CONCEPT
Downward Causation
Roger Sperry’s claim that higher levels of organization—in particular, the mind—exercise genuine causal power over the lower-level processes that produce them, so that conscious mental states actually move neurons rather than merely accompanying them.
Downward causation is the most controversial and most consequential element of
Roger Sperry’s mature philosophy of mind, and the one that most directly challenges the way we talk about artificial intelligence. Having proven that consciousness could be divided by a surgeon’s knife, Sperry turned to the question of what consciousness is and whether it does anything. His answer was that
consciousness is an emergent property of brain organization that, once it emerges, reaches back down and governs the lower-level neural processes from which it arises—that mind is not merely the result of neural activity but a cause of it, a higher-order pattern that steers the lower-order activity without suspending physical law. The image he used was a wheel rolling downhill: the molecules in the wheel obey all the usual laws of physics, yet where any particular molecule goes is determined not just by forces from its neighbors but by the fact that it is embedded in a rolling wheel. The whole