This issue of the journal is focused on ‘top-down (downward) causation'. The words in this title, however, already raise or beg many questions. Causation can be of many kinds. They form our ways of ordering our scientific understanding of the world, all ...

Complexity—nonlinear dynamics for my purposes in this essay—is rich with metaphysical and epistemological implications but is receiving sustained philosophical analysis only recently. I will explore some of the subtleties of causation and constraint in ...

In this paper, I will argue that there is an important connection between two questions concerning how certain features of the macro world emerge from the laws and processes of fundamental microphysics and suggest an approach to answering these questions. ...

This article examines two influential authors who have addressed the interface between the fields of chemistry and physics and have reached opposite conclusions about whether or not emergence and downward causation represent genuine phenomena. While ...

The concepts of functional equivalence classes and information control in living systems are useful to characterize downward (or top-down) causation by feedback information control in synthetic biology. Herein, we re-analyse published experiments of ...

Genes store heritable information, but actual gene expression often depends on many so-called epigenetic factors, both physical and chemical, external to DNA. Epigenetic changes can be both reversible and heritable. The genome is associated with a ...

The concept of emergence and the related notion of ‘downward causation’ have arisen in numerous branches of science, and have also been extensively discussed in philosophy. Here, I examine emergence and downward causation in relation to evolutionary ...

Must higher level biological processes always be derivable from lower level data and mechanisms, as assumed by the idea that an organism is completely defined by its genome? Or are higher level properties necessarily also causes of lower level behaviour, ...

Evolution has sculpted the incredibly complex human nervous system, among the most complex functions of which extend beyond the individual to an intricate social structure. Although these functions are deterministic, those determinants are legion, heavily ...

This article emphasizes how the recently proposed interlevel relation of contextual emergence for scientific descriptions combines ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ kinds of influence. As emergent behaviour arises from features pertaining to lower level ...

Top-down causation has been implicit in many sociological accounts of social structure and its influence on social events, but the social sciences have struggled to provide a coherent account of top-down causation itself. This paper summarizes a critical ...

The computer metaphor is dominant in most discussions of neuroscience, but the semantics attached to that metaphor are often quite naive. Herein, we examine the ontology of software-intensive systems, the nature of their structure and the application of ...

I have two main aims. The first is general, and more philosophical (§2). The second is specific, and more closely related to physics (§§3 and 4). The first aim is to state my general views about laws and causation at different ‘levels’. The main task is ...

The ubiquity of top-down causal explanations within and across the sciences is prima facie evidence for the existence of top-down causation. Much debate has been focused on whether top-down causation is coherent or in conflict with reductionism. Less ...

Both bottom-up and top-down causation occur in the hierarchy of structure and causation. A key feature is multiple realizability of higher level functions, and consequent existence of equivalence classes of lower level variables that correspond to the ...