#JuarreroBook Ch. 3 starts out by again highlighting the importance of “context” – which can by temporal, spatial or hybrid (includes aspects of both).

Spatial context is understood extremely broadly and includes “psychosociocultural situations such as economic conditions and social activities, as well as those physical, material, chemical, and biological conditions in which events and processes take place”

Context exerts influence through constraints. Constraints come in two variants: context-independent and context-dependent.

“By precipitating symmetry breaks and making entities and processes covary conditional on each other, constraints turn possibility spaces irregular.”

“Because numerous constraints must be continuously satisfied on many dimensions and time scales simultaneously, possibility spaces also reconfigure moment by moment in response to those multiple constraints, entrenched as well as current new ones. Possibility spaces are thus defined by their probability contour (Buchler 1977) or dynamic signature (Kelso 1995). I call it its profile.”

These possibility spaces are not just epistemic (possibilities we can conceive) but “real, bounded, and sculpted by constraints”.

She refers to phil. John Collier who identifies three pre-requisites of complexity: an energy source, gradients and interactions that convert some of the energy influx made available by gradients into structure.

She considers gradients to be constraints and interactions “can also be subsumed under the general notion of constraint” (are constraints?). The notion of ‘interaction’ here is one that goes beyond the ‘reversible bumping and jostling of Newtonian forceful impacts’.

‘coherence’ is a term for the “unity relations of complex systems like snowflakes, tornadoes, ..living things..ecosystems…cultures”

The rest of the chapter is examples of these various concepts some of which might be worth discussing

@uh Ulrike and Dimitri, I have been busy elsewhere. Returning to your excellent summaries and replies I have to make some comments on where I come from. I will reread the chapters and come up with comments later, if I think I have to say something valuable. I am a (psycho)pharmacologist from education and a (partial?) neuroscientist because I studied more than pharmacology. I am certainly not a philosopher like you. Your comments help me to understand that angle of reading the book. What is appealing to me is that Juarrero (and some other writers I studied, like Collier, Jaeger, Metzinger) leave the 'old school' approach of how the brain works behind. I think the approach of the brain doing calculations, using algorithms, certain nuclei or parts doing specific tasks etc is at least one-sided and maybe wrong. I am pretty sure that the reductionist view that what the brain does can in the end be explained bottom-up, ie the total of neuronal (and other cells) activity, is wrong. That is why the idea of top-down causation eg (and emergence and more) is appealing to me. Your discussions and previous ones on Mastodon help to keep (or get) me grounded. I think my intuition that Juarrero is on to something is healthy, but I search for information that helps me evaluate to what extend my intuitions are correct (it is stupid to deny intuitions, but they are dangerous to trust). So thanks so far and I will be back.