Sean Carroll

That sounds vaguely familiar.

I went to Pensbury High School, and you're 100% correct that Pensbury and Council Rock were two big rivals in that neck of the Bucks County woods.

But what counts as a rival depends very delicately on what activity you're talking about.

So in football, yes, Council Rock and Pensbury were the big rivals.

I was never that much into high school football.

When I was in high school, I was on the debate team, the speech and debate team, the forensics team, and Council Rock, for whatever reason, didn't have a forensics team.

So they were not my big rivals.

It was actually Harry S. Truman High School that were our local rivals and schools like LaSalle College High School in Philadelphia and a place like that.

Henry Jacobs says, on downward causation, in the case of macrostates versus microstates in the context of statistical mechanics, it seems easy to dismiss the idea of downward causation.

However, when aggregating people and their actions into a nation and its actions, the actions of the nation, the high level, will affect the citizens, the low level, through enacting laws or going to war.

Does this count as downward causation?

Maybe.

I mean, that's literally what we suggested in the paper I wrote with Truth Parola on what emergence can possibly mean.

We said that the space for downward causation is at these levels where even the lower level is already pretty high.

And there's a very specific reason why.

The reason why is that when your lower levels are fundamental physics, you have very strong constraints from things like locality and the small number of degrees of freedom per particle, etc.

The individual constituents of your theory are themselves simple, and their interactions are local.

So there's really no room for higher levels to directly affect them.

Whereas if your lower level is individual humans and your higher level is some collective set of people like an economy or a government or whatever, then the boundary lines are a little bit less clear, right?

And so I can imagine—so I'm honestly saying that I'm not sure.