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

I’m confused by the terminology too, but I’m thinking more and more that one’s opinion on both the notion and on the examples is going to be determined by how one thinks about possibilities or possibility spaces. If you start with those, then the notion of a constraint seems natural, and if you think of those possibilities in some sense as ‘real’, then constraints will be ‘real’ to that extent also.

@UlrikeHahn @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh I agree, I just don't quite get why we should take that as competition to the familiar causal picture: constraints may capture patterns in nature, which are though underlain by familiar kinds of causal relations. So explanatorily useful in some cases, and capturing something real (as those patterns are real), but still no threat to the mainstream causal view, as J. seems to think.

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

Maybe it would help to articulate ‘the mainstream picture’, causal or otherwise, on the buttons example as you see it? What is the story with respect to “a connected network emerged”, and it “emerged when there were x many links”?

@UlrikeHahn @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh that sort of behaviour of the buttons depends on how they interact causally with each other, I would imagine, and this in some cases and under certain conditions generates a sort of network pattern, which just is the ensemble of those causal interactions. Something along these lines would be the typical causal picture?

@dcm@social.sunet.se @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh in the example, they aren’t interacting at all. It’s just someone going around randomly tying bits of string between pairs of them.