scholarly journals Top-down causation: an integrating theme within and across the sciences?

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-3 ◽  
Author(s):  
George F. R. Ellis ◽  
Denis Noble ◽  
Timothy O'Connor
Keyword(s):  
Downward Causation ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Adaptive Selection ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Holistic Concept ◽  
Scientific Context ◽  
Semantic Frames ◽  
Whole Systems

This issue of the journal is focused on ‘top-down (downward) causation'. The words in this title, however, already raise or beg many questions. Causation can be of many kinds. They form our ways of ordering our scientific understanding of the world, all the way from the reductive concept of cause as elementary objects exerting forces on each other, through to the more holistic concept of attractors towards which whole systems move, and to adaptive selection taking place in the context of an ecosystem. As for ‘top’ and ‘down’, in the present scientific context, these are clearly metaphorical, as some of the articles in this issue of the journal make clear. Do we therefore know what we are talking about? The meeting at the Royal Society on which this set of papers is based included philosophers as well as scientists, and some of those (Jeremy Butterfield, Barry Loewer, Alan Love, Samir Okasha and Eric Scerri) have contributed articles to this issue. We would like also to thank those (Claus Kiefer, Peter Menzies, Jerome Feldman and David Papineau) who contributed only to the discussion meeting. Their contributions were also valuable, both at the meeting and by influencing the articles that have been written by others. We include a glossary with this introduction, composed by one of us (O'Connor). The clarification of the use of words and their semantic frames is an important role of philosophy, and this was evident in the discussions at the meeting and is now evident in many of the articles published here. Moreover, philosophical analysis is not limited to the papers by the professional philosophers. The idea of top-down causation is intimately related to concepts of emergence; indeed, it is a key factor in strong theories of emergence.

Birds Without Borders

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 433-455
Author(s):  
Lino Camprubí
Keyword(s):  
Small Group ◽  
National Park ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Science Diplomacy ◽  
The World ◽  
Large Project ◽  
Environmental Diplomacy ◽  
Ecological Dimension

The Spanish Doñana Biological Station, inaugurated in 1964, poses two historiographical puzzles. First, it was the first large project of the World Wildlife Fund, which is usually seen as a response to the very specific post-imperial challenges of African parks. Second, it was the first non-alpine park in Spain, and although it was designed and inaugurated in the midst of Francisco Franco’s nationalist dictatorship, it was an explicitly transnational project. This paper approaches Doñana’s unique story through the concept of ecological diplomacy. It points to the diplomatic strategies mobilized by a small group of ecologists with managerial and financial skills. Promoting Doñana, British ornithologists presented it as an African wilderness, which created tensions with Spanish ecologists, themselves colonial scientists. Ecological diplomacy, moreover, refers to a characteristic period between conservation diplomacy and environmental diplomacy. In it, conservation was understood as the top-down management of foreign territories for research purposes. While this can be partly understood as the globalization of the Swiss model for conservation, it arrived in Spain through the mediation of the French Tour du Valat station and of English ecology. Finally, stressing the ecological dimension of this type of conservation diplomacy helps in studying the role of the science of ecology and its transformations. As Doñana became a national park, the WWF’s early emphasis on research was replaced by a new attention to recreation. Max Nicholson’s participation in the International Biology Program granted him an opportunity to favor this model when Doñana became a national park. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Science Diplomacy, edited by Giulia Rispoli and Simone Turchetti.

scholarly journals A Qualitative Study of Pre-Vaccine Decrease of Mortality from COVID-19

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vugar Mammadov ◽  
Lala Jafarova
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Health ◽  
Health Issues ◽  
Political Events ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
The Media ◽  
Global Nature ◽  
Restrictive Measures

More than a year has passed since the appearance of disease called COVID-19 in the world. This disease became the reason for unprecedented measures taken so far, having received the classification of pandemic. The world has faced with pandemics before, but society has not yet taken such unprecedented restrictive measures. The restrictions of not only local but even of global nature, such as the suspension of international flights, various scientific and political events were adopted around the world. Media resources have played a key role in the formation and development of the attitude towards the disease in people. Despite all the depressing news, the facts showed a low mortality rate, which is often ignored by the media. As a result, medical staff around the world have faced psychological health issues among the different groups of the population, especially vulnerable ones such as people with chronic disease and with weak immunity. At present, it is early to talk about the results and outcomes of the pandemic. However, previous year has taught us many lessons and can become a key factor in understanding the role of the media in pandemic times, developing strategies for combating diseases and protecting public health.

