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Alicia Juarrero: Context Changes Everything (2023, MIT Press, The MIT Press)

#JuarreroBook Ch. 6, final part

We’ve been on context-dependent constraints- constraints that create non-independence. There are two types:

“Some context-dependent constraints are enabling constraints; others are constitutive (Mossio 2013; Moreno and Mossio 2016) or governing. 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.”

These enabling constraints generate “constitutive constraint architectures of complex interdependencies” which in turn do “double duty as governing constraints”.

“Governing constraints ..exert control on their components and behavior in cascades of mutual constraint satisfaction” and “tie together individual and population levels dynamics, parts, and wholes”, ..stabilizing “the possibility space” within which the behavior of individual parts “must remain for the constrained global pattern to persist.”

Basically, “governing constraints of context-dependent coherent dynamics generated by enabling constraints keep mutually dependent relations coherent. They regulate component processes top down such that the overarching dynamic remains metastable. Collective properties of constitutive constraint regimes do so by raising or lowering barriers to energy flow, adjusting timing and activation strength, as conditions warrant.”

replied to uh's status

In that sense, governing constraints are “distributed mechanisms of control”, and “the way complex systems regulate and control their constituents”.

“Reinterpreted in terms of constraint, top down causation is real” e.g., in the example of a group marching in synchrony across a bridge, the synchronization pattern itself (an emergent property..) not only “can collapse the bridge, it also acts as a global governing constraint on the tempo of the individual soldiers’ cadence, whose steps become entrained to the beat”

at the same time, “constitutive and governing constraints should not be reified; they are not spatiotemporally other than the components and constraints from which they were formed and which they control. Because they operate from whole to parts (from extant, coherent interdependencies to token components, or to next step), governing con-straints are in fact second-order context-dependent constraints (Juarrero1999) that bring about specific effects and actions.”

“They select and filter internal and …

@uh

notable also: law and legal systems are specifically mentioned as governing constraints (pg. 85)

there's one thing I don't understand at all, though:

that constraints tie together individual and population level dynamics, parts, and wholes *through the propagation of information* (pg. 79)