BI 174 Alicia Juarrero: Context Changes Everything
Sep 13, 2023
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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.
Constraints shape the dynamics and possibilities of complex systems like brains and minds.
Top-down causality and constraint regimes challenge traditional notions of efficient causation in understanding complexity.
Understanding constraint regimes is crucial for explaining the behavior and organization of complex systems, including the self.
Deep dives
Constraints as Causes
In her podcast episode, Alicia Juáclero discusses the idea that constraints should be given more attention when trying to understand complex systems. She emphasizes that constraints are causes and shape the dynamics and possibilities of systems. She explores the concept of constraint regimes and how they interact and influence each other. Juáclero argues that constraints create coherence and enable the emergence of new properties and possibilities. Rather than focusing solely on efficient causation, she highlights the importance of context-dependent and context-independent constraints in shaping complex systems.
Exploring Top-Down Causality
Juáclero delves into the concept of top-down causality and how it challenges traditional notions of efficient causation. She suggests that emergent properties and constraint regimes play a crucial role in top-down causality. She argues for the inclusion of top-down causality in our understanding of complex systems, especially in fields like neuroscience and ecology. Juáclero discusses the limitations of reductionism and emphasizes the need to consider the interdependencies and interconnections of different levels of organization.
The Significance of Constraints in Explanation
Juáclero emphasizes the necessity of constraints in providing meaningful explanations for complex phenomena. She explores the role of constraints in enabling the emergence of new properties and behaviors. Juáclero argues that constraints give meaning and coherence to the components of a system, and that understanding constraint regimes is crucial for understanding the behavior and organization of complex systems. She discusses the concept of narrative and hermeneutics as tools for explaining the dynamic interplay of constraints.
The Nature of Self and Constraints
In addressing the question of the self, Juáclero suggests that the self can be seen as a dynamic constraint regime that organizes behavior across scales. She discusses examples where the sense of self may dissolve or shift, such as during flow states or under pharmacological manipulation. Juáclero argues that even in these cases, there are enough constraints and connectivity to maintain coherence and structure in behavior. She highlights the interplay between automatic and controlled processing and suggests that the self is a dynamic organizing principle that shapes behavior within a system.
The Importance of Constraints and Context
The podcast episode explores the significance of constraints and context in understanding complex systems and human intelligence. Constraints can be seen as the rules and limitations that shape and guide behavior, and they can occur at various levels, from biological to societal. Understanding how different constraint regimes interact and influence behavior is crucial. The episode emphasizes the need to study and map the multiple constraints that operate simultaneously in order to gain insights into the dynamics of complex systems. Context is also highlighted as a key element that is often missing in artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Current AI lacks the ability to incorporate somatic information, historical context, and social factors, which are essential in understanding the richness and complexity of human intelligence.
Exploring Emergent Properties and Possibility Spaces
The episode delves into the concept of emergent properties and their role in shaping behavior. Emergent properties are characteristics that arise from the interactions and organization of complex systems and cannot be predicted from the properties of individual components alone. The notion of possibility spaces is introduced, which refers to the range of potential behaviors and outcomes a system can exhibit. The conversation touches on the idea that higher dimensionality and expanded possibility spaces can provide more options and flexibility. The importance of context, organization, and constraints in understanding complex systems, including the brain and human cognition, is emphasized, while acknowledging the challenge of capturing and formalizing the highly nuanced and individual nature of these systems.
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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.
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
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