DEVELOPMENT OF EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE AT PRE-SCHOOL AGE

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-263
Author(s):  
Anzhela Ilieva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Intelligence ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
School Age ◽  
The Family ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Problems ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Core Idea ◽  
Current Report

The current report examines the question of development of emotional intelligence of children at a pre-school age as a part of the work on an Erasmus+ project „To hug the world“. The core idea of the project is to enhance the quality and efficiency of education at early child age, as well as emphasize equality, social convergence and active civil participation. The development of emotional intelligence is a key factor for the complete participation of a child in life, which sets the main goal of the current development and is targeted towards the children to grow up as active future members of society, ready to participate in its management and at the same time forming sense of compassion, belonging to societies wider than the family. The child as a participant in the project „To hug the world“ acquires the needed social knowledge and skills for fulfilling their role of a citizen, learns to solve interpersonal, local, national and global problems, showing constructive, pragmatic and critical thinking, freedom of thought and independence of will. Teaching children emotional intelligence, to acknowledge feelings, to understand where they come from and to learn to cope with them, sets the foundations of the most important skills for success and premise of full personal development at a later stage. In the current report, there are different techniques used by teachers of Kindergarten „Zname na mira“, Vratsa, targeted towards forming of emotional intelligence in children.

Designed Intervention

2021 ◽  
pp. 93-120
Author(s):  
Séverine Autesserre
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Intervention Strategy ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
Timor Leste ◽  
The World ◽  
International Aid Agencies

Chapter Four further explores the limitations of “Peace, Inc.”: the traditional way to end wars. United Nations peacekeepers, foreign diplomats, and the staff of many non-governmental organizations involved in conflict resolution share a specific way of seeing the world. They often assume that the only path to peace is through working with governments and national elites and mediating formal agreements between world leaders. As a result, most international aid agencies use a top-down strategy of intervention, ignoring the crucial role of local tensions in fueling violence. Foreign peacebuilders also regularly rely on other widely held beliefs, such as the notion that education, elections, and statebuilding always promote peace. Anecdotes from places as varied as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Timor-Leste, along with a detailed story of the massive international efforts in Congo, highlight the possibility for devastating consequences while explaining why these detrimental assumptions and this flawed intervention strategy nevertheless persist.

Finding the “Eye” Amid a Pandemic Storm: A Holistic Guide Toward Visual and Autonomic Balance

2020 ◽  
pp. 150-165
Keyword(s):  
Nervous System ◽  
Virtual Education ◽  
Autonomic Balance ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Sympathetic Response ◽  
The World ◽  
Visual Skill ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Vision Therapy

In March, 2020, the world was confronted with the COVID-19 pandemic and worldwide governmental orders to “shelter in place.” Within days of this externally imposed hardship, threatening plans for gathering in every community, behavioral optometry organized a platform for virtual education which united the vision therapy community in mutual self-education, shared over 55 countries around the globe. The following article is distilled from a 4-part series of lectures presented by the author, Dr. Samantha Slotnick, on “Making Remote Vision Therapy Valuable.” These lectures constitute a guide for acting in a supportive capacity for our patients, with attention to the reciprocal roles of a balanced, open and available visual process, and a balanced autonomic nervous system. It addresses the impact of the sympathetic response on the visual system, and offers guidance to help patients selfmodulate the state of their nervous systems, with both bottom-up and top-down direction. In particular it elucidates the role of the peripheral visual field in both stress modulation and binocular visual skill development. It offers recommendations on conducting optometric assessments through the telehealth interface, as well as providing vision therapy through a video-based portal. Through the hardship the pandemic has created, and the wonder of technology, this isolating experience may in fact serve as an opportunity to hone our single most valuable tool in our practice: Ourselves, and our ability to facilitate change for others.

scholarly journals A museologia e a construção de sua dimensão social: olhares e caminhos

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Chagas ◽  
Judite Primo ◽  
Claudia Storino ◽  
Paula Assuncao
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Singular Problems ◽  
The World ◽  
Theoretical Construction ◽  
The 19Th Century

