Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T04:42:33.287Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Explicating Top-Down Causation Using Networks and Dynamics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

William Bechtel
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In many fields in the life sciences investigators refer to downward or top-down causal effects. Craver and I defended the view that such cases should be understood in terms of a constitution relation between levels in a mechanism and intralevel causal relations (occurring at any level). We did not, however, specify when entities constitute a higher-level mechanism. In this article I appeal to graph-theoretic representations of networks, now widely employed in systems biology and neuroscience, and associate mechanisms with modules that exhibit high clustering. As a result of interconnections within clusters, mechanisms often exhibit complex dynamic behaviors that constrain how individual components respond to external inputs, a central feature of top-down causation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 84 , Issue 2 , April 2017 , pp. 253 - 274
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

I thank three anonymous referees for this journal for their very helpful comments and suggestions. I also thank John Norton and visiting fellows at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh in 2014–15, especially Sara Green, Raphael Scholl, and Maria Serban, for their spirited discussion of an earlier draft of this paper. Likewise, I thank members of the audience at the Workshop on Levels of Organization, Causality, and Top-Down Relations sponsored by the IAS Research Centre for Life, Mind, and Society, University at the Basque Country, San Sebastian, in June 2015, especially Leonardo Bich, Alvaro Moreno, and Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo, for valuable discussion at and after the workshop. Finally, I thank Jason Winning for many productive discussions concerning constraints and mechanism.

References

Aton, Sara J., and Herzog, Erik D.. 2005. “Come Together, Right … Now: Synchronization of Rhythms in a Mammalian Circadian Clock.” Neuron 48:531–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barabási, Albert-László, and Albert, Réka. 1999. “Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks.” Science 286:509–12.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Barabási, Albert-László, and Oltvai, Zoltan N.. 2004. “Network Biology: Understanding the Cell’s Functional Organization.” Nature Reviews Genetics 5:101–13.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bechtel, William. 2006. Discovering Cell Mechanisms: The Creation of Modern Cell Biology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bechtel, William 2008. Mental Mechanisms: Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bechtel, William 2015. “Can Mechanistic Explanation Be Reconciled with Scale-Free Constitution and Dynamics?” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science C 53:84–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bechtel, William, and Richardson, Robert C.. 1993/1993. Discovering Complexity: Decomposition and Localization as Strategies in Scientific Research. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (1993 edition published by Princeton University Press.)Google Scholar
Churchland, Patricia S., and Sejnowski, Terrence J.. 1992. The Computational Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Craver, Carl F. 2007. Explaining the Brain: Mechanisms and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Craver, Carl F., and Bechtel, William. 2007. “Top-Down Causation without Top-Down Causes.” Biology and Philosophy 22:547–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fazekas, Peter, and Kertész, Gergely. 2011. “Causation at Different Levels: Tracking the Commitments of Mechanistic Explanations.” Biology and Philosophy 26:365–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldbeter, Albert. 1995. “A Model for Circadian Oscillations in the Drosophila Period Protein (Per).” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 261:319–24.Google Scholar
Goodwin, Brian C. 1965. “Oscillatory Behavior in Enzymatic Control Processes.” Advances in Enzyme Regulation 3:425–28.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hardin, Paul E., Hall, Jeffrey C., and Rosbash, Michael. 1990. “Feedback of the Drosophila Period Gene Product on Circadian Cycling of Its Messenger RNA Levels.” Nature 343:536–40.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hitchcock, Christopher. 2003. “Of Humean Bondage.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54:1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hooker, Clifford A. 2013. “On the Import of Constraints in Complex Dynamical Systems.” Foundations of Science 18:757–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kim, Jaegwon. 1998. Mind in a Physical World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, David. 2000. “Causation as Influence.” Journal of Philosophy 97:182–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Machamer, Peter, Darden, Lindley, and Craver, Carl F.. 2000. “Thinking about Mechanisms.” Philosophy of Science 67:1–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mayr, Otto. 1970. The Origins of Feedback Control. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moreno, Alvaro, and Mossio, Matteo. 2015. Biological Autonomy: A Philosophical and Theoretical Inquiry. Dordrecht: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Noble, Denis. 2006. The Music of Life: Biology beyond the Genome. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pattee, Howard Hunt. 1971. “Physical Theories of Biological Co-ordination.” Quarterly Review of Biophysics 4:255–76.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ravasz, Erzsébet, Somera, A. L., Mongru, D. A., Oltvai, Zoltan N., and Barabási, Albert-László. 2002. “Hierarchical Organization of Modularity in Metabolic Networks.” Science 297:1551–55.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rosen, Robert. 1985. “Organisms as Causal Systems Which Are Not Mechanisms: An Essay into the Nature of Complexity.” In Theoretical Biology and Complexity: Three Essays on the Natural Philosophy of Complex Systems, ed. Rosen, Robert, 165–203. New York: Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenberg, Alex. 2015. “Making Mechanism Interesting.” Synthese. Electronically published May 30. doi:10.1007/s11229-015-0713-5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenblueth, Arturo, Wiener, Norbert, and Bigelow, Julian. 1943. “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology.” Philosophy of Science 10:18–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soom, Patrice. 2012. “Mechanisms, Determination and the Metaphysics of Neuroscience.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science C 43:655–64.Google ScholarPubMed
Sporns, Olaf. 2010. Networks of the Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watts, Duncan, and Strogratz, Steven. 1998. “Collective Dynamics of Small Worlds.” Nature 393:440–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Welsh, David K., Logothetis, Diomedes E., Meister, Markus, and Reppert, Steven M.. 1995. “Individual Neurons Dissociated from Rat Suprachiasmatic Nucleus Express Independently Phased Circadian Firing Rhythms.” Neuron 14:697–706.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wiener, Norbert. 1948. Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. New York: Wiley.Google ScholarPubMed
Zhang, Eric E., Liu, Andrew C., Hirota, Tsuyoshi, Miraglia, Loren J., Welch, Genevieve, Pongsawakul, Pagkapol Y., Liu, Xianzhong, Atwood, Ann, Huss, Jon W., Janes, Jeff, Su, Andrew I., Hogenesch, John B., and Kay, Steve A.. 2009. “A Genome-Wide RNAi Screen for Modifiers of the Circadian Clock in Human Cells.” Cell 139:199–210.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed