Hi, Roger,
Can you say what you thought was “nice” about it. (As you know, it makes me nervous to disagree with you about stuff). I struggled with the article. I thought at one point she confused aggregate with emergent properties. Emergent properties are properties of the whole that are dependent on the temporal or spatial arrangement of the parts. Thus the enzymatic properties of proteins, which depend on the arrangement of their amino acids, are emergent properties. Also, the standard definition of materialism is the believe that everything real consists of matter and its relations. So entertaining the notion that relations are not material (and therefore incapable of being causal) is … well … silly. Finally, I have always suspected that downward causation is an example of a “mystery” i.e., confusion that arises when words are applied to a situation where they aren’t equal to the task. (“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”) I think whenever we talk about causes we are trying to do with physical events what we do with social and legal ones … we are trying to assign responsibility for event so we can blame or praise the thing that “caused” it. It’s a form of animism. To say that A is a cause of B is only to say that variations in A have been shown, experimentally, to be necessary and or sufficient for variations in B. Causal statements ALWAYS come with an “other things being equal” clause, ceteris paribus. To the extent that emergent properties can be shown to be necessary or sufficient for some change in the property of some parts of the whole, we have downward causation, no? Now the shape of the hemoglobin molecule is an emergent property of that molecule which determines whether it binds oxygen in its active site. Whether or not it has oxygen bound to its active site determines its shape. Surely one of these is downward causation. I am just no sure which. (};-|) Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow Sent: Saturday, November 18, 2017 6:15 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation Nice. -- rec -- On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 12:29 PM, Carl Tollander <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: Of interest, also the whole issue... http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/375/2109/20160338 C ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
