Downward causality
Downward causation ( English downward causation ) is a causal effect of a system applied to its elements.
A simple example is the difference between an open and a closed pressure cooker: Pressure can only build up in a closed pressure cooker; thus the condition of the overall structure has an effect that has an influence on the behavior of the individual parts. The idea of downward causality goes back to Donald T. Campbell . On the one hand, it is opposed to the materialistic - reductionist view that causal effects are only ever transferred from the lower to the upper structural levels and coordinated emergent behavior on the upper levels is only an epiphenomenon of structural relationships ; on the other hand, the holistic viewpoint that only the structural relationships create the overall structure and that the behavior of the individual parts results entirely from these structural relationships. The whole is therefore determined to a certain degree by its parts (upward causality), but at the same time the parts are determined to a certain degree by the whole (downward causality).
literature
- Donald T. Campbell : 'Downward causation' in hierarchically organized biological systems. In Francisco Jose Ayala & Theodosius Dobzhansky (eds.): Studies in the philosophy of biology: Reduction and related problems (London / Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 179-186.
- Karl R. Popper : Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind. Dialectica 32: 339-355 (1978).
- Donald T. Campbell: Levels of organization, downward causation, and the selection-theory approach to evolutionary epistemology. In G. Greenberg & E. Tobach (Eds.): Theories of the evolution of knowing (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990), pp. 1-17.
- Robert C. Bishop: Downward Causation in Fluid Convection . Synthesis (in press; online 2006).