Hierarchical Brain

Levels of description

Levels of description is a method that can be used to describe or explain a complex thing using multiple hierarchical levels. Features that do not exist at lower levels emerge at higher levels of description. These emergent higher level features, which can be concepts and/or behaviours, qualify as being real provided they have physical form and are associated with cause and effect.

When describing or explaining the brain, this method is crucial because many important brain functions can only be described at higher levels of description. I have proposed seven levels of description, each of which has emergent concepts or behaviours. For example, coincidence detection is a low-level emergent feature, the representation of concepts in the brain is mid-level emergent feature, and “the self”, consciousness and free will are high-level emergent features.

Alternative names

• In the phrase “levels of description”, “levels” are sometimes called “layers”, and “description” is sometimes “structure”, “explanation” or “organisation”.
  • Philosophers, who often tend to use more complicated terms, refer to “ontological levels”¹ for levels of description and “emergentism” or “epiphenomenon” for emergent concepts or behaviours.
  • As the Wikipedia entry for epiphenomenon suggests, I think the meaning of the word “epiphenomenon” has a broader meaning than the phrase “emergent feature”: an emergent feature arises only from multiple levels of description whereas an epiphenomenon can arise in other ways as well.

Multiple levels for complex systems

• The laws of physics are the most basic level of explanation there is for everything, but for any complicated system it may be necessary to describe things from higher-level viewpoints¹.
  • Most people accept that the laws of physics are the lowest level of explanation for everything in the universe, which means that, at least in theory, everything we know can be explained using only the laws of physics.
    • Not everyone accepts this premise, for various reasons.
    • If you do not accept this premise, then you are likely to have difficulty accepting a number of the arguments on this website.
    • I admit that we cannot be 100% sure that we know all the relevant laws of physics, or that the laws are all 100% correct, but from our current knowledge of the physical world, it seems highly unlikely that there are any relevant gaps or discrepancies at the levels that this website discusses.
  • For any complex system, defined as a system with many parts and many internal interactions^{4, 5}, it is likely to be very difficult, if not impossible, to explain everything in full detail using only very basic laws or principles.
  • Multiple hierarchical levels of description are then usually necessary to be able to obtain a reasonable explanation¹.
• A useful delineation of levels of description is one where at each level:
  1. useful things can be said purely about that level without reference to the details of the level(s) below;
  2. emergent concepts that do not exist at lower levels can be given a specific name, and can be defined and discussed;
  3. the physical make-up of the lower levels can, at least in theory, change without affecting the working of that level.
• Some prominent scientists have published papers that state that multiple levels of description and emergent features are required to describe the workings of the brain, and that this is familiar to other fields already^{6, 7}, but there seems to be little progress beyond this in describing what the levels should be or what the emergent features are.

