@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?

@UlrikeHahn @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh not me! I don't think Juarrero made a good case for those examples, and I still don't quite understand what she means by constraint, let alone the many different kinds of constraint she identifies.

@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.

@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.

@UlrikeHahn @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh I see, then I don't think I understand the example: don't they interact through weight, friction, etc., once they are connected by the string?

@dcm@social.sunet.se @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh they do, but the thing that’s at issue is why they are suddenly all connected. What ‘caused’ that?