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I need help, i'm having troubles getting the intuition behind top to bottom causation. Just the existence of said process is controversial, but let's assume it does in fact exist. How does it work? I can't get a sense of this.
A paper about this:
>A key assumption underlying most present day physical thought is the idea that causation is bottom
up all the way: particle physics underlies nuclear physics, nuclear physics underlies atomic physics,
atomic physics underlies chemistry, and so on. Thus all the higher level subjects are at least in
principle reducible to particle physics, which is therefore the only fundamental science; as famously
claimed by Dirac, chemistry is just an application of quantum physics. 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; epigenetic studies demonstrate that biological development is crucially
shaped by the environment.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1212/1212.2275.pdf
Thoughts?
A paper about this:
>A key assumption underlying most present day physical thought is the idea that causation is bottom
up all the way: particle physics underlies nuclear physics, nuclear physics underlies atomic physics,
atomic physics underlies chemistry, and so on. Thus all the higher level subjects are at least in
principle reducible to particle physics, which is therefore the only fundamental science; as famously
claimed by Dirac, chemistry is just an application of quantum physics. 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; epigenetic studies demonstrate that biological development is crucially
shaped by the environment.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1212/1212.2275.pdf
Thoughts?
