BI 174 Alicia Juarrero: Context Changes Everything

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Sep 13, 2023

Philosopher Alicia Juarrero discusses the importance of constraints in understanding complex systems like the brain. They explore the concept of context and its impact on human behavior. The conversation touches on emergent properties, culture, and the role of top-down constraints. They also delve into embodied cognition, brain activity, dimensionality, the difference between mind and brain, and the concept of wisdom. Exploring hope, protein folding, and higher levels of organization and constraints conclude the podcast.

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Introduction

00:00 • 3min

The Impact of Context on Human Behavior

03:12 • 16min

Context and Constraints

19:03 • 13min

Emergent Properties and Culture

32:28 • 16min

Exploring Emergence and Explanation

48:44 • 19min

Sense of Self and Top-Down Constraints

01:08:08 • 12min

Exploring Embodied Cognition and Embeddedness in Context

01:19:52 • 2min

Brain Activity, Dimensionality, and the Mind

01:21:38 • 4min

The Difference Between Mind and Brain and the Concept of Wisdom

01:26:02 • 14min

Exploring Hope, Commonalities, and Context in Protein Folding

01:40:12 • 2min

Exploring Higher Levels of Organization and Constraints

01:42:39 • 2min

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Alicia Juarrero is a philosopher and has been interested in complexity since before it was cool.

In this episode, we discuss many of the topics and ideas in her new book, Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence, which makes the thorough case that constraints should be given way more attention when trying to understand complex systems like brains and minds - how they're organized, how they operate, how they're formed and maintained, and so on. Modern science, thanks in large part to the success of physics, focuses on a single kind of causation - the kind involved when one billiard ball strikes another billiard ball. But that kind of causation neglects what Alicia argues are the most important features of complex systems the constraints that shape the dynamics and possibility spaces of systems. Much of Alicia's book describes the wide range of types of constraints we should be paying attention to, and how they interact and mutually influence each other. I highly recommend the book, and you may want to read it before, during, and after our conversation. That's partly because, if you're like me, the concepts she discusses still aren't comfortable to think about the way we're used to thinking about how things interact. Thinking across levels of organization turns out to be hard. You might also want her book handy because, hang on to your hats, we jump around a lot among those concepts. Context Changes everything comes about 25 years after her previous classic, Dynamics In Action, which we also discuss and which I also recommend if you want more of a primer to her newer more expansive work. Alicia's work touches on all things complex, from self-organizing systems like whirlpools, to ecologies, businesses, societies, and of course minds and brains.

Book:
- Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence

0:00 - Intro 3:37 - 25 years thinking about constraints 8:45 - Dynamics in Action and eliminativism 13:08 - Efficient and other kinds of causation 19:04 - Complexity via context independent and dependent constraints 25:53 - Enabling and limiting constraints 30:55 - Across scales 36:32 - Temporal constraints 42:58 - A constraint cookbook? 52:12 - Constraints in a mechanistic worldview 53:42 - How to explain using constraints 56:22 - Concepts and multiple realizabillity 59:00 - Kevin Mitchell question 1:08:07 - Mac Shine Question 1:19:07 - 4E 1:21:38 - Dimensionality across levels 1:27:26 - AI and constraints 1:33:08 - AI and life