money? From having $0 in non-physical money? If the answer is “it doesn’t”, then in what sense is the non-physical money real?
The recognition that it is not realistic seems to argue against the causal power being in the “physical manifestations”.
Hmm, no. Money is a social phenomenon that depends on using physical representations. But it is largely independent of the particular physical details of how it is represented.
I haven’t read anything recent about the ontology of money, and I often wonder how going off the gold standard and the rise of financialization has affected what money is.
But aside from those fascinating complications, I think it’s probably safe to say that money is (as Marx nicely put it) “the universal commodity” or “pure exchange value”. That’s not an adequate definition, obviously, but it’s the beginning of one.
We can define what money is that way, and also think that nothing can be used as money unless it also has some causal properties (whether as metal, paper, or code), because the concept of “exchange value” can only be applied in a norm-governed, cooperative-and-competitive pattern of exchange of goods and services.
The situation with mental states is a bit different, but not by much. In the case of money, we can talk about what is to adopt the economic stance. When a creature has adopted the economic stance, lots of causal transactions in the world are salient to that creature that wouldn’t be salient otherwise. (My cats cannot take up the economic stance, but is a very real thing!) Likewise, when we ask someone what they remember (think, feel, believe, etc) we are adopting the intentional stance towards that person — treating him or her as a person, with all the complicated baggage that implies.
I think we can — and should — say that, on the one hand, adopting a stance at all involves orienting oneself bodily in the world according to inferentially structured concepts that make salient various real patterns, and also say that no stance — not even the mechanistic stance of physics and chemistry — is “more real” than any other.
If I had to say what I think the stance-independent real patterns are, I would go with Giles Deleuze: being is difference.
Why under god’s heaven would we trust YOU? A person who thinks that fossils on Everest are somehow evidence of some unspecified great flood? You can’t be trusted to pour water out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel.
You certainly can’t be trusted to think past your faith biases.
Heh heh. And here we have Erik’s rejoinder for anything he doesn’t comprehend because of his faith biases. “Category error”. It would be sad if it weren’t so funny.
Now Erik is a mind reader! Erik definitely knows what keiths cares about and doesn’t care about!
Or maybe it just appears that way because of Erik’s usual infelicitous usage of English. Maybe it just seems that Erik doesn’t care how his words will be perceived by anyone but himself.
Or something.
Somewhat ironically, it was Gilbert Ryle who coined the phrase “category mistake” precisely in order to refute the idea that the mind is some sort of immaterial thing.
All you need is an example of a mind without an associated brain.
hotshoe,
I particularly enjoy the fact that when he gets into trouble, Erik starts demanding definitions. It’s quite Mungian.
keiths:
Neil:
How?
keiths:
Neil:
Social phenomena are physical phenomena.
Multiple realizability isn’t an argument against physicalism when all the realizations are physical.
Category error is viewed as a type of fallacy of composition, which has a longer history. Such as, “Dollars are physical, therefore money is physical.” This ignores money as an accounting unit, a unit of economic value. Units are conceptual, arbitrary abstractions.
The fallacy goes both ways. If one’s life is focused on obsessively avoiding this fallacy, one should be a dualist. There’s a way to be monist without falling into this fallacy by knowing the nature of universals.
Not to be too picky, but can you give me an example of money without any physical instantiation?
Can you give me an example of any mathematical entity of your choice with physical instantiation?
Possibly you think that a circular thing is the same as the circle. Then zero must also be physically instantiated…
I’m not aware of any ideas that are not physically instantiated.
The difference between gold standard or not is the same as between storage value and fiat money.
Granted, there are multiple definitions of money, so the argument is not really about whether money is physical or not. It definitely has physical aspects and instantiations. A dollar can be called money, but it does not encapsulate all aspects of what money is about. Money also has immaterial and non-physical aspects. The argument is whether these latter aspects are safely ignorable and unproblematically reducible to the physical or perhaps emergent from there.
In my view, an accounting unit, the same way as any other unit of measurement, can be called a “physical phenomenon” only by way of severe conflation, blatantly ignoring what “physical” and “phenomenon” mean. A milepost is a physical object, but mile and length are concepts, not physical phenomena.
Mile and length are labels for things we do, as in measuring.
Multiple realizability isn’t an argument for physicalism either. It’s rather a handy argument for preliminary acceptance of dualism.
It’s important to consider what they are realizations of. The realization may be physical all the way, but when it’s the realization of a mentally conceived plan, then it could be called top-down causation. Just a thought on topic.
Unicorns? Gods? Zeroes? All physically instantiated?
How about memory? Can you take your memory of yesterday, put it on the table and take it from there tomorrow?
Ideas like “immaterial” and “non-physical” have an actual meaning, you know. Namely, the opposite of “physical”.
I’m guessing that top-down causation is a concept too, and that’s why keiths can’t define it. It’s not physical, so he just can’t get his brain around it. Even though he claims he’s going to argue against it. Why doesn’t he just engage it in a wrestling match?
I don’t think you’re both in the same page. Pretty sure he means the idea is physically instantiated in the brain, not the object of the idea.
You can’t have an idea of god instantiated without a physical brain, but that idea doesn’t instantiate any gods
Memory is an activity of the brain, which is a physical object.
The problem with money as physical per se is that there’s nothing physical that makes it money across the various media. Money can be gold, fiat currency, physical instantiations of numbers representing the value of your account, code in a particular computer, or thoughts in one’s head in some cases.
There’s always something physical, of course, as far as I can tell. But we understand various symbols in various contexts as “money” and nothing physical that makes these various symbols in those contexts into that “money.” It’s just an understanding, an agreed-upon valuation of certain accounting procedures that allows “money” to transfer across various media. In effect, money today is really nothing but credit (although it can also denominate debts), an abstraction that keeps track of what one is “owed” in an economy.
When gold was money (in a sense it still can be, but we’re more inclined to see gold as something you buy with money), you really were trading gold around, and in some instances you just might turn that gold into something else so that it is no longer “money” (paper can be, too, but it isn’t worth the money value, not by a long shot, so one would be stupid to turn a $100 bill into papier mache). It wasn’t so much a credit as something valued. Now money isn’t something physical, it’s an abstraction for keeping track of accounts. There has to be a physical instantiation of the abstraction, to be sure, yet the physical instantiation is not the money, it simply encodes the symbol that we call “money.” It is in the mind that symbols and procedures become “the money,” and the mind is, of course, quite physical. So in that sense I certainly come down on the side of the physical, yet I could not consider the coins, bills, and computer codes to be “money” per se, but merely as embodiments of the abstract valuation that we give to various “forms of money,” keeping track of what people are “owed” in an economy.
Glen Davidson
Abstractions and metaphors are abstractions and metaphors.
They stand in for objects and activities.
Erik,
Such as?
If they’re reducible to the physical, then in what sense are they non-physical?
You keep trying to steer the conversation back to money as a measure of value, but the questions I’ve been asking are about money as a store of value. Do you acknowledge that money as a store of value has no causal power apart from its physical manifestations?
In other words, if we erase all memories and records of the money in your checking account, does it still exist as a store of value? I think the answer is obviously “no”. What about you?