BI 145 James Woodward: Causation with a Human Face
Brain Inspired
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Is There Such a Thing as Downward Causation?
In recent papers, i've defended the idea that there is such a thing as downward causation. All that has to happen is you wiggle some now relatively upper level, or coarse grain, variable and something ot of so called lower level changes in response. It's not, ah, you don't really require anything more than that. There're lots of people who think that there are, you metaphysical and other kinds of objections to downward causation. But i claim it fits naturally within the interventionis framework. That's because the interventionist framework for causation is so metaphysically thin, so to speak. Don't have any problem, i don't think, with making sense of a downward causation
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