The Causal Closure of Physics in Real World Contexts
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The Causal Closure of Physics in Real World Contexts George F. R. Ellis1 Received: 9 June 2020 / Accepted: 22 July 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The causal closure of physics is usually discussed in a context free way. Here I discuss it in the context of engineering systems and biology, where strong emergence takes place due to a combination of upwards emergence and downwards causation (Ellis, Emergence in Solid State Physics and Biology, 2020, arXiv:2004.13591). Firstly, I show that causal closure is strictly limited in terms of spatial interactions because these are cases that are of necessity strongly interacting with the environment. Effective Spatial Closure holds ceteris parabus, and can be violated by Black Swan Events. Secondly, I show that causal closure in the hierarchy of emergence is a strictly interlevel affair, and in the cases of engineering and biology encompasses all levels from the social level to the particle physics level. However Effective Causal Closure can usefully be defined for a restricted set of levels, and one can experimentally determine Effective Theories that hold at each level. This does not however imply those effective theories are causally complete by themselves. In particular, the particle physics level is not causally complete by itself in the contexts of solid state physics (because of interlevel wave–particle duality), digital computers (where algorithms determine outcomes), or biology (because of time dependent constraints). Furthermore Inextricably Intertwined Levels occur in all these contexts.
1 The Context It is often supposed that causal closure occurs at the micro level in physical systems, and hence prevents the occurrence of strong emergence because the macrostate supervenes on the microstate [81, 82]. This is discussed in [27, 68, 89, 54]. In contrast, [20] shows by careful philosophical argument that One can have emergence with reduction, as well as without it; and emergence without supervenience, as well as with it.
* George F. R. Ellis [email protected] 1
Mathematics Department, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Foundations of Physics
Here I want to examine the issue in a different way, by dealing in some detail with the hierarchical nature of emergence in real world contexts: the cases of engineering, based in the underlying solid state physics, and biology, based in the underlying molecular biology, in turn based in the underlying physics. The context is my paper [41] that establishes that strong emergence does indeed take place in both those cases, so that the argument against strong emergence has to be wrong in those contexts. Reference [41] examines the issue of strong emergence of properties P of macrodynamics M out of the underlying microdynamics m in the context of condensed matter physics and biology. Following Anderson’s lead [4, 5] that symmetry breaking is at the heart of emergence, its method was to identify five different kinds of symmetry
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