#JuarreroBook Chapter 6 Part 2

so, moving on... The examples were meant to illustrate the notion of context dependent constraint, specifically context dependent enabling constraints:

"Enabling constraints (Pattee 1973; Salthe 1985; Juarrero 1999) are context-dependent constraints that irreversibly link and couple previously separate and entities at the same scale as the constraints."

e.g., "The rolling columns of fluid that constitute a Bénard cell are nothing other than interdependent, coherent dynamics generated by enabling constraints"

such " coordinated and coherent dynamics have emergent proper-ties their components severally do not, not least of which is their capacity to affect the properties and behaviors of those components that make them up. Phase locking, resonance, synchronization, and entrainment are emergent properties of coherently organized interdependent dynamics.Enabling context-dependent constraints are therefore constraints that make the probability of one event conditional upon another. "

"They irreversibly generate emergent and coherent, metastable patterns of matter and energy flow"

these patterns are coherent in the sense that the "interlocking and covarying interdependencies brought about by enabling constraints hold systemwide patterns of mutual dependence together across spatiotemporal scales."

"Complex systems ranging from convection cells to economic and ecosystems form and function in this fashion" (e.g., the pendulums and metronomes swing as one; the convection cells rotate as a unit)

These "complex entities formed by context-dependent constraints under conditions of nonequi-librium are coherent and persistent. Those interdependencies satisfy the second law: energy, matter, and information flow with greater ease as coordinated interdependencies than separately."

and "such coherent structures and dynamics constitute real and novel, interactional types of entities."

"Interactional types .... are internally consistent, multiscale,mutual dependencies brought about by enabling constraints operating against a stable background set by context-independent constraints ... They are measured with conditional probabilities..and ... they are multiply realizable in distinct tokens"

"They are the outcomes of multiple constraint satisfaction, a process of continuous adjustment of rates, weights, timing, and so on that satisfies as many constraints as possible."

hence "constraint satisfaction is an important form of “causality” that has been systematically ignored by modern science and philosophy. It can explain the generation and persistence of coherence."

and "in response to multiple constraint satisfaction, components acquire new relational roles and properties" that "reflect a real reconfigured probability distribution of events in possibility space."

Such enabling constraints include temporal enabling constraints - "contextual constraints that turn entities interdependent in time"

"Complex systems are therefore historical, not merely temporal; they embody temporal constraints in their very logic. They carry their history on their backs, as it were"

"Spatial and temporal constraints.. produce indexical ordering." that is

"First, second, and third, or before and after, are emergent ordinal properties of points in phase space structured by temporally organized constraints. Significantly, this distinction is possible only because individual steps in temporally constrained sequences are not independent of each other. The burst of entropy with which irreversible phase transitions are paid marks a qualitative transition to a now temporally organized phase space. This new space represents a novel four-dimensional landscape,a new distinct constraint regime organized by time as well as space."

"Long- lasting temporal constraints and the long-range temporal dependencies they induce also underpin persistent coherence, the temporal counterpart of stability"

Finally, ...." examples make clear that enabling constraints generate coherent dynamics whose boundaries need not be tangible, material structures"

"When enabling constraints weave together new coherences, autocorrelated dynamics are“lifted”—differentiated—from the contextual backdrop from which they emerged. Hurricanes, for example, are coherent structures sufficientlydistinct from their environment to be visible from space This notion of identity is quite different from the inherent essential traits of Aristotelian and Cartesian substances. It is grounded in persistent, extended, and dynamic interdependencies among individual entities; between entities and processes on the one hand and conditions in the environment on the other; and between all of these and the past."