Quantum Biology and the Puzzle of Coherence

[Jim__]

33. A couple of thoughts.

You claim: Darwinian evolution has a top down causal component called "environmental adaptation".

But the site that you cited with respect to top-down causation claims:

The core issue is volitional agency.

They don't provide any real context for that statement, so I'll take it at face value. Darwinian evolution, as it is currently understood, is not at all concerned with volitional agency.

The site further asks:

How would we or could we know that the relevant causal powers are not (even in principle) reducible to constituent properties of the “bottom” level of reality? If we cannot answer this question, does this rule out top-down causation as empirically useless?

Studying photosynthesis in all its aspects can definitely help to determine whether or not it is reducible to the constituent properties of the components.

Some further questions from this site are:

• What counts as “top” in top-down causation? What counts as “bottom”? Would “whole-part causation” be a better description? If so, what difference would that make?


• Are there any top-down realities to do the causing? If so, are they properties or substances? If properties, “of what” are they properties? If substances, of what are the substances made/composed?


• What would be required for a supervening or emergent entity to have causal powers? And what would be required for “downward causal” power in particular?


• Where might we get some explanatory (or metaphysical) “cash value” out of employing or hypothesizing top-down causal entities? Gaia? Agents? God? Molecules? Minds?


• How would we or could we know that the relevant causal powers are not (even in principle) reducible to constituent properties of the “bottom” level of reality? If we cannot answer this question, does this rule out top-down causation as empirically useless?


• How could we empirically test for the existence of the relevant causal powers?

...

These questions indicate that this concept is not yet particularly well-defined and is not ready to be applied against scientific discoveries.