Free Will: Top down or bottom up (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, January 14, 2016, 02:02 (3023 days ago) @ David Turell

Interesting Discussion re' George Ellis by V. J. Torley:-First Ellis:-http://fqxi.org/data/essay-contest-files/Ellis_FQXI_Essay_Ellis_2012.pdf-"However there are many topics that one cannot understand by assuming this one-way flow of causation. The flourishing subject of social neuroscience makes clear how social influences act down on individual brain structure ; studies in physiology demonstrate that downward causation is necessary in understanding the heart, where this form of causation can be represented as the influences of initial and boundary conditions on the solutions of the differential equations used to represent the lower level processes [3]; epigenetic studies demonstrate that biological development is crucially shaped by the environment. What about physics? In this essay I will make the case that top-down causation is also prevalent in physics, even though this is not often recognised as such. This does not occur by violating physical laws; on the contrary, it occurs through the laws of physics, by setting constraints on lower level interactions. Thus my theme is that the foundational assumption that all causation is bottom up is wrong, even in the case of physics. Some writers on this topic prefer to refer to “contextual effects” or “whole-part constraints”. These are perfectly acceptable terms, but I will make the case that the stronger term “top-down causation” is appropriate in many cases.-***-"The assumption that causation is bottom up only is wrong in biology, in computers, and even in many cases in physics, for example state vector preparation, where top-down constraints allow non-unitary behaviour at the lower levels. It may well play a key role in the quantum measurement problem (the dual of state vector preparation). One can bear in mind here that wherever equivalence classes of entities play a key role, such as in Crutchfield's computational mechanics, this is an indication that top-down causation is at play. There are some great discussions of the nature of emergent phenomena in physics, but none of them specifically mention the issue of top down causation. This paper proposes that recognising this feature will make it easier to comprehend the physical effects underlying emergence of genuine complexity, and may lead to useful new developments, particularly to do with the foundational nature of quantum theory. It is a key missing element in current physics.-Torley:-http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/physicist-tells-people-to-stop-saying-they-have-free-will/-"All that is needed is to show that the the idea of top-down causation which is irreducible to preceding instances of bottom-up causation remains a valid one in physics, and that this, coupled with the suggestion that the mind can make non-random global selections from random sequences of events without destroying their local randomness, is enough to render the ideas of agent-causation and strong libertarian free will scientifically tenable. How the mind makes these selections and influences processes within the brain is a question for another day (for a discussion, see here and here). All that I have been concerned to show here is that no laws of physics are broken, even if one adopts a very robust version of libertarian free-will."-Comment: I like Ellis' computer analogy approach. I fell my brain and body work exactly that way. Torley confirms. My decisions are macro events in my brain not controlled by micro events in each neuron.