Lectures:

Alicia Juarrero, "Top-Down Causation as the Operation of Second-Order Context-Sensitive Constraints"

Description:
This lecture will focus on the philosophical history of causality. Juarrero will suggest how the new understanding of complex dynamical systems allows us to reconceptualize causality in terms other than mechanistic efficient causality. Rethinking causality in terms of constraints allows us to get a handle on both mereological causation and on how intentions cause actions.

Readings:

Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (MIT Press, 1999, 2002): Introduction and Chapter 1 (historical background); Chapters 9-12 (Juarrero’s reformulation); Optional: Chapters 14 & 15

Paul Davies, “Downward Causation: Can wholes affect parts?”

Description:
Most people tacitly assume downward causation in daily life: society affects individuals, minds affect bodies, etc. But to a physicist causation is normally understood only at the bottom level of reality – in terms of local forces acting between point-like particles. The claim that wholes can have causal efficacy over parts leads to the problem of over-determination: if the behavior of a particle is already determined by local, bottom-level forces, then there is “no room at the bottom” for additional higher-level forces, such as mental states, to act. For this reason most physicists reject downward causation, and with it, strong emergence. However, new developments in cosmology and information theory have dramatically changed this traditional impasse. The holographic principle and related considerations suggest that the universe has finite information processing capacity, and that “hard reductionism” (in the sense adopted by most physicists) is a fiction predicated upon an idealized picture of mathematical laws as epitomized by the concept of Laplace’s demon.

Reading:

Mark Bedau, "Downward Causation and the Autonomy of Weak Emergence."

Paul Davies, "Emergent Biological Principles and the Computational Properties of the Universe."

Paul Davies, "The Physics of Downward Causation."

The Re-Emergence of Emergence , Paul Davies, Philip Clayton, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Read especially “The physics of downward causation,” pages 35 on.

Neil Rabinowitz, "Emergence: an algorithmic formulation"

George Ellis, “The emergence of complexity and the causal efficacy of the mind: how is this consistent with physics?”

Description: This talk will cover issues in emergence of complexity from a physics viewpoint, and then more specifically how this relates to the mind and the action of the mind in the world, viewed in a non-reductionist way. I will first briefly look at non-linear dynamics and attractors in phase space, and then focus on top-down action, feedback control systems and the role of goals in dynamics, causality in complex hierarchical systems, and the issue of causal completeness: how can genuine top-down action be possible if all is physically determined from a micro level?. I will say something about the role of emotions in the mind, and their genuine causal powers in functional and evolutionary terms (a specific important example of top-down action).

Readings :

“On the Nature of Emergent Reality”:
http://www.mth.uct.ac.za/~ellis/emerge.doc

http://www.mth.uct.ac.za/~ellis/reduct_sht.ppt

“Physics and the Real World”:
http://www.mth.uct.ac.za/~ellis/realworld.pdf

http://www.mth.uct.ac.za/~ellis/nature.pdf

Terrence Deacon, “Emergent dynamics: A path from mechanism to teleology”

"The modern scientific age can fairly be said to have begun with a direct challenge to the teleological explanation of nature"
Julien Hartt (in P. Hodgson & R. King, eds. Christian Theology (Minneapolis, Fortress press, 1985). p. 152)

The core motivation behind the more than century-long fascination with the concept of emergence is the hope that it can resolve the apparent paradox of teleology in science. The existence of teleological causality and its many correlates such as intentionality and consciousness appears to some as intractably mysterious and to others as merely epiphenomenal. The possibility that this impasse can be resolved through an emergentist approach is, however, widely believed to have been defeated by devastating critiques that appear to show that any form of teleology must be epiphenomenal. But this critique is based on a number of unwarranted assumptions. Including the assumption that final causality is self-contradictory, that all “causal power” presumed to emerge at higher levels of physical interaction is epiphenomenal, and that there must be a direct correlation between features of purposive systems and their non-purposive subvenient dynamics for teleology to be efficacious. The critique is valid but many of its assumptions are fallacious.

In response to these critiques Deacon argues that the concept of “causal power” is a cryptic way of substantializing the concept of work, which is instead irreducibly processual. This critique falsely assumes that the capacity to perform work can be treated as a static property of basic particles rather than an indecomposable attribute of the organizational relationships between dynamical systems. From an irreducibly dynamical perspective even presumed fundamental substantive properties are explained as highly itinerant dynamical attractors. Consequently, the varieties that work can assume can be as distinctive as the organizational properties of the dynamical regimes they arise within. This means that an adequate theory of teleological causality need not assume any direct correlation with the thermodynamic work performed by subvenient particle interactions, but it must instead specify the distinctive and possibly convoluted dynamical organization that it emerges from. This requires a theory of emergent dynamics, not merely a loosely organized taxonomy of emergent phenomena.

