The cosmologist G.F.R. Ellis once wrote a one-page essay in Nature about it: http://www.mth.uct.ac.za/~ellis/nature.pdf
A simple statement of fact: there is no physics theory that explains the nature of, or even the existence of, football matches, teapots, or jumbo-jet aircraft. The human mind is physically based, but there is no hope whatever of predicting the behaviour it controls from the underlying physical laws. Even if we had a satisfactory fundamental physics ‘theory of everything’, this situation would remain unchanged: physics would still fail to explain the outcomes of human purpose, and so would provide an incomplete description of the real world around us.
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the higher levels in the hierarchy of complexity have autonomous causal powers that are functionally independent of lower-level processes. Topdown causation takes place as well as bottom-up action, with higher-level contexts determining the outcome of lowerlevel functioning, and even modifying the nature of lower-level constituents.
Topdown causation takes place as well as bottom-up action, with higher-level contexts determining the outcome of lowerlevel functioning, and even modifying the nature of lower-level constituents.
I think this is a hugely unappreciated fact about the universe. Macroscopic variation can be insensitive to virtually all microscopic variation, in the sense that some small set macroscopic variables obeys some relation without special regard to the particular microstate in existence, e.g., PV=nRT. And yet, interactions that can be described entirely at the mac...
In Zombies! Zombies? Eliezer mentions that one aspect of consciousness is that it can causally affect the real world, e.g. cause you to say "I feel conscious right now", or result in me typing out these words.
Even if a generally accepted mechanism of consciousness has not been found yet are there any tentative explanations for this "can change world" property? Googling around I was unable to find anything (although Zombies are certainly popular).
I had an idea of how this might work, but just wanted to see if it was worth the effort of writing.