causation; top down math research (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, June 04, 2017, 20:15 (2729 days ago) @ GateKeeper

New studies on top down causation:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-theory-of-reality-as-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts-20...

"Hoel’s theory, called “causal emergence,” roundly rejects this reductionist assumption.

“Causal emergence is a way of claiming that your agent description is really real,” said Hoel, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University who first proposed the idea with Larissa Albantakis and Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “If you just say something like, ‘Oh, my atoms made me do it’ — well, that might not be true. And it might be provably not true.”

"Using the mathematical language of information theory, Hoel and his collaborators claim to show that new causes — things that produce effects — can emerge at macroscopic scales. They say coarse-grained macroscopic states of a physical system (such as the psychological state of a brain) can have more causal power over the system’s future than a more detailed, fine-grained description of the system possibly could.

"In a May paper in the journal Entropy, Hoel placed causal emergence on a firmer theoretical footing by showing that macro scales gain causal power in exactly the same way, mathematically, that error-correcting codes increase the amount of information that can be sent over information channels. Just as codes reduce noise (and thus uncertainty) in transmitted data — Claude Shannon’s 1948 insight that formed the bedrock of information theory — Hoel claims that macro states also reduce noise and uncertainty in a system’s causal structure, strengthening causal relationships and making the system’s behavior more deterministic.

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"Their ultimate usefulness in explaining the world and its mysteries — including consciousness, other kinds of emergence, and the relationships between the micro and macro levels of reality — will come down to whether Hoel has nailed the notoriously tricky notion of causation: Namely, what’s a cause? “If you brought 20 practicing scientists into a room and asked what causation was, they would all disagree,” DeDeo said. “We get mixed up about it.”

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"philosophers have argued that causal power existing at two scales at once would be twice what the world needs; to avoid double-counting, the “exclusion argument” says all causal power must originate at the micro level. But it’s almost always easier to discuss causes and effects in terms of macroscopic entities.

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"Tononi conceives of consciousness as information: bits that are encoded not in the states of individual neurons, but in the complex networking of neurons, which link together in the brain into larger and larger ensembles. Tononi argues that this special “integrated information” corresponds to the unified, integrated state that we experience as subjective awareness.

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"With Albantakis and Tononi, Hoel formalized a measure of causal power called “effective information,” which indicates how effectively a particular state influences the future state of a system. (Effective information can be used to help calculate integrated information, but it is simpler and more general and, as a measure of causal power, does not rely on Tononi’s other ideas about consciousness.)

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"For any given system, effective information peaks at the scale with the largest and most reliable causal structure. In addition to conscious agents, Hoel says this might pick out the natural scales of rocks, tsunamis, planets and all other objects that we normally notice in the world. “And the reason why we’re tuned into them evolutionarily [might be] because they are reliable and effective, but that also means they are causally emergent,” Hoel said. [Comment: I feel this means it takes a whole brain to have consciousness]

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"Hoel and his collaborators aim to show that higher-level causes — as well as agents and other macroscopic things — ontologically exist. The distinction relates to one that the philosopher David Chalmers makes about consciousness: There’s the “easy problem” of how neural circuitry gives rise to complex behaviors, and the “hard problem,” which asks, essentially, what distinguishes conscious beings from lifeless automatons.

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"Causation “is really the measure or quantity that is necessary to identify where in this whole state of the universe do I have groups of elements that make up entities? … Causation is what you need to give structure to the universe.” Treating causes as real is a necessary tool for making sense of the world."

Comment: Can one prove causation is top down? Just consciousness or God's consciousness? Huge article. Should read all.