#JuarreroBook Ch. 2

The chapter gives a roadmap of the book. The goal: the conclusion that coherence, wholeness, and identity arise from the operation of constraints. More specifically, an argument that “that complex systems, living and nonliving, are coherent dynamics analogously generated by enabling constraints”.

The means: consideration of the dynamics of complex systems which reframes notions of cause and effect, wholeness, relations, context and history.

The systems of interest are so-called dissipative structures – open systems far from equilibrium that exchange matter, energy, and in information with their environment. Such systems “self organize and act as coherent totalities in response to constraints” and “persist as themselves in a paradoxical state of dynamic stability despite being in non-thermal equilibrium”.

Context-dependent constraints induce integration and coordination that leaves marks on interacting ‘parts’ or elements in the sense of multiscale and multidimensional coherent dynamics (patterns of energy, matter, and information flow) that “transform erstwhile separate and isolated elements into interdependent skeins”.

“erstwhile independent elements from which the coherent dynamics were generated are in- formed by the constrained relations in which they are now embedded and on which they are now conditional. These interlocking relations become governing constraints that hold those coherent dynamics together and contribute to their persistence.” “These dynamics are simultaneously constraining AND constrained.”

“constraints” are factors (both context independent and independent) that shapre the possibility space of a system. They are not “forceful causes” (efficient causes transferring energy billiard ball style), and the word “constraint” is chosen to avoid the baggage of past causal language. An example is a roundabout that constrains traffic flow and to give rise to very different possibilities than traffic lights.

They give rise to wholes with meta-stability (flexible and dynamic steady state behaviour that remains in thermal non-equilibrium). The constraints and dynamics involved simultaneously span multiple scales, and allow ‘downward causation’ from wholes to parts, ie elements constrained to interact in certain ways loop down to affect those very parts. That mereological influence is “real”, as are the interactions, the wholes and their powers. None of this conflicts with causal closure, because constraints are not forces.

“Context“ includes both time and space and it modulates/co-determines outcomes.