uh commented on Context Changes Everything by Alicia Juarrero
#JuarreroBook Ch. 7 “Catalysts, Loops, and Closure” Part I
This chapter (finally) moves the book to more interesting examples: systems and processes exhibiting “self-organizing self-cause” and richer mereological (part-whole) relationships.
The example is catalysts and the way they function as context-dependent constraints (reminder: the constraints that create dependencies).
“Catalysts speed up chemical reactions by lowering barriers to energy flow and thereby facilitating irreversible interactions without being consumed themselves.”
as such, they illustrate the general property of context-dependent constraints whereby they “weave together interlocking dependencies without directly injecting energy”
nb “Folding-back-on-themselves processes such as feedforward and feedback loops are also catalysts. Iteration and recursion are two such examples”
“In recursive iteration, full sequences are fed back on themselves. This looping causes processes and sequences to become self-referential; recursive iteration blurs the distinction between parts and wholes.”
“Iteration and recursion feed information from the context back into the next sequence as newly initialized conditions and constraints. Such looped and contextually constraining and constrained interactions effectively import spatial and temporal information about the world into those processes and their properties. As a result, the processes become interdependent and covary with events in the world.”
One example J. lists is backpropagation and the way weight modification in neural networks leads the system to attune to meaningful real-world distinctions
“It is important to note that recursion and iteration are possible only after temporal dependencies (straightforward sequences) have already formed in response to enabling, context-dependent constraints. That is, recursion and iteration are not possible without previously constrained ordinal relations. That said, however, when the last step of a sequence feeds back to become the first in the next iteration, the looping creates self- referential configurations and nonlinearities. Nonlinearities generate multiscale and multidimensional interdependencies.”
Iteration and recursion are “hybrid constraints”: “Both take systems farther from equilibrium ..so.. qualify as context-independent constraints. But by feeding real world information back into the process, iteration and recursion also weave context, history, and the subject’s own actions into a more encompassing coordination dynamic—the spatiotemporally more extended nterdependencies of a new context. In this role, ..they..function as context-dependent constraints. Once recursive or iterative loops close thanks to integration by enabling constraints, real-world spatiotemporal information becomes embodied in a qualitatively distinct set of interlocking relations with novel properties"
one example discussed later in the chapter is the Plaut & Shallice (1991), Hinton & Shallice (1991) connectionist model of deep dyslexia
