nucleation

QUESTION-033: In a system described at more than one level, does "who drives?" have an answer at a given level, and what kinds of answer are there?

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Properties8
StatusOpen
Version2
Tagsagency, behavioral-integration, complex-systems
Linedistributed-agency
RefinesQUESTION-009 — When does a pattern of coordination constitute an additional agent?
Refined byQUESTION-213 — In which causal systems would the effect still occur had a higher-level property been realized differently, and how would an intervention show it?
Answered byCLAIM-158 — Systems differ in whether "who drives?" has an answer at a given level of description, and the kinds form a spectrum: fully top-down, bidirectional, emergent from the whole, and between
BearingTHEORY-612 — Natural selection cannot be both a cause and an effect of a process such as niche construction: if selection is an emergent population-level process, niche construction partly composes it, and a whole and its parts are not independently fixable and so not causally related; if selection is not emergent, it is either no cause at all or incoherently individual-level. Niche construction can still cause the product of selection, CLAIM-316 — A person's drive profile is time-indexed: who drives changes with state, such as hungry or sated and stressed or calm, with task and with regime, THEORY-410 — Brain–computer interface decoding does not show intentions to be causes distinct from their neural realisers: what is many-to-one realised there is a coarse cortical variable over single-neuron patterns, and each intention matches one value of it, so under proportional difference-making the evidence fits identifying the intention with that variable, CLAIM-166 — A lower-level collective within the composite person, such as the gut microbiome, can at times drive higher-level behaviour and even experience: the routes exist and the effects are causal in rodents, while the human evidence is modest, CLAIM-159 — The record's rival accounts of will are claims about drive profiles in different cells: Ainslie's interests are aggregate or emergent, the expected value of control is top-down, and will-organization is the maintained organization that governs how the drive profile changes

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Why it is a question

CLAIM-167 left “who drives?” as the information a system’s architecture carries once membership is settled. Within one level the answer was simple: one member drives (a hierarchy), the members drive each other (peers), or the drive is diffuse. Across levels it is not simple. A higher level can constrain its parts, the parts can produce the higher level, both can happen, or the dynamics can live at the higher level with no part in charge.

The owner’s framing (CLAIM-158, CLAIM-316): “who drives” may or may not have an answer with respect to a particular level of description. The kinds form a spectrum, and the answer is not constant.

What would count as an answer

A way to apportion drive between levels of a described system, for a stated macro-variable and target, that can come out differently for different systems and can be wrong. The record holds the materials for one:

  • Information decomposition (LIT-025) separates downward causation from causal decoupling.
  • Proportional causation (THEORY-133) makes a higher level the cause exactly when the effect does not depend on how that level is realized.
  • Interventions (THEORY-138) say what any of these claims asserts.

An answer must also say how the apportionment changes over time. The proposed vocabulary is TERM-051.

A demonstration that higher levels “matter” in some system is not an answer. Nor is the bare assertion that every level contributes.

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