uh commented on Context Changes Everything by Alicia Juarrero
#JuarreroBook Ch. 3 starts out by again highlighting the importance of “context” – which can by temporal, spatial or hybrid (includes aspects of both).
Spatial context is understood extremely broadly and includes “psychosociocultural situations such as economic conditions and social activities, as well as those physical, material, chemical, and biological conditions in which events and processes take place”
Context exerts influence through constraints. Constraints come in two variants: context-independent and context-dependent.
“By precipitating symmetry breaks and making entities and processes covary conditional on each other, constraints turn possibility spaces irregular.”
“Because numerous constraints must be continuously satisfied on many dimensions and time scales simultaneously, possibility spaces also reconfigure moment by moment in response to those multiple constraints, entrenched as well as current new ones. Possibility spaces are thus defined by their probability contour (Buchler 1977) or dynamic signature (Kelso 1995). I call it its profile.”
These possibility spaces are not just epistemic (possibilities we can conceive) but “real, bounded, and sculpted by constraints”.
She refers to phil. John Collier who identifies three pre-requisites of complexity: an energy source, gradients and interactions that convert some of the energy influx made available by gradients into structure.
She considers gradients to be constraints and interactions “can also be subsumed under the general notion of constraint” (are constraints?). The notion of ‘interaction’ here is one that goes beyond the ‘reversible bumping and jostling of Newtonian forceful impacts’.
‘coherence’ is a term for the “unity relations of complex systems like snowflakes, tornadoes, ..living things..ecosystems…cultures”
The rest of the chapter is examples of these various concepts some of which might be worth discussing