Emergent features

• The primary way in which multiple levels are helpful is that new features, which can be concepts or behaviours, often emerge at the higher levels which can be given names and definitions, and can be usefully described and discussed^{2, 8}.
  • In practice, it is often the case that an already-known concept or feature defines a level (see the example of heat and temperature below).
  • These emergent features often turn out to be useful in helping to understand the system from a higher-level viewpoint without having to know about all the low level details.
  • An emergent feature is something that can only be defined at the level in which it appears, and which does not exist in lower levels^{2, 9, 11}.
  • However, I feel strongly that an emergent feature must be able to be explained in terms of the functionality of the level below.
    • This explanation may not always be a complete one, or the full details may not yet have been worked out.
    • The explanation may be in terms of probability (as in the examples of heat and temperature discussed below).
    • It may not easily be able to explain every detail of every occurrence, but it must have credibility.
  • If an emergent concept is not able to be explained from the functionality of the level below, then it can validly be criticised as being an invention or an illusion.
    • There have been many cases where people have argued that consciousness is an emergent concept of the brain, but have not explained how it emerges, or the mechanism by which it emerges, or what the levels below are (Google “emergent +consciousness” to see plenty of examples).
    • These are just “hand-waving” arguments and any conclusion must be that consciousness is an illusion, and therefore there is really very little point in discussing it further¹⁰.
    • The examples below such as temperature, pressure and words, are well-known and generally understood concepts that are clearly emergent, but that no-one would think of as illusions.
  • Sometimes an emergent feature is not useful in explaining the overall complex system. Just because an emergent feature in a system is easy to observe or measure, it does not necessarily mean that the feature will be helpful, and it may in fact be misleading.
    • An obvious early example of this related to the human brain is phrenology, the study of bumps on the skull, which was very popular in the nineteenth century, and persisted in some areas for many years.
      • It was obviously a feature that was very easy to measure and describe.
      • It has since been completely discredited and labelled as a pseudoscience.
      • It turned out that bumps on the outside of the skull had no relationship to the workings of the brain inside the skull, so in fact it was not an emergent feature of the brain at all.
    • It could be argued that a more recent example is so-called brain waves.
      • The electrical activity seen by an EEG machine is clearly an emergent feature of the activity of neurons in the brain, but the output is only dependent on the aggregate of many thousands or even millions of neurons with similar spatial orientation that are quite near the surface of the skull.
      • The results of EEG tests are helpful for the diagnosis of certain problems that affect large areas of the brain, such as epilepsy and sleep disorders.
      • But, despite many neuroscientists studying brainwaves over many years, classifying them (alpha, beta, delta etc.) and proposing theories about their significance, very little of use has been concluded about the actual working of the brain as a result.
      • There are hundreds of thousands of published papers based on EEG readings, and I suspect that a large proportion of these have been done solely because the data is easy to obtain, rather than because a useful result was likely, which is not a good scientific way to select a research method.
      • Sometimes the results of this research has been over-hyped or misunderstood, particularly in reviews^{12, 13}.
    • Unfortunately, there seems to be no scientific way to choose the levels or emergent features that are likely to be useful in describing or explaining the whole complex system.
  • Some writers have classified emergence as either strong or weak, but there does not seem to be a complete consensus of the exact meaning of these two terms¹⁴.
    • Weak emergence is where emergent features can be relatively easily explained from lower-level features, which I hope is the case with the levels I describe on these web pages.
    • Strong emergence generally implies that emergent features cannot be explained from the behaviour of lower-level features. This has led some to criticise these emergent features as being illusions¹⁰, and not compliant with basic laws of nature.
    • Strong emergence also sometimes means that the emergent features are difficult to explain from the underlying lower levels. So chaotic features such as the weather or the stock market might sometimes be described as strongly emergent features.
    • Sometimes it is said that an emergent concept is more than the sum of its parts¹⁵, although this is often meant in a philosophical or allegorical sense, not a physical sense. The quote is often attributed to Aristotle, and means that the whole has better qualities than the sum of the individual parts because of the effect of the combination. So this does not only apply to emergent concepts, but certainly could be true for them.
  • Other writers have tried to define different categories of emergence¹⁶, but I do not think that this helps much in identifying or describing emergence in the brain.

Downward causation

• Downward causation is the name given to the possibility of a higher level concept changing or affecting a lower level one.
  • It is certainly possible for a higher level concept to influence and change lower level features^{17, 20}. There are a number of examples of this below (clouds are a very simple example). This must be true in the brain if we believe our thoughts can affect our choices of actions, or our future thoughts.
  • One example, which may surprise you, is a web page like this. A hyperlink that you can click on is clearly a high-level concept, built on many lower levels such as transistors, bits and bytes, program code and http protocols. But when you click on a link, you are causing changes at nearly all these lower levels, which in turn cause changes to the higher levels, with the result that you end up on a different web page.
  • Downward causality is a requirement for a mental state within the brain to be able to cause an action. It terms of the proposals on this website, my self symbol schema uses downward causation to influence the activation of other symbol schemas, so causing thoughts and actions, and enabling my free will.

