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@dcm@social.sunet.se @uh @dcm@bookwyrm.social @MolemanPeter @NicoleCRust it might be an idea to make a table of the various examples and put them in the right columns to help better grasp the distinction between the two.

Relatedly, I’m also not yet entirely sure why the distinction is really needed, and why talk of “constraints” (of which there will be many types) isn’t simply enough.

@UlrikeHahn @uh @dcm@bookwyrm.social @MolemanPeter @NicoleCRust Hopefully the next chapter will make this clearer, for now I also don't get what that distinction is supposed to give us. Maybe it's just the trivial idea that some constraints are always there, and some may be there only in some contexts? Say, an antelope by itself is constrained by gravity, biology, etc, but in a population it becomes part of a predator-prey dynamic.

@UlrikeHahn @uh @dcm@bookwyrm.social @MolemanPeter @NicoleCRust My interpretation of the deviation from randomness point is just the point that context-independent constraints are stable, thus making the world fairly stable too, or 'organised'.
If so, then it's just a sort of a terminological (obscure) variant to claiming that there are laws of nature or regularities that make our universe stable, organised, rich in patterns, etc.

@MolemanPeter @UlrikeHahn @uh @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust right, and the constraints introduced by gravity themselves depend on context... e.g., what planet one is in, in water or not... so I don't think my attempt to make sense of the distinction works, indeed.

On information: does she say what she means by it? I vaguely (mis)remember something about it not being Shannon information, but not sure what is meant then.

@dcm@social.sunet.se @UlrikeHahn @uh @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust This may not help, because it is out of context. But it hints where it is going. And you see it is towards the end of the book.
"Processing information by recoding signals into self-organized continuous variables in this manner consumes less energy than digitally processing each separate and individual raw physical signal every time. It is also more noise tolerant."
Juarrero, Alicia. Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence (p. 158). MIT Press. Kindle-editie.

@MolemanPeter @UlrikeHahn @uh @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust yes, but my attempt was just to understand the distinction between context-independent and context-dependent constraints, which seems to be orthogonal to external vs internal.
Indeed without knowing what she means by self-organised continuous variables it does not help much. In any case, that passage seems to be about the format of encoding rather than information proper.