12/9/2018 UAH-MCMP Workshop "Multiple Realizability, Causation and Reductive Explanations in Science" (6-7 March 2018) - Munich Center

Center for Mathema…

Hom e Eve nts W ork shops & C onfe re nce s

UAH-MC MP W ork shop "Multiple R e a liza bility, C a usa tion a nd R e ductive Ex pla na tions in Scie nce " (6-7 Ma rch 2018)

UAH-MCMP Workshop "Multiple Realizability, Causation and Reductive

Explanations in Science" (6-7 March 2018)

The Workshop is organized by the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP), LMU Munich, and the
Department of Philosophy, Alberto Hurtado University, Chile (UAH).

This workshop aims to promote an international forum to share knowledge, issues, and challenges related to
multiple realizability, causation and reductive explanations in science. Some of the questions that we will address
are: Is multiple realizability compatible with reduction? Should multiple realizability be understood as synonym of
universality? Do we have reasons to believe in top-down causation in science? Is supervenience a causal relation?
Does thermodynamics reduces to statistical mechanics? Are there examples of emergence in science? Does
Quantum Statistical Mechanics provide reductive explanations? Are Causal explanations in the high-level Sciences
Complete?

Speakers
Sergio Daniel Barberis (University of Buenos Aires)
Sebastian Fortin (University of Buenos Aires- CONICET)
Samuel Fletcher (MCMP/LMU)
Stephan Hartmann (MCMP/LMU)
Manuel Herrera Aros (University of Buenos Aires- CONICET)
Olimpia Lombardi (University of Buenos Aires- CONICET)
Francisco Pereira (UAH)
Patricia Palacios (MCMP/LMU)
Michael Strevens (NYU)

Organizers
Stephan Hartmann (MCMP/LMU)
Patricia Palacios (MCMP/LMU)
Francisco Pereira (UAH)

Registration
If you want to attend this workshop, please send notice to patricia.palacios@lrz.uni-muenchen.de.

Program

Day 1 (Tuesday, 6 March 2018)

Time Event

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10:15 - 11:15 Olimpia Lombardi and Sebastian Fortin: Multiple Realizability: Comparing Classical
Irreversibility and Decoherence

11:15 - 11:35 Coffee Break

11:35 - 12:35 Stephan Hartmann: Reductive Explanations in Quantum Statistical Mechanics

12:35 - 14:15 Lunch Break

14:15 - 15:15 Manuel Herrera Aros: Physical Causation, Conserved Quantities and General Relativity

15:15 - 15:35 Coffee Break

15:35 - 16:35 Samuel Fletcher: The Topology of Intertheoretic Reduction

19:30 Dinner

Day 1 (Wednesday, 7 March 2018)

Time Event

10:15 - 11:15 Patricia Palacios: On the Universality of Hawking Radiation

11:15 - 11:35 Coffee Break

11:35 - 12:35 Francisco Pereira: Multiple Realizabilty, Local Reduction and Psychological Eliminitavism

12:35 - 14:15 Lunch Break

14:15 - 15:15 Sergio Daniel Barberis: Direct Evidence of Multiple Realization of Memory in Mollusks

15:15 - 15:35 Coffee Break

15:35 - 16:35 Michael Strevens: The Whole Story: Explanatory Autonomy and Convergent Evolution

Abstracts

Sergio Daniel Barberis: Direct Evidence of Multiple Realization of Memory in Mollusks

In this paper, I revisit the neurobiological research on memory in mollusks and argue that there is direct evidence
that the same abstract computation is multiply realized in the vertical lobe of octopus and cuttlefish. The vertical
lobe (VL) of the central brain plays a fundamental role in learning and memory both in octopus and cuttlefish. The
network in the VL has been characterized as a ‘fan-out fan-in’ neural network. The tens of millions of amacrine
interneurons in the intermediate layer are innervated by the ‘fan-out’ input from the superior frontal lobe, which
integrate sensory information. The dendrites of the amacrine interneurons then ‘fan-in’ to innervate about 65000
efferent large neurons. In both the octopus and the cuttlefish the synaptic input to the amacrine interneurons is
glutamatergic, but only in the octopus is this synaptic connection endowed with a robust activity-dependent long-
term potentiation (LTP). Furthermore, the fan-in synaptic connections to the efferent large neurons is cholinergic in
both species, but only in the cuttlefish these synapses show a robust LTP.