Examples of different levels of description with emergent features

• There are many familiar examples that might help clarify the concept.
  • Temperature, and more specifically heat and cold, are commonly understood concepts that we all happily talk about (and complain about!).
    • These concepts do not exist at the lowest level of atoms and molecules, they are emergent features, but we do not consider them to be illusions, they are very real to us, they have known causes and they also have easily-studied effects.
    • The temperature of a thing is actually a statistical effect dependent on the average speed of movement or energy of the atoms or molecules that make up the thing.
    • Temperature (or heat or cold) can in theory be described from the very basic laws of the interactions and movement of the molecules or atoms but if you want to discuss, measure or compare temperatures, it is far more useful to be able to use the higher-level emergent concept.
    • Temperature is a good example of a concept that was very well understood, defined and measured for many years before the lower level explanation was discovered. It only became obvious that it was an emergent concept when theories of thermodynamics and the existence and movement of molecules and atoms were discovered. Historically, there have been many other examples like this.
  • Another everyday example that everyone is happy discussing is a cloud.
    • A cloud is actually made up of millions of tiny individual ice particles, water droplets, and/or dust.
    • So the concept “cloud” is an emergent feature, it does not exist at the level of atoms or molecules, and not really even at the level of the individual particles of water, ice or dust.
    • The edges of a cloud are very fuzzy, you cannot point to exactly where it starts and finishes. When you get close to a cloud in an aeroplane, or when it gets close to the ground as a mist or fog, you may not be sure whether you are in it or out of it.
    • Its boundaries move apparently at random, it can get bigger or smaller, darker or lighter, and the whole mass can move in different directions at different speeds.
    • It can form apparently out of nothing, or fade and disappear into apparently nothing.
    • So it is a very amorphous form (“How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?” to quote from “The Sound of Music”!).
    • Despite all this, clouds have real effects - they cast shadows, cause temperature differences, hold and deposit rain, hail and snow, and are the main reason for us to admire a spectacular sunrise or sunset.
    • In particular, the brightness of a cloud, known as its albedo, can have a strong influence on the heat reflected, either back to earth or incoming solar radiation, and can therefore change the properties of molecules at lower levels of description, hence having a positive or negative feedback effect on whether more clouds are formed.
    • We talk about clouds, both in everyday conversation and in meteorology, where we even have multiple names for the different types.
    A cloud is a good analogy for a symbol schema, which is my name for a fuzzy set of neurons and the connections between them that represents a concept in the human brain. A symbol schema has many similar properties to a cloud, and also is a high level concept which is capable of influencing lower levels which in turn can change the behaviour of the symbol schema in a feedback loop.
  • As well as temperature and clouds, other concepts we use when talking about the weather are emergent features, such as humidity, wind and pressure.
  • Many areas of human life such as biology, economics and sociology are almost completely based on emergent concepts and have multiple levels below the ones we normally talk about, whether they are commonly known or not³.
  • Life itself is surely an emergent feature.
  • Other examples that are perhaps more relevant when it comes to discussions about the brain include computer apps, social media and smartphone screens; these all have a high level interface which is the level that we deal with, but we know that there are many lower levels of complex technicalities that we as users do not need to know about, and are usually not aware of, unless something goes wrong.
  • A more detailed example that uses multiple levels of description and has emergent features at several levels is that of a printed novel.
    • The lowest level could be the molecules of ink and paper, which, if a tiny sample were taken and analysed, could be described and explained by a chemist. In doing this, the chemist would not need to know anything about where the sample came from or what it was part of.
    • The next level up, the printed letters on the page, could be examined and described by someone interested in font styles, or an expert in the alphabets of the world languages, without reference to the lower level molecular details. In fact, the letters being examined could be on a completely different medium, for example a computer screen, without any change to their description. At this level, the concept of “letter” is an emergent feature, it does not exist at the lower level. Other concepts such as “alphabet” and “font” then follow.
    • The next level above the letters is the words, which can be analysed and described, and useful things can be said about them, for example about their frequency of use, without reference to the letters that make them up. In this case, any changes to the letters of the lower level would change the words, so the levels are not totally independent. At this level the concept of “word” is emergent.
    • There could be intermediate levels inserted here such as sentence, paragraph or page, but skipping on...
    • The highest level would be the things described in the novel: the plot, the characters, the events and the settings, which are all emergent concepts. These can all be discussed in a literature class, and interesting things can be said about them, with some reference to the actual words used, but no knowledge of the font used, and no reference whatsoever to the chemical make-up of the ink and paper, or which publishing medium was used.

