Right. I'm ignorant of Weismann's doctrine. But it does seem to imply purely bottom-up causation. We *could*, I suppose talk of hierarchical systems where the causal flow only went upward ... maybe a bit like the causal cone defined by the speed of light in space-time. Everything within the cone is "same layer causation" and cross-cone relations might be the only time you'd need large-scale, collective effects. [⛧]
The only way I can see to get any kind of downward causation in that case is through iteration, as I mentioned with the sticks (1st stick is completely free, 2nd stick is more constrained, ...). But you can remove time and replace it with some other requirement, like no/minimal space between tiles for sphere packing or, say, aperiodic tilings. In that case, it's not only the tile shapes, but also *how many* of each shape you have that impinges on their (micro) placement. [⛧] This popped up this morning: https://uwaterloo.ca/astrophysics-centre/news/astrophysicists-release-largest-3d-map-universe-ever-created On 7/20/20 10:07 AM, Jon Zingale wrote: > Maybe I am misremembering (which clearly happens), but didn't the discussion > of gen-phen-like maps arise in the context of goal-function distinctions? In > this latter class, we included the thermostat system where constraining > systems to Weismann's doctrine would not be meaningful. Clearly, in the > goal-function system, an individual that changes the thermostat dial because > they prefer the house to be at 60 degrees rather than 80 degrees (a > variation on function) performs downwardly to affect the tolerance of the > piece of metal or mercury switch (a variation on goal). Are we breaking the > semantic game by now demanding that our admissable gen-phen-like maps > preserve Weismann's doctrine? I understood Glen's evocation to not be so > constrained. -- ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