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Samuel Fletcher: The Topology of Intertheoretic Reduction

I expound a new account of intertheoretic reduction as reductive explanation, showing how it incorporates a
version of the Nagelian account as a special case. In contrast to accounts that develop the latter, the one I
develop does not give up on providing a precise account of "analogy" or "approximation", for which the
mathematics of topology is central. I also explain how this account rules on a bevy of common distinctions:
reduction vs. emergence (sometimes compatible), synchronic vs. diachronic reduction (makes less of a difference
than it seems), ontological vs. epistemic reduction (depends on one's attitude towards a theory), and the
autonomy of the special sciences vs. reductionism (mostly compatible).

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Olimpia Lombardi and Sebastian Fortin: Multiple Realizability: Comparing Classical Irreversibility and
Decoherence

Originally, multiple realizability was proposed in the philosophy of mind as a non-reductionist position.
Nevertheless, it was immediately extrapolated to the relation between thermodynamics and mechanics: a single
thermodynamic state is realized by many different mechanical states. This many-to-one relationship has been
viewed as supporting the idea of the emergence of thermodynamic irreversibility from the time behavior of the
underlying mechanical states.
In this talk we will compare the case of the emergence of classical irreversibility with the case of the irreversibility
involved in quantum decoherence. In particular, we will show that the quantum case cannot be easily understood
in terms of a many-to-one relationship: the reduced state that evolves irreversibly is not a mere disjunction of
underlying quantum states. On this basis, we will give a unified view of the emergence of irreversibility, applicable
both to the classical and to the quantum case. According to this unified view, the relation between the macro-
emergent level and the micro-basal level is a generalized coarse-graining, mathematically defined as a projection.
It is this generalized-coarse graining, and not multiple realizability, the essential feature of this kind of emergence:
multiple realizability is only a particular case of generalized-coarse graining.

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Stephan Hartmann: Reductive Explanations in Quantum Statistical Mechanics

This talk explores to what extent Quantum Statistical Mechanics provides reductive explanations. I will introduce
the theoretical framework and then focus on the master equation approach which is widely used, for example, m
in quantum optics and quantum information theory.

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Manuel Herrera Aros: Physical Causation, Conserved Quantities and General Relativity

The Conserved Quantity Theory (CQT) of Phil Dowe proposes that the essence of causal relations is in the
possession and/or transmission of conserved quantities governed by conservation laws. This account of physical
causality presents serious problems when we try to apply it in general relativistic (GR) contexts. In this talk we try
to contribute with some precisions and/or clarifications in the CQT that allow us an adequate application of this
theory in GR. Furthermore, this analysis we will permit us to obtain a better understanding of the real reaches of
this theory.

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Patricia Palacios (with Karim Thébault and Sean Gryb): On the Universality of Hawking Radiation

Unruh and Schützhold (2005) suggested that the Hawking effect in black holes should be understood as a
universal phenomenon based upon generic insensitivity of the characteristic thermal flux to modified dispersion
relations. From that, they infer that the trans-Planckian problem is irrelevant to the Hawking effect in a way that
validates the many different approaches to derive the Hawking radiation. Nonetheless, some questions remain
open. For instance: Is the alleged universality of Hawking radiation of the same kind as the universality that
characterizes phase transitions in condensed matter systems? Are the mathematical methods used to derive the
universality of the Hawking radiation analogous to the methods used to infer the universality of critical
phenomena? In this contribution, we address these questions by comparing the methods used by Unruh and
Schützhold with the Wilsonian approach to renormalization.

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Francisco Pereira: Multiple Realizabilty, Local Reduction and Psychological Eliminitavism

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In this talk I will briefly introduce the relevance of multiple realizability for contemporary debates about the nature
of mental states/events. First, I will attempt to show that despite appearances we can reconcile the multiple
realizability thesis with type identity theories that rely on local reductions. Second, I will make some comments
regarding the status of psychological kinds if we accept that mental state types should be identified with species-
specific neurophysiological realizers as suggested by Kim (1992).

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Michael Strevens: The Whole Story: Explanatory Autonomy and Convergent Evolution

Causal explanations in the high-level sciences typically black-box the low-level details of the causal mechanisms
that they invoke to account for their explananda: economists black-box psychological processes; psychologists
black-box neural processes; and so on. Are these black-boxing explanatory models complete explanations of the
phenomena in question, or are they just sketches of or templates for the whole explanatory story? This paper
poses a focused version of the question in the context of convergent evolution, the existence of which appears to
show that underlying mechanisms are completely irrelevant to the explanation of high-level biological features—in
which case a black-boxing model would be a complete explanation of such features rather than a mere sketch.

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Venue
Sala Balcones, DINAMARCA 399, Valparaíso, Chile

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