@uh @UlrikeHahn

I will focus here on "context" as more than the "space and time" in which something is observed to be/happen. I would emphasize that this sense of "context" is always _relational_ and is always plays some active role in shaping/constraining the perceived object system.

You may notice my use of words such as "observed" and "perceived". I may be taking this notion further than Juarrero, but I have long thought that _any_ meaningful description of a system is incomplete without including the context of the _observer_. (Often the observer goes without saying, but is always there.)

I am reminded of my high school physics class back in the 1970s, where I baffled and frustrated the instructor by my insistent questions asking for clarification of his definition of "entropy" as disorder. I kept trying to get him to see that the state of disorder must (it seems to me) be relative to the state of some observer. He never got it. I gave up and answered his test question about whether a scrambled egg has more entropy than a pristine egg in the shell, neglecting that the state of scrambledness may have been precisely the outcome for which work was done, to constrain the outcome.

Still bothers me... I'll sit down now and behave.

#entropy, #context, #constraint #JuarreroBook

@uh @MolemanPeter @UlrikeHahn@fediscience.org @dcm@social.sunet.se

#JuarreroBook

Thanks for your thoughts Ulrike and Peter! I agree that those seem to be the aims of the book as stated in this chapter. However, I rather disliked this chapter. It provides a rather partial, oversimplified, and partly false historical reconstruction of many of the topics mentioned, making the dialectical setup rather unconvincing to me. In more detail: - the points about relations, interactions and context being seen as irrelevant or causally impotent fails to take into consideration the past 20 years or so of work on neo-mechanistic explanation, e.g. Bechtel, who tackle these things explicitly - similarly, the supposed mainstream consensus that cause and effect are purely a matter of energy-transferring processes does not exist. Currently (one of) the most influential theories of cause-effect is manipulationism (e.g. work by Woodward), in which energy-transfer plays no central role - it is not true that the consensus is that tokens of a kind differ only in secondary properties. Her own example of scorpions belonging to the same species denies this, as each scorpion differs from each other in many of their primary properties. There seems to be a conflation between primary properties and essential properties in her treatment. - saying in p.8 that the reason Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was controversial due just to its rejection of essence and immutability is a wild oversimplification - the whole depiction of reductionism is rather uncharitable, focusing exclusively on its crudest version, which pretty much no philosopher subscribes to today. Moreover, reductionism has been attacked and rejected by many philosophers of science already starting in the 70's, so it's very far from being anything like being the mainstream view - same for causation being only to be found at the level of quarks and electrons (actually, it's the opposite, it's difficult to make sense of causation at that level). Very few philosophers subscribe to this strong view. - there is a crude misinterpretation of the nature and motivations of Chalmers' Hard Problem of Consciousness, oversimplifying the whole debate. - on p.17, she seems to imply that naturalistic accounts of mind are just a no-go in current philosophy. The opposite is the case. Since at least the 1950s very few are dualists, and from the 70s on there has been a flurry of work on how to naturalise the mind, with a rather broad consensus around some version of functionalism + teleosemantics today. - the ontological picture she claims to be mainstream in philosophy today, the desert landscape sort of approach, is anything but. Since the 70's philosophers have been claiming that ontology, natural kinds, etc., are legion and go much beyond the kinds posited in physics.

In brief, I found this first chapter very frustrating. Hopefully the positive view she wants to put forward will not suffer from the weakness of this first, mostly negative chapter.

What do you think?

@uh @UlrikeHahn

I see that Juarrero defines "coherence" as the property of complex systems whereby their parts are integrated and coordinated into a unified whole. This integration and coordination is brought about by constraints, which operate across different scales and dimensions to weave together streams of energy, matter, and information flow.

It's a good definition, in my estimation. I have been concerned with the question of "coherence" and how relative coherence of two systems might be measured and compared, for a couple decades now, My specific interest is in application to comparing different models of (human) values, hierarchical and fine-grained. [I often refer to this in terms of "increasing coherence over increasing context"]

The best approach I have envisioned so far is in terms of maximizing flow through a network, and I'm inspired by her reference to weaving together streams of energy, matter, and information flow. I see some parallels to notions of trophic flow in ecological networks, and a certain "resonance" with Ulanowicz's thinking on "Ascendancy".

#coherence #context #ArrowOfMorality #JuarreroBook

@uh @UlrikeHahn

Comments on "Identity" in ch 1.

"Wisdom is seeing the edges" is a thought that struck me strongly in a moment back in the 70s while I was enjoying an altered state of consciousness and listening to Pink Floyd. I wrote a reminder to consider it later.

What I meant was that what matters about knowing something is not its "essence", whatever that might be, but its interactions—how it behaves at the edges, its interface with its context. That thought stuck with me and has been key to unraveling many of the common philosophical conundrums of "identity", "consciousness", "the self", moral agency at multiple levels of organization, and more.

It's reassuring to see Juarrero coming to a similar understanding seen from different angles. The main difference in our views appears to be my emphasis on the ineluctable role of the observer in any _description_ of reality.

"Paradox is always a problem of insufficient context—in the bigger picture all the pieces must fit."
- Jef

#JuarreroBook #identity #buddhism #paradox