George Ellis - What is Causation?

George and trying to search for the fundamental laws some people would have said quantum mechanics uh or a couple centuries ago they would have said Newtonian mechanics now people are talking about String Theory uh everybody believes that there has to be something beneath things that we're talking about as a so-called Theory of Everything well I think you claim that no matter what they get it's not going to be a Theory of Everything yep because you believe that top-down causation is is in a sense non-reducible to any of that yes and I I need to understand how that could be possible well the the first point is that I think top-down causation it's irrefutable that it exists now an example is we're talking English why are we talking English it's because our society our parents and so on uh spoke to us in English taught us the language and it then got embodied in the detailed neural Connections in our brain so that's dropped down from society into the detailed structures of our brain um that is a fundamental form of causation which one must include into account as well as the bottom-up stuff which is beloved of the particle physics and the others and I have the support in saying this of someone as imminent as Phil Anderson who says that the uh a very famous solid-state physicist who says that the laws of emergence of of of of of of solid-state physics are as fundamental as the laws of particles that is the key question because emergence is a wonderful metaphor It's a Wonderful descriptor it's a it's a shorthand it's a nice model but the question is is it fundamental yeah well I would say it's a fundamental property of nature that emerges things can emerge yeah okay um and they do so um by aggregating in such a way that what you get is more than the sum of the parts the famous statement from philander some more and more is different and um what that enables to come into being as higher levels of behavior which have their own autonomy um independent of the lower level ones now at a certain level this is what Alan Turing discovered in the case of digital computers you can have a digital computer algorithm and you can realize it in any way you like you can realize it in wood or in water or in electrical or Abacus yeah yeah and what is happening there is that the same higher level logic is getting realized in any of these different kinds of ways and what is happening there is it's the logic which is then you're trying to implement it's getting realized in in building there's a Lego a turing machine or a water or whatever and so that is the thing which is actually the real cause and all the others are just um phenomena which are used to make that thing happen and so the the question is is given a a a as much time as you want a billion years of civilization assuming we're here and our science continues for a billion years like it has for the last uh a couple of centuries it would be it it would or would not be in in principle impossible to ever ever ever ever be able to describe those higher level activities strictly by analyzing the Deep properties of the lower level would it ever be possible well it means it depends if you mean the generic properties of the lower levels or the specific one if your means does Maxwell's equations imply let's say um darwinian Evolution the answer is no if you if you had the Maxwell's equations and whatever else you would need for every particle and force uh in in in every brain that was associated with that thing and you could predict that in some massive supercomputer no um it's not impossible that you would be able to predict it in a mechanical kind of way but you wouldn't be terrifying what the causal effects were because the causal effect and darwinian evolution is survival of the fittest now if you want to split that down into particles and so on going on it is in principle possible to do that and but you are simply missing out what is the actual causal mechanism which is that's the question are you are you not if you're if you're understanding it totally the question the question is predictability could you ever predict that Darwin's evolution the theory of it can come if you analyze every particle and every Force prior no the answer is no because Darwin's theory depends on the concept of animals surviving or not at the lower level there isn't a concept of the animal or the animal being alive or the animal being dead those Concepts do not exist at the lower level so you cannot write Darwin's theory at the lower level maybe this will help me um can you categorize the different kinds of top-down causation yeah I've got there are five different types which I've talked about the first one is by constraints setting constraints on what happens so for instance in a digital computer that transistors are wired up in a very very specific kind of way in order to give the procedure yeah what that does the wiring is a higher level of structure than the level of the electrons and it makes the electrons flow in certain causal patterns by that wiring our brain is the same it's the connections that okay that's the first type the second type is um feedback control when you have a thermostat you set it at a certain value and that feedback control system makes molecules in the water speed up to a certain level and you can change it by changing the dial in that feedback control system never stop down from dial down to the motion of the molecules the third is exactly selection of which darwinian selection is a classic example animals adapt to their environment so if you go and you look at those pictures which you now see often of the white polar bears they're white because they grew up in a certain environment the brown ones and the Canadian Rockies grew up in a different room so the environment that large-scale structure is feeding down to the structure of the genes where there's a specific Gene which turns the the fur white or brown the The Fourth Kind of chop down causation starts to get interesting when you have a feedback control system like for instance body temperature or blood pressure so there is a setting there where did that setting come from and that setting came by adaptive selection to what would be good for the body and so so that so that level of top down selection is selection of the goals in a feedback system and the highest level of top-down causation is that all adaptive selection takes place on the basis of a selection Criterion for instance if you sort out your emails and you discard the ones you don't want to keep the ones you do that's top down causation according to a selection Criterion where do you get that selection Criterion from and you develop that adaptively by your experience over your lifetime is there any difference in the top-down causation between different categories uh let me give you example the top down causation in in physics or or um physical chemistry that that generates it in the purely inanimate world number one category two is a top-down in in life systems biology and the third would be mental uh brain Consciousness is there any difference in the in the qualitative obviously a lot of differences but if they're fundamental difference in the in any of those three categories I am the the physics one I just want to say that the really hot physics one at the moment is that of topological conductors and topological uh resistors which is a Nobel Prize Euro Sago um that is it's purely mechanical that the difference comes in in the following as you go up from physics where the laws of physics are controlling into biology what happens is that logic comes in so physics the logic is these things are going to bump into each other and certain things are going to take place there is nothing optional about it as soon as you hit biology you have branching logic I will do this if something I will won't do it if that so for instance um little bugs creep towards poison and away from poisoning towards nutrients they've got feedback control mechanisms do that there's an if there's a poison there move away if there's food move towards it it's the if then else branching which distinguishes physics from biology okay and that enables the biological system to react to the environment so all biology is adapting to the environment so the environment is feeding down into the organism and altering Its Behavior and then from uh generic biology to Consciousness mind mentality well that's when you get the abstract stuff coming in the symbolic representation so you've now got a symbolic representation of the staparte now I maintain that symbolic representation is abstract so that is the level at which abstract ideas start to have causal powers in my view

Channel: Closer To Truth

Views: 12,250

Keywords: closer to truth, robert lawrence kuhn, George Ellis, What is Causation

Id: MKPz304y4i0

Length: 9min 26sec (566 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 18 2023