@dcm@bookwyrm.social
Intrigued! Do you have a good ref or pointer on the redescription complaint (of dyn sys in cog sci)?

@UlrikeHahn @dcm@social.sunet.se @awaisaftab @uh

@NicoleCRust @dcm@bookwyrm.social @UlrikeHahn @awaisaftab @uh This recent overview paper summarises a bit of that discussion and gives some of the key references on the first paragraph or so of section 3

https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phc3.12695

@dcm@social.sunet.se @NicoleCRust @dcm@bookwyrm.social @awaisaftab @uh thanks for the paper! I had a quick read through and it is helpful, but I wanted to draw attention to something that already struck me when I went back and read van Gelder, which is that dynamical systems and complex systems are not the same thing, though related, and some of the aspects of J’s book that I’m most interested in like the mereological (part/whole) issues aren’t really part of the discussion of DS (in cogsci)

@UlrikeHahn @NicoleCRust @dcm@bookwyrm.social @awaisaftab @uh that's true, I didn't mean to suggest that Juarrero is defending DST, mine was just an off-the-cuff parenthetical remark about potential analogies between Juarrero's notion of constraints and its problems, and some issues regarding DST and explanatory power.

Good though that it led to some interesting discussions! :)

@dcm@social.sunet.se @NicoleCRust @dcm@bookwyrm.social @awaisaftab @uh indeed! It’s just that, for me, the notion of constraint seems potentially really useful in a way that DS on its own is never going to be for me….see the exchange about rationality and psych a few weeks back - DS (certainly of the anti-representational bent) is just a step in the wrong direction for the things I’m interested in ;-)

so I wanted to highlight the bit that’s (?) different and new about J relative to those past debates…

@dcm@bookwyrm.social @UlrikeHahn @NicoleCRust @dcm@social.sunet.se @awaisaftab @uh

Full disclosure: I'm not reading Juarrero’s book. But I'm really enjoying your discussions.

I have a simple view of DST as an idea that literally models how nature moves forward. The motion aspect is important to me because in my field we want to understand development — cognitive, social/emotional, behavioural. DST helps me make sense of development and how internal and external circumstances both contribute to and constrain experience...

@dcm@bookwyrm.social @UlrikeHahn @NicoleCRust @dcm@social.sunet.se @awaisaftab @uh

A concrete example:
In vertebrates, the auditory system comes online prenatally, long before onset of the visual system, and so the former dominates the latter for a time following birth. Can you imagine how the immature and less experienced visual system would operate under constraints?...

@dcm@bookwyrm.social @UlrikeHahn @NicoleCRust @dcm@social.sunet.se @awaisaftab @uh

In most vertebrate species, the visual sensory system eventually turns the tables to dominate the auditory system. I believe that occurs in birds in the first few days of life with little individual difference. In humans, generally speaking, visual dominance takes a few years — with high context-specificity and considerable individual difference.

@dcm@bookwyrm.social @UlrikeHahn @NicoleCRust @dcm@social.sunet.se @awaisaftab @uh

Due credit to Gottlieb et al.(2006) who make mention of a "general lack of appreciation of the role of functional constraints or limitations in the realization of early patterns of perceptual organization."

Gottlieb et al. (2006). The Significance of Biology for Human Developmnt: A Developmental Psychobiological Systems View. In Lerner & Damon (Eds.), Handbook of child psychology: Theoretical models of human development (pp. 210–257). Wiley.

@dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dcm@social.sunet.se @awaisaftab @uh I’m more unsure than you about the new examples, Dimitri, and I’m still confused by the first one at the moment. It feels natural(ish?) to think of a real world group of objects and a process establishing connectivity between them and say something like ‘they became fully connected because the number of links exceeded ln(N), and that that feels not just like a description but like an explanation as something bound to happen. 1/n

@dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dcm@social.sunet.se @awaisaftab @uh in that way it feels constraint like? But what is it? I was thinking about logical constraints in the chapter on context independent constraints and that had me confused too. If one is thinking in terms of possibility spaces and what narrows them down (‘constrains’ them) then both logical constraints and the ln(N) threshold (whatever it is) feel as real as the notion of a possibility space itself (but what is the latter?)

@dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dcm@social.sunet.se @awaisaftab @uh 3/n but I’m also confused by the phase transition threshold in other ways: how is it like or unlike saying ‘if I have 2 objects and add one I now have >2’ because the transition threshold is neither strict (network doesn’t have to be conn.) or exact (it wouldn’t be wrong, in some sense, to say the network was connected because it had 1.5 ln(N) links…), and am I confusing a description with the constraint itself?….am lost in the weeds

@dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dcm@social.sunet.se @dsmith @awaisaftab @uh 4/n and very last thought: it’s a very long time ago that I read the Kauffmann book, but I remember the point of it as being that evolution alone is insufficient to explain life and life forms as we see them, and that further constraints on generating structure are required to render it as anything other than wildly improbable - cue emergence and complexity. So he presumably thought example shows meaningful constraints in action?

@dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dcm@social.sunet.se @dsmith @uh ..5/5 which links to Dylan’s point?

@dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dcm@social.sunet.se @dsmith @uh so is nobody else going to make more of a case that the constraints in the examples are real and have some degree of ‘causality’ or causal-like power?

@dcm@bookwyrm.social @UlrikeHahn @NicoleCRust @dcm@social.sunet.se @awaisaftab @uh

I like the term “constraint satisfaction” as it captures how conditions/experience can move an individual toward a regulated state (not unlike the synchronizing clocks).

cf: Blair describes causal role of SES, cortisone, etc., in emotional reactivity, school readiness.

Blair, C. (2002). School readiness: Integrating cognition and emotion in a neurobio conceptualization of children's functioning at school entry. The Amer Psych, 57, 111-127.

@dsmith @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dcm@social.sunet.se @awaisaftab @uh Dylan, I like the notion of constraint satisfaction in many contexts, but I think my specific problem here with these three examples is identifying what exactly *is* the constraint and what is its nature.

@UlrikeHahn @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dcm@social.sunet.se @awaisaftab @uh

I think I understand this difficulty. Not easy to describe a constraint... What caused your window to blow in, a specific wind or the entire storm? Any attempt to explain needs to account the big-picture storm, but then the explanation smacks of description.

Solution?.. I think the value of group discussion is that each of you brings diverse experience that can help all to "pan out" via concrete examples.

The Blair article is brilliant, btw.

@UlrikeHahn @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dcm@social.sunet.se @awaisaftab @uh

Back to the clocks... Any one of the clocks cannot continue to do just what it was doing because the other clocks create conditions (constraints) that keep it from doing so. That is, the other clocks are "canalizing" the behaviour of the clock in question.

@dsmith @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dcm@social.sunet.se @awaisaftab @uh

or is the resonator (the shelf) the constraint?

or is the fact that you cannot maintain the interfering vibrations the constraint?

and isn't the presence of the resonator also a context?

or is the context the thing that provides the physical manifestation of the constraint?

?????