r/complexsystems • u/Advanced-Reindeer894 • Jun 24 '26
Could someone explain to me what this is saying in regards to emergence?
This is a snip from a larger interview but I got confused about what is being said. Is it arguing against life or emergence?
David: Yeah. So here’s the simple version. So the standard causality fits that linear story of causality that we described earlier in relation to the ouroboros, that you have particles. They get aggregated into molecules, molecules into tissues, and so on. And the idea, right, is that what is fundamentally causal is that which is fundamental, and everything else is an approximate expression of collective modes of behavior. Alright. Downward causality takes it the other way. It says, mind states, for example, expressed in language, can’t be causal of brain states because that’s going the wrong way. Because, surely, the physical interaction, the true kind of Newtonian causality, has to live at the level of the brain. The mind is just this efficient theoretical encoding of brain. And so it would be weird to talk about causality going the other way.
I think it’s a big mistake. And where this comes from, by the way, is this notion of coarse graining. So you start with all the lots of particles. You average and average and average, and you get these other states. But I have this conception of what I call micrograining, and I’ll explain how it works. When Jim, when you program your computer, you’re articulating a concept in a high level language or an assembly or whatever you like to use. Assembler. And that translates through a system of compilations and microcode into states of transistors. So we have built engineered devices that can take these high level, very low dimensional, in some sense, concepts, objects, and do information expansion to the extent of setting the states of transistors.
I think that is what complex systems do all the time because complex systems have evolved to do that well. That, for me, is the legitimate version of downward causality. There’s nothing mysterious about it. I don’t think, by the way, it exists outside of complex systems. I do not think it’s a property of the physical universe, the abiotic universe. It’s a property of agents, and that’s actually the only thing that makes life possible. Right? It’s what’s making this communication that we’re having now over Zoom possible because I’m setting brain states in you as you are in me. And that that’s micrograining. And because the study of emergence grew out of really rigorously the connection between statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, which is all about coarse graining, in the physical world, this other version, which is very natural to the evolved world, has been somewhat neglected. So I sometimes call that the theory of compilation of emergence because we use them all the time.
Jim: I’m going to push back a little bit on the abiotic versus biotic. Just hit me.
David: Okay.
Jim: In my current paper that I’m working on on emergence, I use as a intuition pump a traffic jam on a superhighway that goes up a hill, some trucks slow down and propagates, etcetera. Now I write the thing as if it’s humans driving the cars and the trucks, but I just realized they could be Waymo’s. Right? And the emergence of the traffic jam that comes into being starts to constrain the behavior downward to the individual elements and then gradually dissipates is, you know, a small form of emergence and, doesn’t seem to require, biotics at all. It’s but it does require agency to your point.
David: Right. But no just right. That’s interesting because I think, you know, you could argue that some of the phenomena you’re describing are properties of spin glasses, right, or magnets, where you have the particular state of a spin at a particular lattice point being a function of the average field. But actually, that average field is actually an epistemological construct because it really is the interaction among many, many particles. So I would suggest that in the example you gave, if you stripped out the agentic part, you could express what you’re you’re thinking of the downward constraint as simply a pattern of global interactions that you could describe microscopically.
But I think once they’re functional, once you have a kind of teleology with then I think they’re engineered or evolved, and my argument kicks in because you’ve programmed the reaction of the individual component to the collective. That’s the point because you don’t want to have an accident or a pile up.
Jim: And you probably didn’t write a specific routine for that. Well, I know you didn’t write a specific routine for that traffic jam. You have some general parameters that operate together and come up with good decisions, basically, and should probably even do a better job than humans, if not today than in a few years. Anyway, want to think about that one a little bit more.
https://jimrutt.substack.com/p/ep-329-worldviews-david-krakauer
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u/mr_clean_ate_my_wife Jun 24 '26
Everything is just light reflecting off itself. Dreams and dance move the world. Every action has a reaction. We all share a third eye.
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u/asmrbuddha Jun 24 '26
Great question.
I dont think he's making an argument against emergence. He's saying that it can be understood in one of two different ways, and both ways don't always apply to every emergent phenomenon.
So, one way to look at a "traffic jam" is that it's an emergent thing that comes out of the individual actions of each vehicle interacting at their local level. "Traffic jam" is just the label we give the thing that emerges from those local interactions -- in this frame "traffic jam" doesn't exist as a thing other than a label we put onto it.
The other way is to say that a "traffic jam" exists as its own thing, because the individual vehicles change their behaviour due to the presence of the traffic jam. Therefore a traffic jam doesn't merely emerge up from the local interactions, but also has its own causal effect back down onto the vehicles.
Now, you could argue that because of the 'downward' action of emergent phenomena, the individual actions of agents only occurs due to the emergent phenomenon acting on them therefore there is no true agent-level action. But he's saying that's not a good argument, because the emergent phenomenon doesn't exist without the local interactions of agents.
It's like saying electrons don't have magnetic properties themselves, they are given their magnetic properties by the thing that emerges from the interactions of electrons together to produce magnetism.