philosophy Philosophy (from , ) is the systematized study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. ...

, downward causation is a

causal relationship Causality (also referred to as causation, or cause and effect) is influence by which one event, process, state, or object (''a'' ''cause'') contributes to the production of another event, process, state, or object (an ''effect'') where the cau ...

from higher levels of a system to lower-level parts of that system: for example, mental events acting to cause physical events. The term was originally coined in 1974 by the philosopher and social scientist

Donald T. Campbell Donald Thomas Campbell (November 20, 1916 – May 6, 1996) was an American social scientist. He is noted for his work in methodology. He coined the term ''evolutionary epistemology'' and developed a selectionist theory of human creativity. A ''R ...

Theories

According to practopoietic theory of system organization,Nikolić, Danko
"Practopoiesis: Or how life fosters a mind."
Journal of Theoretical Biology 373 (2015): 40-61. downward causation in biological systems always involves the environment. Downward causation does not occur by direct causal effects from higher to lower levels of system organisation. Instead, downward causation occurs indirectly because the mechanisms at higher levels of organisation fail to accomplish the tasks dictated by the lower levels of organisation. As a result, inputs from the environment signal to the mechanisms at lower levels of organisation that something is wrong and therefore, to act. For example, a species may find itself under evolutionary pressure to adjust to novel circumstances—which is a form of downward pressure for adjustment. Similarly, an organism may be under downward pressure to express different genes if the expression patterns from the past did not lead to desired results. Another special case of downward causation is

supervised learning Supervised learning (SL) is a machine learning paradigm for problems where the available data consists of labelled examples, meaning that each data point contains features (covariates) and an associated label. The goal of supervised learning alg ...

(of neuronal networks) in which both behavior and environment govern the propagation from higher to lower levels. This leads to a unique form of a causal interaction pattern—called a ''practopoietic loop (cycle) of causation''. The end result is that the mechanisms responsible for mental events cause physical events only based on their joint interaction with the environment. An interesting consequence is that neither behavior of an organism nor its mental operations can be considered fully or exclusively

supervenient In philosophy, supervenience refers to a relation between sets of properties or sets of facts. X is said to supervene on Y if and only if some difference in Y is necessary for any difference in X to be possible. Some examples include: * Whether t ...

on the body of the organism. On the one hand, behavior is not supervenient on all parts of the body. On the other hand, due to the necessary interactions with the environment at all levels of organization, behavior is supervenient also on some aspects of the environment. The same holds for the mental operations, or the

mind The mind is the set of faculties responsible for all mental phenomena. Often the term is also identified with the phenomena themselves. These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation. They are responsible for various m ...

References

External links

Mind and the Causal Exclusion Problem
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Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy The ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (''IEP'') is a scholarly online encyclopedia, dealing with philosophy, philosophical topics, and philosophers. The IEP combines open access publication with peer reviewed publication of original p ...

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Practopoiesis

Practopoietic loop of causation

Downward pressure for adjustment
Causality {{metaphysics-stub

Theories

See also

References

Further reading

External links