Ellis - How Can Physics Underlie the Mind? Top-Down Causation in the Human Context

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Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016

George Ellis How Can Physics Underlie the Mind? The Frontiers Collection 10.1007/978-3-662-49809-5_1

1. Complexity and Emergence

George Ellis 1

(1)

Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa

George Ellis

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One of the most astonishing things in the physical world is the way that mind emerges from matter. Atoms obeying fundamental impersonal physical laws form stars, rocks, oceans, planets, amoeba, mice, whales, the human brain. Somehow the brain enables creation of Bach concertos , supercomputers, Jumbo jet aircraft, roast lamb , the Mona Lisa, the rules of chess, global warfare, Einsteins theories of relativity, the Eiffel Tower, and Shakespeares sonnets . How on earth can this be possible?

From a physics viewpoint, physics underlies all []. The law-like behaviour of matter investigated by Galileo, Newton, and Laplace suggests the world is determinate and describable by mathematical equations. Newtons second law :

(1.1)

which says that the force on a particle i equals its mass times its acceleration, implies that given the forces on each particle i and full initial data, i.e., the initial positions and velocities of all relevant particles, you can calculate the acceleration of every particle and hence determine the outcome. All is determinate!].

This book will present arguments that counter that understanding. It certainly does not claim to solve the hard problem of consciousness : indeed at present science has no idea how to tackle that issue (despite some claims [). We are genuinely fully human, even though we emerge through the interactions of fundamental particles.

The lower level physical interactions enable the propagation of signals encoded in action potentials in neurons in our brains, these signals being part of the causal nexus enabled by the myriad connections between neurons, which in turn enables consciousness, feelings, and thoughts to emerge from matter. That is the extraordinary outcome that needs explanation [, pp. 395409].

Francis Crick famously said []:

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

This is the classic reductionist view . I will revisit this quotation in Sect. in the light of the discussion in the rest of this book, showing how this is an inadequate position because it represents an arbitrary partial reductionism. I will further argue that the reductionist claims of nothing but are fallacious because they ignore important aspects of causation. In fact, we are much more than the sum of our parts.

In this introductory chapter, I deal briefly in turn with:

• Section . The issue considered.
• Section . A basic viewpoint.
• Section . Key points of the argument.
• Section . Is it real? Testing the proposal.
• Section . Significant implications.
• Section . An outline of the book.
• Section . The necessity of the conclusion.

1.1 The Issue Considered

There are at least two kinds of causation at work in the world: blind physical forces doing their thing in an algorithmic and meaningless way, as explored by physics and physical chemistry, and living beings doing their thing in a purposeful and meaningful way, as explored by biology, the humanities, psychology, and sociology. Both kinds of causation are clearly active and causally effective in the real world.

So how do they fit together? Does one kind in fact supplant the other when we examine it closely, making the other an illusion? Then there is really only one kind of causation at work (as the diehard reductionists claim), inter alia implying that we have no free will: we are just automata, mindlessly obeying underlying algorithms and deceiving ourselves that we have meaningful control over our lives [], functioning according to the psychology of social interactions and allowing the logic of scientific investigation, while it also obeys the strict laws of physics and neurobiology? If so, how can this happen? How is there space for both?

The digital computers that dominate in the world around us are based, at the bottom level, on a binary coding system: that is, every programme, and all the data it uses, are nothing but a sequence of zeros and ones. A Bach sonata played on your digital system by Yo-Yo Ma will ultimately be just a sequence of digits: 0011010100011100010101000010111.... A Rembrandt self-portrait displayed on your screen, or your holiday photos stored on your computer, will be other such sequences, and so will the data used in a company accounting system, the signals in the computer controlling the flight of an airliner, all the emails you get, as well as the digital TV programmes and films you watch.

And here we already see the problem with the reductionist stance as regards the nature of the world around us. In the end, they are all nothing but a sequence of zeros and ones. But these sequences store in their precise details the most astonishing variety of things: images, books, films, economic data, signals used in automated factories, and so on. The components are the same, working strictly according to the laws of physics, but radically different outcomes emerge depending on context. And that is a model of how complexity works.

The nothing but story is true in a certain wayat the bottom, all digital data are just comprised of zeros and onesbut misses the essential core of what is going on. It is the specific organisation of the zeros and ones that crucially matters: they encode the meaning of the signal stored in the computer, and this meaning depends on the context. The correct context in each case (an appropriate high level programme running as required) interrogates the data and produces its intended meaning. If you run the wrong programme with the data (read the Yo-Yo Ma music with Photoshop, for example) you will get nonsense. Context is everything, turning the details into higher level meaningful entities.

In the influential book What Is Life , written in 1945, Erwin Schrdinger wrote [, p. 81]:

From all we have learnt about the structure of living matter, we must be prepared to find it working in a manner that cannot be reduced to the ordinary laws of physics. And that not on the ground that there is any new force or what not, directing the behaviour of the single atoms within a living organism, but because the construction is different from anything we have yet tested in a laboratory.

Paradoxically, while the higher-level properties emerge from the lower-level processes, they have a degree of causal independence from them: they operate according to their own higher-level logic. According to Philip Anderson in his famous paper More Is Different []:

Large objects such as ourselves are the product of principles of organisation and of collective behaviour that cannot in any meaningful sense be reduced to the behaviour of our elementary constituents. Large objects are often more constrained by those principles than by what the principles act upon.

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