Source
Juarrero (2023), LIT-1995, chapters 2, 3 and 6, pp. 21–86; read in NOTE-1532 from the MIT Press open-access PDF.
What was actually shown
What is shown is the account’s content, and the reading checked each element against the text.
The definition. “Constraints are entities, processes, events, relations, or conditions that raise or lower barriers to energy flow without directly transferring kinetic energy” (p. 40). Nothing in it is relative to a time scale.
The two kinds. Context-independent constraints “take or keep conditions away from equiprobability”; context-dependent constraints “take conditions away from independence (Gatlin 1972)”, so that processes become “mutually conditional on one another and on the history and context in which they formed”, “measured with conditional probability” (p. 67).
The bottom-up step. Enabling constraints (credited to Pattee 1973, Salthe 1985 and Juarrero 1999) “irreversibly link and couple previously separate … entities at the same scale as the constraints” and “drive parts-to-whole phase transitions to emergent coordination patterns” (p. 71).
The top-down step. The constitutive constraints of the result “do double duty as governing constraints” (p. 79), “second-order context-dependent constraints (Juarrero 1999)” (p. 81), acting “often as negative feedback loops” (p. 79) to “restrict the behavior of the system and of its components or stages to a subregion of the system’s overall possibility space” (p. 80). This is offered as top-down causation that, because it transfers no energy, avoids overdetermination and respects closure (pp. 25, 46).
The identity condition. Governing constraints “are not spatiotemporally other than the components and constraints from which they were formed and which they control” (p. 81; again pp. 84, 95).
The account could have been stated otherwise: with a time-scale condition on constraints, as Montévil and Mossio’s has (LIT-582), or with the governing regime as a distinct entity. It is not.
What this does not say
- That constraints transfer no energy. That is asserted with examples (the timing of a swing’s kick, p. 46; vasculature, p. 82), not argued, and a governing constraint such as a vessel is maintained by dissipating processes.
- That the account is true or explanatory. The author calls the book “speculative metaphysics” (p. 32).
- That “context-dependent constraint” is TERM-070’s constraint. It is a conditional dependence; TERM-070’s is conserved at the time scale of the process it acts on. The book adopts TERM-070’s closure only in chapter 7 (pp. 93–94).
- That governing constraints give an agent control in the libertarian sense. The book accepts “indetermination and uncertainty” as the price of creativity (p. 235) and gives no account of control over them; Froese (NOTE-1521) cites the 1999 book among accounts that do not explain whose efficacy a top-down constraint is.