The theory of emergent dynamics identifies three nested hierarchic levels by which dynamical regimes can be organized. These regimes are named with respect to the attractor characteristics that uniquely arise in systems with this organization: orthodynamics (linear convergence toward a statistically symmetric state; thermodynamics is the simplest form), morphodynamics (symmetry-breaking dynamics that converges toward global attractor regularities; self-organizational processes are the most commonly recognized forms), and teleodynamics (end-directed, self-preserving, adaptive dynamics; such as in evolutionary processes and life). Importantly, it is possible to articulate a concept of work that is specific to each dynamical domain, because each has a distinctive change asymmetry associated with it and thus certain spontaneous attractor conditions with respect to which work can be defined. This means that the concept of causal power (work) can only be defined relative to a particular dynamical realm, and thus that the emergence of new dynamical regimes can be the basis for the emergence of new forms of causal power.

The important point for a theory of teleological causality is that morphodynamic processes offer a mediating level of dynamics between simple thermodynamics (assumed in mechanical cause) and teleodynamics, and thus can help explain the difficulty of identifying a subvenient physical basis for teleological processes. The mediating role of morphodynamics is a function of a partial decoupling from and thus multiple realizability with respect to material substrates and thermodynamic details. Similarly teleodynamic properties emerge from morphodynamic underpinnings by an additional partial decoupling. In fact, this creates a double break in correlation between teleological processes and simple thermodynamic processes that makes them appear as almost independent realms.

We can characterize phenomena exhibiting teleodynamic properties by virtue of the fact that they are governed by “absent forms.” Examples include obvious cases such as representations, desired states of affairs, memories, and so forth, but also more minimalistic cases such as function, self-maintenance, self-reproduction, etc. Absent form can only acquire efficacy by virtue of reciprocal relationships between morphodynamic processes. In the most basic sense, absent form can be a determinate factor in the unfolding of physical processes, so it is appropriate to call this teleology, not merely teleonomy.

The logic of this transition from simple physical dynamics to teleological dynamics has been explicitly explored in a minimalistic molecular system called an autocell. This also corresponds to a transition phase between nonlife and life, and thus from merely mechanical to functional relationships. It offers a first step, proof-of-principle model, but it is Deacon’s opinion that the underlying emergent logic can be extended to higher-order teleological phenomena as well. The constructive demonstration of a minimal form of teleological causality is an important augmentation of physical science that cannot help but be of central relevance to issues of ultimate concern, the theme of the STARS program.

Readings:

Terrence Deacon, "Emergence: The Hole at the Wheel’s Hub"

Terrence Deacon, "Reciprocal Linkage between Self-organizing Processes is Sufficient for Self-reproduction and
Evolvability"

Nancey Murphy, "Downward Causation and the Emergence of Morality and Free Will"

Description:
This lecture addresses one aspect of the free will problem, the threat of neurobiological determinism. Murphy first uses resources, largely provided by Alicia Juarrero, to argue that in virtue of downward causation, humans, like other higher animals, are agents in their own right. She then enquires into what needs to be added to this animalian flexibility to constitute free will. Here Murphy employs Alasdair MacIntyre's account of the necessary conditions for morally responsible action, which include the ability to evaluate that which moves one to action in light of a concept of the good. Murphy examines some of the cognitive and neural capacities that are known so far to subserve these necessary conditions. She concludes that mature humans who exercise these capacities meet the criteria for acting freely.

Readings:

Alicia Juarrero, Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System, Part 3.

Nancey Murphy and Warren Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?, Chs. 2, 7.

Conference Description: According to many scientists the phenomenon of emergence is characteristic of hierarchically-ordered structures and self-organizing systems, and these structures and systems can be found ubiquitously at all levels of complexity ranging from those studied by physics and chemistry to neurophysiology and ecology. In describing emergence, complexity theory seems at a minimum to require epistemic non-reducibility or "weak emergence": the presence of properties and processes at higher levels of complexity which cannot be explained entirely in terms of the properties and processes at the lower levels which underlie them.

But can we go further? Do some forms of complexity require "strong emergence": truly robust features which exhibit a degree of downward causality on their component systems? If so, how does this take place without violating the "causal closure" of nature at the level of physics as represented by the conservation laws, such as the conservation of mass-energy, momentum, and so on? What form of emergence - weak, strong, others? - is exhibited in the context of the mind/brain problem and the phenomenon of religion and spirituality? And does the phenomenon of the human spirit, with its capacity for freedom, relationality, compassion and self-transcendence, point to an ultimate, transcendent source of spirit, or is it an inherent property of nature expressed in time through the biological evolution of life?

Clayton, Philip: "The Emergence of Spirit," Volume 20, No. 4 (Fall 2000): 3-20 - (CTNS Bulletin) - © The Center for Theology and the Natural Science.

Davies, Paul. "Teleology Without Teleology: Purpose through Emergent Complexity." (summary...)

Murphy, Nancey. "Supervenience and the Downward Efficacy of the Mental: A Nonreductive Physicalist Account of Human Action." (summary...)