Toy Models of Top Down Causation

TL;DR

This paper explores toy models using probabilistic cellular automata to illustrate how higher-level structures can causally influence microdynamics, aiming to unify physical theories and address consciousness-material interactions.

Contribution

It introduces novel toy models demonstrating top-down causation, highlighting potential pathways for unifying quantum, classical, and gravitational physics, and exploring consciousness-material causality.

Findings

Toy models show possible top-down causation mechanisms.

Models reveal challenges in integrating higher-level causation.

Illustrates potential for unifying physical theories.

Abstract

Models in which causation arises from higher level structures as well as from microdynamics may be relevant to unifying quantum theory with classical physics or general relativity. They also give a way of defining a form of panprotopsychist property dualism, in which consciousness and material physics causally affect one another. I describe toy models based on probabilistic cellular automata that illustrate possibilities and difficulties with these ideas.