Application of levels of description to an explanation of the human brain

• The human brain is certainly complex (it has been said that it is the most complex thing in the known universe - see mind-boggling brain), so it is very likely that multiple levels of description will be essential to be able to describe the functionality^{18, 19}. But the current status of the understanding of it is very unusual compared to other systems because we do not know how the concepts and levels fit together.
  • We have quite a good understanding of the lowest level(s), such as neurons and their synapse connections. It would be possible to start even lower with atoms and molecules, but since they are not unique to the brain, that would seem to be going too deep!
  • We tend to think that we have a good personal knowledge of the higher levels such as perception, attention and consciousness.
    • In fact, our supposed personal knowledge of the higher levels has been shown, by research and experiments particularly in the last fifty years or so, to be severely incomplete, and in some cases completely wrong, so we should not let our own biased views affect how we define the higher levels.
    • This is difficult, not least because the words we use for some of the higher-level concepts, such as perception and consciousness, may have unclear or various definitions. Hence I always try to define exactly what I mean by a concept on the relevant page.
    • The intermediate levels are more difficult to define and investigate.
  • The perceived difficulty in creating an explanation for higher levels (particularly feelings and consciousness) from the known lower levels has been called the explanatory gap.
  • So what intermediate levels might be useful in describing or explaining the human brain?
    • The symbol schema is the emergent concept that I started with when looking for a structure for these web pages. There is clear evidence that there are neurons in the brain that represent concepts, and it is generally believed that there must be a network of neurons and their synapse connections involved in this representation. But I was not aware of a helpful name (see symbol schema history for a discussion on various similar concepts and their names, including the strange term “grandmother cell”) and I had not come across any example of someone working through the implications of using this concept to define a level of description.
    • The model of my world is another emergent concept that I came to later. Many people seem to believe that the brain does build a model of the world, including the body and brain itself, but I was not aware that anyone had proposed details of how this could be used as a level in a hierarchical structure of levels of description of the human brain.
    • I found that other intermediate levels were needed between these when I started defining the details. In particular, I found it helpful to split up the processing of incoming sense data into several intermediate layers.
  • Once a symbol schema is defined as an emergent feature at a particular level of description, all higher-level functions such as perception and action can be defined in terms of symbol schemas, and there needs to be no reference to lower levels such as neurons and synapses.
    • An exact parallel can be drawn with temperature. Once temperature is defined as an emergent feature, higher-level functions can be defined in terms of temperature without reference to the energy of molecules.
    • Example for heat include pressure, heat transfer and compression, which then leads to the internal combustion engine, although of course the emergent nature of these concepts was not appreciated when the internal combustion engine was invented.
• One of the most promising theory of consciousness that I have come across is the Attention Schema Theory developed by Michael Graziano. This proposes that self-awareness arises from the brain’s model of attention.
  • This is very interesting, but, according to the model I have described on these web pages, does not go far enough, because it seems to me that self-awareness arises from the brain’s model of the self, and therefore is our perception of the self symbol schema.
  • The brain’s model of attention is our perception of our attention, based on the model of attention, which is part of the self symbol schema.
  • Perception of any object or concept is our view of the model of that object or concept, so of the symbol schema for that object or concept.
  So the model of the world is a crucial part of how we perceive the world and ourselves, hence the level of description of the brain at the level of the model is very important.

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References For information on references, see structure of this website - references

