WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

Erik Hoel, a 29-year-old theoretical neuroscientist and writer, quoted the passage in a recent essay in which he laid out his new mathematical explanation of how consciousness and agency arise. The existence of agents--beings with intentions and goal-oriented behavior--has long seemed profoundly at odds with the reductionist assumption that all behavior arises from mechanistic interactions between particles. Agency doesn't exist among the atoms, and so reductionism suggests agents don't exist at all: that Romeo's desires and psychological states are not the real causes of his actions, but merely approximate the unknowably complicated causes and effects between the atoms in his brain and surroundings.

Hoel's theory, called "causal emergence," roundly rejects this reductionist assumption.

"Causal emergence is a way of claiming that your agent description is really real," said Hoel, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University who first proposed the idea with Larissa Albantakis and Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "If you just say something like, 'Oh, my atoms made me do it'--well, that might not be true. And it might be provably not true." [...]

Hoel and collaborators have been developing the mathematics behind their idea since 2013. In a May paper in the journal Entropy, Hoel placed causal emergence on a firmer theoretical footing by showing that macro scales gain causal power in exactly the same way, mathematically, that error-correcting codes increase the amount of information that can be sent over information channels. 

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