{"id":29821,"date":"2016-01-30T16:09:05","date_gmt":"2016-01-30T16:09:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/?p=29821"},"modified":"2016-01-30T16:09:05","modified_gmt":"2016-01-30T16:09:05","slug":"george-ellis-on-top-down-causation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/george-ellis-on-top-down-causation\/","title":{"rendered":"George Ellis on top-down causation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In <a href=\"http:\/\/www.uncommondescent.com\/intelligent-design\/physicist-tells-people-to-stop-saying-they-have-free-will\/\">a recent OP at Uncommon Descent<\/a>, 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/fqxi.org\/data\/essay-contest-files\/Ellis_FQXI_Essay_Ellis_2012.pdf\">an essay by cosmologist George Ellis<\/a> in defense of the concept.<\/p>\n<p>Vincent is <a href=\"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/how-and-why-questions-for-scientists-and-philosophers\/comment-page-5\/#comment-110346\">commenting here at TSZ<\/a>, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to engage him in a discussion of\u00a0top-down causation, with Ellis&#8217;s essay as a starting point. Here&#8217;s a key quote from Ellis&#8217;s essay to stimulate discussion:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I think that&#8217;s wrong, but I&#8217;ll save my argument for the comment thread.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/george-ellis-on-top-down-causation\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy-of-science","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29821\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/theskepticalzone.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}