To regard museology, in a special way, the so-called social museology or sociomuseology, conversing with ideas and notions that might be considered obvious, but which, perhaps, if examined by another angle, have something new to offer, is part of this essay’s objectives. Besides, it is relevant to ask: to whom is the obvious, obvious? Frequently, that which seems obvious to certain groups of specialists may not be obvious to a great majority of people. It’s in this sense that, wandering through obviousness, we may affirm that Social Museology or Sociomuseology did not arise out of nowhere and neither is it the result of illuminated intellectuals who brought out of themselves, of their essences, the museal or museistic light that was to illuminate the world; on the contrary, it emerged from wide-ranging discussions and clashes, of built-up of tensions, criticism, confrontations, experiences, reflections and practices that impacted museology and museums which had advanced from the 19th century into the 20th without submitting their paradigms to a critical analysis.In other words: social museology, or sociomuseology, is not the result of a theoretical construction that wants, at any cost, from the top down, to frame museums and different forms of thinking and practicing museology to its technical, scientific, artistic and philosophical dictates; on the contrary, it is a construction resulting from a specific historical context, that doesn’t have, and doesn’t want to have, a normative character; that presents singular answers to also singular problems and that, above all, explicitly assumes political and poetical commitments. Keywords: Museology; social museology; sociomuseology; education; memory; social role of museums.

scholarly journals Expectation-Based Gist Facilitation: Rapid Scene Understanding and the Role of Top-Down Information

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic McLean ◽  
Louis Renoult ◽  
George L. Malcolm
Keyword(s):  
Contextual Information ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Presentation Duration ◽  
The World ◽  
Scene Processing ◽  
Behavioural Experiments ◽  
Visual Properties ◽  
Trial Participants

AbstractScene meaning is processed rapidly, with ‘gist’ extracted even when presentation duration spans a few dozen milliseconds. This has led some to suggest a primacy of bottom-up information. However, gist research has typically relied on showing successions of unrelated scene images, contrary to our everyday experience in which the world unfolds around us in a predictable manner. Thus, we investigated whether top-down information – in the form of observers’ predictions of an upcoming scene – facilitates gist processing. Within each trial, participants (N=336) experienced a series of images, organised to represent an approach to a destination (e.g., walking down a sidewalk), followed by a final target scene either congruous or incongruous with the expected destination (e.g., a store interior or a bedroom). Over a series of behavioural experiments, we found that: appropriate expectations facilitated gist processing; inappropriate expectations interfered with gist processing; the effect of congruency was driven by provision of contextual information rather than the thematic coherence of approach images, and; expectation-based facilitation was most apparent when destination duration was most curtailed. We then investigated the neural correlates of predictability on scene processing using ERP (N=26). Congruency-related differences were found in a putative scene-selective ERP component, related to integrating visual properties (P2), and in later components related to contextual integration including semantic and syntactic coherence (N400 and P600, respectively). Taken together, these results suggest that in real-world situations, top-down predictions of an upcoming scene influence even the earliest stages of its processing, affecting both the integration of visual properties and meaning.

The Impact of Mobile Phone Uses in the Developing World

2021 ◽  
pp. 315-338
Author(s):  
Sylvain K. Cibangu ◽  
Donna Champion ◽  
Mark Hepworth
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Mobile Phone ◽  
Mobile Phones ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Top Down ◽  
The World ◽  
Socio Economic Development ◽  
The Impact

Around the turn of the year 2020, unprecedented challenges rocked the world, casting a spotlight on large swathes of the world's populations still unconnected and those connected being gravely plagued by inequalities and racism. The promises of rapid/digital mobile phone dissemination around the world have evaporated. To add to these woes, despite the amount of writings produced on mobile phones, Western bias is surprisingly unbridledly prevailing alongside the fêted wireless connections/apps. Expansive literature tends to present the rapid adoption of mobile phones among rural individuals, with little to no indication of how local values and voices are respected or promoted. This chapter is a study that undertook semi-structured interviews with 16 rural chiefs to inquire into ways in which mobile phones enabled socio-economic development in the rural Congo. Rather than using quantitative, large-scale, or top-down data, the study sought to give voice to chiefs themselves about the role of mobile phones.

scholarly journals Understanding violent extremism in the 21st century: The (re)emerging role of relative deprivation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas R. Kunst ◽  
Milan Obaidi
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Relative Deprivation ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Violent Extremism ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Right Wing Extremism

Recently, the world has experienced a wave of violent protest, and in particular Islamist and right-wing extremism have become increasing challenges for many societies. We argue that especially the experience of relative deprivation, that is the perception that oneself or one’s group is undeservingly worse off than others, can explain various, contemporary forms of violent extremism, including (a) low-power groups’ violent attempts to challenge the unequal status quo, (b) high-power groups’ violent defense of their privileged position, and sometimes even (c) people’s violent attempt to help out-groups in need. In light of recent research and growing social inequalities, we expect relative deprivation to be a key factor driving violent extremism across cultures and contexts in the 21st century.

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