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How Downwards Causation Occurs in Digital Computers

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Abstract

Digital computers carry out algorithms coded in high level programs. These abstract entities determine what happens at the physical level: they control whether electrons flow through specific transistors at specific times or not, entailing downward causation in both the logical and implementation hierarchies. This paper explores how this is possible in the light of the alleged causal completeness of physics at the bottom level, and highlights the mechanism that enables strong emergence (the manifest causal effectiveness of application programs) to occur. Although synchronic emergence of higher levels from lower levels is manifestly true, diachronic emergence is generically not the case; indeed we give specific examples where it cannot occur because of the causal effectiveness of higher level variables.

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Notes

  1. There are of course lower levels than Level 0 in Table 2, as described by the standard model of particle physics, which may in turn depend on even lower levels such as string theory/M theory. They are of no concern to us here.

  2. See the Appendix of [14].

  3. We thank an anonymous referee for this comment

  4. We thank an anonymous referee for this comment.

  5. Try writing a complex program in Assembly language [2, pp. 507–521], or much worse, Machine code! The name of Grace Hopper should be up there with the panoply of computer greats such as Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, and John von Neumann: see Wikipedia, ‘Grace Hopper’.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Steven Simon and Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce Figs. 2 and 3 from [25]. This project was completed while both authors were visiting the Quantum Research Group at the University of KwaZulu Natal (UKZN), and we thank Francesco Petruccione for his hospitality at UKZN and support from his research grant number 64812: National Research Foundation (South African Research Chair). We thank an anonymous referee for very helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.

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  1. Department of Mathematics, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7701, South Africa

    George Ellis

  2. Institute of Condensed Matter Physics, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Hochschulstr. 6, 64289, Darmstadt, Germany

    Barbara Drossel

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  1. George Ellis
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Correspondence to George Ellis.

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Ellis, G., Drossel, B. How Downwards Causation Occurs in Digital Computers. Found Phys 49, 1253–1277 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-019-00307-6

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