- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .My two cents: I would say the secret to exotic phenomena like downward causation hides behind boring stuff we all know: behind laws and language, however boring that may sound.
Aristotle said the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The difference between the whole and the sum of its parts is the interaction between the parts, their interplay and their organisation.
These interactions are determined by laws - the laws of nature, the rules of swarm intelligence or the laws which are engraved on stone tablets. The laws lead to the emergence of high level structures, but they also constrain individual actions.
So in principle downward causation is simple: the laws are the key. They lead to emergence or downward causation. Stone tablets which everybody ignores have apparently no causally determined effect. But stone tablets which everybody obeys have obviously a strong causal connection to everyone.-J.-------- Original message --------From: [hidden email]Date: 10/29/20 20:26 (GMT+01:00)To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>Subject: [FRIAM] Emergence and Downward CausationAll,
Nobody seems to have the energy for a conversation about emergence right now, but if we were to, I would hope we would start with saying what we thought emergence is.
My working definition comes from Wimsatt. He starts by defining aggregativity as a property of whole which is pretty much dependent on the number of the elements that compose it. Weight is an aggregate property of a football team. He then defines emergence as a failure of aggregativity. Winning ability is an emergent property of a football team because it depends on how you organize the players, not simply on their weight. (eg, you put the heavier players on the line, the lighter, faster players in the backfield or ends). He concludes that emergence is the rule and aggregativity a rarity.
I like this definition because, unlike many others, it does not depend on “surprise” or “ignorance”.
N
Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2020 11:32 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats
I’m actually quite on board with your wish to make these questions more interesting than they may have started out, Nick.
And I also think you are right that the namers meant the names to carry weight. (Though I also think most thought is a bit hurried and careless, and gives itself more credit than is earned.)
The interesting struggle will be that the original calculation was in a way rather small, compared to the metaphor that many hope can be spun from it.
Or perhaps said another way, maybe many of these things that have weight to compel as we experience them in life, are pointers to little mechanics below the surface that, in its own terms, is a small thing.
I know that in each paper I write, I imagine getting at a big idea, and realize that the most I have done is a small calculation. So there is a foot in each boat….
Best,
Eric
On Oct 29, 2020, at 1:20 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:
Sorry everybody. I seem to be out of my depth in many pools at once.
I really like Eric’s analysis.
I still want to protest abit. I think the dynamic relation between the physical concept and the physicist’s humanistic metaphor is much more interesting than this analysis would suggest. Physicists use those metaphors for a reasons, cognitive and communicatory. And humanists are right to explore their implications. Otherwise, it would be fair for the humanist to turn to the physicist and say, “Shut up and calculate.”
The paradox of development (AKA epigenisis) is that there are all sorts of futures that can be known pretty precisely about a developing individual yet they are totally unknown to the individual that is developing. It has to do with our discussion of intenSion, a few months back.
It may also be time for one of you to be delegated to “elder” me, in the quaker tradition. “Now, Nick, ….”
N .
N
Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2020 10:00 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats
I want to somehow say sigh and sigh on this thread.
It comes somehow straight out of Monty Python (Blessed are the cheesemakers….)
1. Some physicists figure out how to do a calculation, showing that some parts can go dynamically into an organized state, appealing to a combination of their own shapes and laws of large numbers for events that happen, and they don’t need to have the organized form imposed by any outside boundary conditions beyond the very low-level rules for how the events are sampled. They already knew this happens in equilibrium, because that is how anything freezes. But here they are seeing it in a dynamical context, where the ordered form happens to be more ordered than the states they could produce from somehow-similar components in equilibrium.
2. Physicsts, like everyone, are usually impatient and don’t want to have to recite the whole operational meaning of something every time they want to refer to it in the course of saying something else.
3. So the physicists come up with a tag. It should be sort of evocative, sort of catchy, and easy to remember. Aha! “Self-organization”, to keep in mind that the organization is resulting from low-level local features, and not from the boundary conditions imposed on the system beyond that local stuff.
4. Nick encounters the term. It happens to contain two words about which he cares very very much, so to him they are not mere hackage generated by some physicists, but freighted with meaning.
5. Nick starts a thread: Which self? Is it the same self before and after? Is “organized” here a transitive or an intransitive verb? If transitive, what is the object? Can the same referent be both object and subject of a transitive verb? Does that make the verb reflexive? What are the implications for monists? For dualists?
6. Friam is willing to engage.
7. I write a long tedious email, trying to remind the humanists that the most important character trait of physicists is impatience.
Eric
On Oct 29, 2020, at 10:03 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:
Nick,
" I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is
assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled."
By what definition? Your monist view that the self lacks ontological status in the first place?
davew
On Wed, Oct 28, 2020, at 5:48 PM, [hidden email] wrote:
> Jon,
>
> Is a steam governor a case of downward causation?
>
> This question will reveal, no doubt, that I don't understand your previous
> answer, but perhaps others will explain it to me.
>
> I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is
> assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled.
>
> Perhaps I am getting tangled up in words again.
>
> n
>
> Nicholas Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
> Clark University
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of jon zingale
> Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2020 2:01 PM
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats
>
> Nick,
>
> Let's say I have a language designed to work with sticks, where for
> instance, it makes sense to name certain relations *Triangle*. Additionally,
> let's assume that the language is detailed enough to include less obvious
> relations such as those which relate sticks to trees to soil and water.
> Would it be cheap to narrowly define *downward causation* as the
> manipulation of the world in accordance with this language to produce new
> sticks?
>
> Consider as another example when one manipulates charge in bulk using analog
> filters. Here, a circuit designer may not need to know about spin or
> superposition or a lot of other details about the universe. In fact, the
> designer may not know how to write a "mid-frequency ranged filter" if they
> were only given a quantum mechanical view of the world. They may, however,
> know how to build such a filter if they are given appropriately shaped
> conductive surfaces and coils.
>
> My apologies in advance if this characterization (that of reducing *downward
> causation* to manipulation of a domain-specific language) is horribly
> flawed, but I spent this much time writing a response. So, there.
>
>
>
> --
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