1. ^ ^ ^ Levels: Descriptive, Explanatory, and Ontological - List 2018
   doi: 10.1111/nous.12241 downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
   This wide-ranging philosophical paper attempts to provide a formal approach to levels of description, and answers some very pertinent questions.
   Bottom of page 1 to top of page 2: “Although it is widely held - though by no means universally accepted - that everything in the world is the product of fundamental physical processes, it is also widely recognized that, for many scientific purposes, the right level of description or explanation is not the fundamental physical one, but a 'higher' level, which abstracts away from microphysical details.”
2. ^ ^ Ibid. Levels: Descriptive, Explanatory, and Ontological
   (Because this is a philosophical paper, it uses lots of complicated words and phrases!)
   Page 18, second sentence under the heading “4.2 Are there emergent properties?”: “...a level-specific property is a property that may be instantiated by a world or object at a particular level. A higher-level property, in particular, is a property that may be instantiated by a world or object at a higher level. The notion of emergence refers to the idea that some properties may be instantiated at some higher level without being simultaneously instantiated at any lower level. Emergence is consistent with supervenience. We may say that a higher-level property is emergent if it supervenes on lower-level properties but is not generally accompanied by some corresponding ('type-equivalent') lower-level property.”
3. ^ Ibid. Levels: Descriptive, Explanatory, and Ontological
   Page 10, last paragraph under the heading “3.3 Levels of description”: “...we use different levels of description to think and speak about the world. In fundamental physics, we describe the world in different terms than in the special sciences, such as chemistry, biology, psychology, or the social sciences. And within each of these sciences, there are debates about which level of description is appropriate for the phenomena of interest: the level of individual molecules versus that of larger aggregates in physics and chemistry, the level of the cell versus that of the organism or ecosystem in biology, the level of the brain versus that of the mind in psychology, and the level of individuals versus that of larger social entities in the social sciences. The notion of a level of explanation is closely related to that of a level of description. An explanation at a particular level - say, a macroeconomic explanation - is an explanation that uses descriptions at that level.”
4. ^ The Consciousness Instinct - Gazzaniga published by Farrer, Straus and Giroux 2018
   Review of The Consciousness Instinct
   Page 109: “A system is complex if it has a large or diverse numbers of (a) components, (b) interconnections and interactions, and (c) resultant behaviours, some predictable, others not so much.”
5. ^ Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind - Gazzaniga, Ivry and Mangun, Fourth Edition 2014 Norton & Company USA.
   Page 626, Chapter 14 under the heading “Emergence”: “A complex system is one composed of many interconnected parts, such that when they self-organize into a single system, the resulting system exhibits one or more properties not obvious from the properties of the individual parts.”
6. ^ Neuroscience and the correct level of explanation for understanding mind - Gazzaniga 2010
   doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2010.04.005 downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
   This paper is a very interesting even for non-scientists. It says that if an alien intelligence came to earth and visited the best neuroscience laboratories, it would find lots of scientists probing the lowest levels of working of the human brain, but not understanding the higher levels of description that are needed to explain the mind. But the idea of emergence is commonly found in other disciplines.
   End of first paragraph after the abstract, page 1: “ Humans seem enthralled with measurement of underlying parts but don’t realize that they have lost the plot - the understanding of mind. ... other scientists working on other complex issues have no problem with the idea of emergence. Physicists, chemists, and biologists all know about it.”
7. ^ Emergent complex neural dynamics: the brain at the edge - Chialvo 2010
   doi: 10.1038/nphys1803 downloadable here.
   Page 2 under the heading “Emergence”: “It is accepted that almost all macroscopic phenomena - from superconductivity to gravity and from economics to photosynthesis - are the consequence of an underlying collective dynamics of their microscopic components. In neuroscience, it is the macroscopic behaviour (cognitive, emotional, motor, etc) aspect that will be ultimately understood as the emergent phenomena of an underlying neuronal collective. However, neurons being nonlinear elements, makes such understanding far from straightforward. It would be fair to say that while the problem is cast in terms most familiar to biology the solution is written in terms very familiar to physics. Let’s recall what emergent phenomena are. Emergence refers to the unexpected collective spatiotemporal patterns exhibited by large complex systems. In this context, 'unexpected' shows our inability (mathematical and otherwise) to derive such emergent patterns from the equations describing the dynamics of the individual parts of the system. ...complex systems are usually large conglomerates of interacting elements, each one exhibiting some sort of nonlinear dynamics.”
8. ^ Ibid. Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind
   Page 626, Chapter 14 under the heading “Emergence”: “Emergence, then, is the arising of a new structure (previously nonexistent), with a new level of organization and new properties, that occurs during the self-organization of a complex system.”
9. ^ Ibid. Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind
   Page 627, Chapter 14 under the heading “Emergence”: “...at different levels of structure, there are different types of organization with unique types of interactions governed by their own laws; and that one emerges from the other.”
10. ^ ^ Ibid. Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind
    Page 627, Chapter 14 under the heading “Emergence”: “Emergence is not a mystical ghost in the machine, however. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature. The job of the neuroscientist is to understand the relationship between one level of organisation and another, not to deny they exist.”
11. ^ Emergence as a construct: History and issues - Goldstein 1999
    doi: 10.1207/s15327000em0101_4 downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
    This article is an excellent summary of emergence, although not specifically about the brain.
    First paragraph: “Emergence ...refers to the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns, and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems.”
    The second page also has a detailed and technical list of properties of emergent phenomena.
12. ^ Our Brains Compress Memory Files Like Computers, for Quick Access Later - Newsweek magazine January 2016
    “...researchers announced the discovery of a mechanism that compresses information we use for memory retrieval and planning future actions, and encodes that data onto a brain wave frequency that’s separate from the one our brains use to record experiences in real time. This second brain wave frequency is the one we use to play back memories much faster than they actually happened, the researchers found.”
    This Newsweek magazine summary is reporting on a paper published in the journal “Neuron”:
    Spatial Sequence Coding Differs during Slow and Fast Gamma Rhythms in the Hippocampus - Zheng, Bieri, Hsiao and Colgin 2016
    doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.12.005 downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
    
13. ^ Multitasking by Brain Wave - Scientific American magazine May 2016
    “...past research suggests that when place cells encode spatial memories they produce theta waves, which operate on a relatively slow, long-wave frequency. Yet these theta oscillations do not work alone. They also contain shorter and more frequent gamma rhythms nested within them like folded accordion bellows. As each wave of electrical activity pops up at the gamma frequency, it conveys information nuggets to the interacting theta wave, effectively presenting a highlights reel relative to the longer theta wave.”
    
