Brain and Consciousness Independent Research Center, Andijan, Uzbekistan.
Biosystems. 2023 Jul;229:104925. doi: 10.1016/j.biosystems.2023.104925. Epub 2023 May 13.
Is information the other face of causation? This issue cannot be clarified without discussing how these both are related to physical laws, logic, computation, networks, bio-signaling, and the mind-body problem. The relation between information and causation is also intrinsically linked to many other concepts in complex systems theory such as emergence, self-organization, synergy, criticality, and hierarchy, which in turn involve various notions such as observer-dependence, dimensionality reduction, and especially downward causation. A canonical example proposed for downward causation is the collective behavior of the whole system at a macroscale that may affect the behavior of each its member at a microscale. In neuroscience, downward causation is suggested as a strong candidate to account for mental causation (free will). However, this would be possible only on the condition that information might have causal power. After introducing the Causal Equivalence Principle expanding the relativity principle for coarse-grained and fine-grained linear causal chains, and a set-theoretical definition of multiscale nested hierarchy composed of modular ⊂-chains, it is shown that downward causation can be spurious. It emerges only in the eyes of an observer, though, due to information that could not be obtained by "looking" exclusively at the behavior of a system at a microscale. On the other hand, since biological systems are hierarchically organized, this information gain is indicative of how information can be a function of scale in these systems and a prerequisite for scale-dependent emergence of cognition and consciousness in neural networks.
信息是否是因果关系的另一面？如果不讨论信息与物理定律、逻辑、计算、网络、生物信号以及身心问题之间的关系，这个问题就无法得到澄清。信息与因果关系之间的关系也与复杂系统理论中的许多其他概念密切相关，例如涌现、自组织、协同作用、临界性和层次性，这些概念又涉及到观察者依赖性、降维以及特别是下行因果关系等各种概念。为下行因果关系提出的一个典型例子是整个系统在宏观尺度上的集体行为，这种行为可能会影响其每个成员在微观尺度上的行为。在神经科学中，下行因果关系被认为是解释心理因果关系（自由意志）的一个强有力的候选者。然而，只有在信息可能具有因果力的情况下，这才是可能的。在引入扩展了粗粒和细粒线性因果链的相对性原理的因果等价原理，以及由模块化⊂-链组成的多尺度嵌套层次结构的集合论定义之后，表明下行因果关系可能是虚假的。尽管如此，由于信息是通过“观察”微观系统的行为而无法获得的，因此只有在观察者的眼中才会出现下行因果关系。另一方面，由于生物系统是分层组织的，因此这种信息增益表明信息在这些系统中如何成为尺度的函数，并且是神经网络中认知和意识的尺度依赖性涌现的前提。
