Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence

From the influential author of Dynamics in Action, how the concepts of constraints provide a way to rethink relationships, opening the way to intentional, meaningful causation. From the influential author of Dynamics in Action, how the concepts of constraints provide a way to rethink relationships, opening the way to intentional, meaningful causation. Grounding her work in the problem of causation, Alicia Juarrero challenges previously held beliefs that only forceful impacts are causes. Constraints, she claims, bring about effects as well, and they enable the emergence of coherence. In Context Changes Everything, Juarrero shows that coherence is induced by enabling constraints, not forceful causes, and that the resulting coherence is then maintained by constitutive constraints. Constitutive constraints, in turn, become governing constraints that regulate and modulate the way coherent entities behave. Using the tools of complexity science, she offers a rigorously scientific understanding of identity, hierarchy, and top-down causation, and in so doing, presents a new way of thinking about the natural world. Juarrero argues that personal identity, which has been thought to be conferred through internal traits (essential natures), is grounded in dynamic interdependencies that keep coherent structures whole. This challenges our ideas of identity, as well as the notion that stability means inflexible rigidity. On the contrary, stable entities are brittle and cannot persist. Complexity science, says Juarrero, can shape how we meet the world, how what emerges from our interactions finds coherence, and how humans can shape identities that are robust and resilient. This framework has significant implications for sociology, economics, political theory, business, and knowledge management, as well as psychology, religion, and theology. It points to a more expansive and synthetic philosophy about who we are and about the coherence of living and nonliving things alike.

Table of Contents:
I
1 What Went Wrong? The Backstory 3
2 The Path Forward 21
II 
3 Constraints: An Introduction 35
4 Context-Independent Constraints 49
5 Why Context Matters--An Interlude 59
6 Context-Dependent Constraints 67
7 Catalysts, Loops, and Closure 87
8 An Abundance of Constraints 103
9 Persistence--Delaying the Second Law 129
10 Sedimentation and Entrenchment 143
11 Many-to-One Transitions, Effective and Analog Control 155
12 Of Holons, Holarchy, Heterarchy, and Hierarchy 177
III
13 The Backstory, Today 197
14 Multiple Realization and Supervenience: A Philosophical Case Study about Constraints 211
15 Empirical Research on Delayed Response: Neuroscience Case Studies about Constraints 223
16 Concluding Remarks 233
Notes 239
References 247
Index 263

About the Author :
Alicia Juarrero is President and co-founder of VectorAnalytica, Inc., and a research associate at the University of Miami. She is the author of Dynamics in Action (MIT Press).