14. ^ Conflicting emergences. Weak vs. strong emergence for the modelling of brain function - Turkheimer, Hellyer, Kehagia, Expert, Lord, Vohryzek, De Faria Dafflon, Brammer, Leech 2019
    doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.01.023 downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
    Page 5, fourth paragraph: “Modern Emergence can be divided into two epistemological types: strong and weak. A system is said to exhibit strong emergence when its behaviour, or the consequence of its behaviour, exceeds the limits of its constituent parts. Thus the resulting behavioural properties of the system are caused by the interaction of the different layers of that system, but they cannot be derived simply by analysing the rules and individual parts that make up the system. Weak emergence on the other hand, differs in the sense that whilst the emergent behaviour of the system is the product of interactions between its various layers, that behaviour is entirely encapsulated by the confines of the system itself, and as such, can be fully explained simply though an analysis of interactions between its elemental units.”
15. ^ Understanding complexity in the human brain - Bassett and Gazzaniga 2011
    doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2011.03.006 downloadable here or see GoogleScholar.
    Page 204 under the heading “Emergence”: “Multiscale organization is one hallmark of complex systems and provides the structural basis for another defining phenomenon; this is the concept of emergence in which the behavior, function and/or other properties of the system (e.g. consciousness or the subjective features of consciousness - qualia) are more than the sum of the system’s parts at any particular level or across levels. In fact, such system properties can emerge from complex patterns of underlying subsystems.”
    
16. ^ Ibid. Understanding complexity in the human brain
    Page 205 under the heading “Types of emergence”: “Understanding the brain depends significantly on understanding its emergent properties. What type of emergence characterizes the brain system? Are different types of emergence present between different levels of the multi scale system? When is the interaction between levels simply correlational and when is it causal? In describing emergence, several different categories are often used including substance (a baby emerges from a mother), conjunction (two parts can perform a different function than either part separately), property (wetness is not a property of a molecule but of a group of molecules), structural (three lines make a triangle), functional (letters form words) and real (a cell is alive unlike the molecules of which it is made) emergence. The mind emerges from the brain in a way that is arguably unlike any of these weak types of emergence. The mind-brain emergence therefore requires a tailored definition. Mental states emerge from physical states by strong emergence, that is in a non reducible and highly dependent manner: mental properties do not exist or change unless physical properties exist or change.”
    
17. ^ Ibid. Understanding complexity in the human brain
    Page 205 under the heading “Bidirectional causation and complementarity”: “Emergence is characterized by a higher-level phenomenon stemming from a lower system level; that is, emergence is upward. However, an important property of the brain, as opposed to some other complex systems, is that emergent phenomena can feedback to lower levels, causing lower level changes through what is called downward causation. The combination of upward emergence and downward causation suggests a simple bidirectionality or more nuanced mutual complementarity that adds to the complexity of the system, and underscores the fact that the emergence of mental properties cannot be understood using fundamental reductionism.”
18. ^ Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter Penguin Books UK 1979
    This fascinating book, despite its title, is mostly about the functioning of the brain, although it covers many other subjects as well.
    See chapter 10, page 285 onwards, under the heading “Levels of Description”, for a general discussion on levels of description.
    Chapter 17, under the heading “Formal and Informal Systems” on Page 559: “The only way to understand such a complex system as a brain is by chunking it on higher and higher levels, and thereby losing some precision at each step.”
19. ^ I am a strange loop - Douglas Hofstadter 2007 Basic Books or see GoogleScholar.
    Chapter 2 of this book, entitled “This Teetering Bulb of Dread and Dream” is an excellent discussion on why multiple levels of description are likely to be required to be able to explain the workings of the brain.
    Page 30 (bottom) under the heading “The Terribly Thirsty Beer Can”: “Dealing with brains as multi-level systems is essential if we are to make even the slightest progress in analyzing elusive mental phenomena such as perception, concepts, thinking, consciousness, 'I', free will, and so forth.”
    Page 35 (top) under the heading “Thinkodynamics and Statistical Mentalics”: “... there is not, in the brain, just one single natural upward jump, as there is in a gas, all the way from the basic constituents to the whole thing; rather, there are many way-stations in the upward passage from mentalics [low-level components of the brain] to thinkodynamics [high-level concepts such as consciousness], and this means that it is particularly hard for us to see, or even to imagine, the ground-level, neural-level explanation...”
20. ^ Ibid. I am a strange loop
    Page 176, the last sentence of Chapter 12, entitled “Downward Causality” : “...the most efficient way to think about brains that have symbols - and for most purposes, the truest way - is to think that the microstuff inside them is pushed around by ideas and desires, rather than the reverse.”

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