Downward causation

[1] The term was originally coined in 1974 by the philosopher and social scientist Donald T.

Downward causation does not occur by direct causal effects from higher to lower levels of system organisation.

As a result, inputs from the environment signal to the mechanisms at lower levels of organisation that something is wrong and therefore, to act.

Another special case of downward causation is supervised learning (of neuronal networks) in which both behavior and environment govern the propagation from higher to lower levels.

This leads to a unique form of a causal interaction pattern—called a practopoietic loop (cycle) of causation.