Abstract
The paper addresses a question concerning George Ellis’s theory of top-down causation by considering a challenge to the “level-picture of nature” which he employs as a foundational element in his theory. According to the level-picture, nature is ordered by distinct and finitely many levels, each characterised by its own types of entities, relations, laws and principles of behavior, and causal relations to their respective neighbouring top- and bottom-level. The branching hierarchy that results from this picture enables Ellis to build his model of modular hierarchical structure for complexity, his account of same-level, bottom-up and top-down causation, of emergence, equivalence-classes and multiple realisability. The three main arguments for the level-picture in Ellis’s works are reconstructed and shown to face serious problems. Finally, the paper presents a possible solution to this challenge by introducing a reformulation of certain fundamental points of Ellis’s theory that does without the level-picture of nature. This allows us to preserve all of his central claims about the model of complexity, the three types of causation, emergence, equivalence-classes and multiple realisability. Any problems pertaining to the level-picture can be remedied in the context of Ellis’s theory of top-down causation.
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Notes
- 1.
This definition applies to many different theories of causation; it is neither limited to Ellis nor meant to imply that his proposal originated the level-picture. The latter can be traced back at least to Anderson (1972), who introduced this kind of formulation into the debates about emergence and causation. Thus defined, the level-picture is a broad concept with a long history in thinking about nature. Yet in every different theory of emergence and causation its defining features change considerably. Any critique has to focus on the particular analysis at issue. George Ellis’s theory is a perfect case in point, not only due to its substantial weight in the debate on causality in the sciences and philosophy, but on account of its clarity regarding the role of levels. For other literature on the level-picture in the aforementioned debates see (Kim 1992, 1999, Emmeche et al. 1997, 2000, Hulswit 2005, Paolini Paoletti and Orilia 2017).
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- 3.
“Genuine complexity can only emerge from interlevel causation (both bottom-up and top-down) in modular hierarchical structures. […] The structure is emergent from lower level entities, but is much more than the parts. It is the patterns of structuring that count. This is a higher level property of the system: its description requires variables that relate to more than just the properties of the components. […] In addition to the properties of the units themselves, it is the set of relations between units […] that is crucial to building up complexity. These aspects cannot be reduced to lower level variables. […] Higher level structural patterns channel causation at lower levels in the system, breaking symmetry and so constraining what happens at those levels” (Ellis 2016, pp. 85–87).
- 4.
Ellis can support this type of causation with any example where the whole determines movements of and changes to its parts, like the changes in the cardiovascular system due to heavy body movements of the whole organism. This seems to suggest that for Ellis a top-cause must always be deterministic for the bottom-effect. On the question of how top-down causation and the question of indeterminism fit together, see (Beebee 2014).
- 5.
Take solar system science: It studies our solar system. Modular subsystems on the same level of complexity and which causally interact with one another include the planet Earth, the moon Callisto, the dwarf planet Ceres, the Mars trojans, Halley’s Comet and many others. The causal relations form a net with an internal hierarchy (Ceres is part of the asteroid belt, moons orbit their planets, trojans are tied to their planets or moons and so on). Yet even at this one distinct level of nature, there are modular subsystems with greater complexity than others: Jupiter seems to be more complex than Halley’s Comet if we take Jupiter not only to have more functionally distinct parts (an outer and inner atmosphere with sub-parts like cloud layers, possibly a rocky core, etc. (Guillot et al. 2004)) than Halley’s Comet but also, due to the interaction of those parts, more genuine complexity, such as weather events (take the Great Red Spot). According to Ellis’s view, interaction between these two modules, Jupiter and Halley’s Comet, in the whole of the solar system still has to be conceived as same-level causation, even if there can be a difference of complexity between modules.
- 6.
The option to define a natural system by way of analysing whether its complexity actually exceeds and not only equals the complexity of the sum of its real functional parts (which would supposedly be the case for any mereological sum of the complexity of arbitrary parts, say the planet Mars and the exoplanet TrES-3b regarded as one part) is not further pursued in Ellis’s work as far as I know. If this were possible it would offer a way to search for cases of strong emergence and top-down causation (understood as feedback loops).
- 7.
In cell A we find a cell nucleus and in cell B we do not.
- 8.
Ellis’s argument stands in a long line of antireductionist arguments that follow Anderson’s classic criticism of the constructionist hypothesis, that is “the ability to start from those [fundamental] laws and reconstruct the universe”, because “at each new level of complexity entirely new properties appear”. (Anderson 1972, p. 393) Many philosophers and scientists with the same agenda follow his lead (see Meyr 1988; Nagel 1998; Castellani 2002; Ellis 2006; Chalmers 2006; Corning 2012). Thomas Nagel’s argument against reductionism, for example, introduces levels in nature as joints in nature (Nagel 1998, pp. 7–12): Our explanations and theories always focus on a specific level, depending on which scale we are looking at. According to Nagel, not all natural kinds and laws can be defined in this reductionist way, functional properties in biology being a case in point. One consequence of his argument is that levels in nature are real because the natural kinds of the higher level of biology cannot even in principle be defined by the fundamental level of physics. So we have at least two distinct levels: The fundamental level of physics without functional properties and the higher level of biology with them. Only an ontological reductionist could claim the absence of distinct levels of nature. Nagel does not find a joint in nature which separates the level of larger entities with functional properties and the level of smaller entities without them. (Though even this is debatable; for a definition of every physical property as dispositional and second-order functional property see Yates 2012.)
- 9.
It would of course be possible to consider A7*, which would not make this claim, because it neither follows from the first sentence of A7 nor does the first sentence require the second as a premise. But with the second sentence, A7 is closer to L7.
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I would like to thank Markus Gabriel and Otávio Bueno for the encouragement and opportunity to write this paper and helpful remarks, Alex Englander and Max Kistler for their comments on an earlier version of this paper, and Noemi Stelzig for all her support during the process of writing.
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Voosholz, J. (2021). Top-Down Causation Without Levels. In: Voosholz, J., Gabriel, M. (eds) Top-Down Causation and Emergence. Synthese Library, vol 439. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71899-2_11
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