What is the relationship between causes at different levels of emergence?

(where am I wrong?) /1 https://twitter.com/micahtredding/status/1303154643829239808

Before we delve into the beautiful idea of emergence I should say something about the intuitive idea of causation. We all know what it is, yet empiricist philosophers struggled to pin it down. I like the counterfactual approach. /2

If event Y (a cause) didn't occur then event Z (the consequence) would not have occurred. This approach accounts for both direct and indirect causes, and it accounts for multiple causal factors acting together, either in sequence or confluencing to produce a consequence. /3

Think about the genesis of WWI as an example of many seemingly unrelated events coming together in terrifying consequence. /4

Aristole saw that causes are answers to why questions. Causes exist intrinsically within explanations. By the end of this thread you may appreciate how the idea of a cause is itself abstract and emergent. /5

So, what is emergence? /6

A new explanation includes new, and sometimes reused concepts that interact with each other according to a causal rule. For example, quantum field theory has fields and a wave function; astronomical explanations have stars, black holes and general relativity; /7

psychology has minds, emotions, and so on.

Emergence is discovered when new abstract quasi-autonomous concepts feature in an explanation that do not interact with quasi-autonomous concepts that feature in any existing explanation that is able to describe the same phenomenon. /8

Consider a car crash that is explained by the driver failing to react to a stop signal with sufficient time to stop. The crash can also be explained by the car's velocity, braking power, distance, frictions and so on. /9

The higher emergence explanation is more meaningful in the sense that it explains what we see as the *actual* reason for the phenomenon. /10

Here the driver's inattention is a more meaningful explanation and contains less information than the respective Newtonian mechanical description of the same crash. /11

Moreover, the concepts that appear in both explanations, such as the car, are there for context rather than to feature in the causal aspect of the explanation. /12

When comparing perspectives from higher and lower emergence explanations, it makes sense to say the higher level emergent phenomenon causes the lower level emergent phenomenon. Or in shorthand, top-down causation. /13

The driver's distracted mind has seemingly nothing to do with the physics of the car colliding with an object it should not have made contact with. However, if the driver had not been checking twitter notifications, they would not have crashed the car. /14

So, an emergent explanation is a new perspective on a phenomenon, which contains less information than a lower emergence explanation, whilst containing more meaning. /15

In other words, an emergent explanation provides a better understanding by revealing concepts and relations that were previously unseen. /16

Circling back to the initial question -- what is the relationship between causes at different levels of emergence? /17

Here's a dense summary of the ground we've covered. A cause is an interacting relationship between concepts within an explanation. An explanation is a particular perspective of phenomena that contains a cause. /18

Explanations at different levels of emergence do not share the same quasi-autonomous concepts. Therefore, and to answer our question, there is no relationship between causes at different levels of emergence. /19

But this doesn't feel intuitively correct, right? If you are a physical determinist you know *everything* is causally connected. And what about that idea of top-down causation? /20

How can we understand that everything can be explained by fundamental laws of physics, and that higher emergence explanations are better for making sense of phenomena than their respective lower emergence level explanations, ... /21

... whilst also claiming there is no relationship between causes at different levels of emergence? /22

These questions are resolved by understanding that the idea of a cause is abstract, and it is emergent, and it is a key component in an explanation. /23

When we say there is no cause between different levels of emergence, we mean we have not created an explanation that provides a new perspective that bridges existing explanations at different levels of emergence. At the same time knowing that such explanations must be possible.

When we do discover such explanations we now have a defined relationship between the causes. However, the boundary between higher and lower emergence phenomena now becomes blurry. /25

Consider how chemistry is subsumed into physics via electrochemistry and now quantum theory.

So perhaps a better answer is, there is no known relationship between causes at different levels of emergence, until there is. /end