Major transitions in evolution (Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1995) mark the generation of new coherences—that is, of new and overarching constitutive regimes that are the outcome of interlocking context-independentand context-dependent constraints.
Constraints are entities, processes, events, relations, or conditions that raise or lower barriers to energy flow without directly transferring kinetic energy. Comment: In other words, constraints affect the possibility of which things can happen and their probability, rather than actually making certain things happen.
Constraints bring about effects by making available, structuring, channeling, facilitating, or impeding energy flow. Gradients and polarities, for example, are constraints; others include catalysts and feedback loops, recursion, iteration, buffers, affordances, schedules, codes, rules and regulations, heuristics, conceptual frameworks, ethical values and cultural norms, scaffolds, isolation, sedimentation and entrenchment, and bias and noise, among many others.
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Collier’s third prerequisite, interactions, can also be subsumed under the general idea of constraint. By interactions, complexity theorists mean relations other than the reversible bumping and jostling of Newtonian forceful impacts. Collier notes that self-organization is characterized by “unity relations,” the information-carrying signature that signals a phase transition from unconstrained jostling to constrained coordination and order, such as the transformation from water vapor to the rigid structured of an ice crystal; from independent and separate photon streams into the coordinated alignment of laser beams; from algae and fungi to marvelous lichens; and from individual human beings to a distinct culture.
Constrained interactions leave a mark. They transform disparate manys into coherent and interdependent Ones. Constrained interactions, that is, irreversibly weave separate entities into emergent and meaningful coherent wholes. In doing so, they create and transmit novel information. That information is embodied in the coordination patterns formed by and embedded in context. Critically, coordination dynamics also leave imprints of the interaction on the interactants, which they change irreversibly. That imprint is new information (Shapere 1982).
The central question, of course, is What changes reversible bumping and jostling into interactions that leave a mark—that create structure, order, and information? The answer, just implied, is constraints, but in this case, a different type of constraint, context-dependent constraints (introduced in chapter 6). ***
Coherence might be a better term for the unity relations of complex systems like snowflakes, tornadoes, lichens, living things, homeostasis, ecosystems, human practices, and cultures. Each of these is nothing other than a coordination pattern formed by different constraints with different stringencies, operating in different contexts. Critically, each of these overarching patterns is held together by a set of interlocking constraints; as a result, each displays qualitatively different emergent properties. Synchronization, coordination, and entrainment are instances of coherent organization, defined as a particular regime or logic of interlocking constraints. Coherence so understood marks a qualitatively novel form of organization and order that is absent in either isolated elements or clumped aggregates. Coherence is real; it is a relational and systemwide dynamic brought about by interdependence.
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Chapter 4 described gradients and fields as constraints that take or keep conditions away from equiprobability; context-independent constraints like these make events in possibility space unequally likely. Unequal distribution in possibility space, as we saw, is a prerequisite of information and order. We turn now to context-dependent constraints, those that take conditions away from independence (Gatlin 1972). These weave together events and processes such that their interactions become mutually conditional on one another and on the history and context in which they formed. They now covary.
In contrast to context-independent constraints that take conditions away from equilibrium, context-dependent constraints therefore take conditions away from independence (Gatlin 1972) by intertwining isolated elements and processes; long-range correlations and interdependencies result. From these transitions there emerge novel, smeared out entities with different properties—in this case, a web. Enabling constraints, in short, transform separate entities into coordination networks characterized by relations and organization.
Context Changes Everything by Juarrero
... we have been making tacit assumptions that get in our way [in understanding the origin of selves and aims]. These assumptions are not consistent with current science but have been carried over into it as vestiges of past approaches or human intuition. The most fundamental of these assumptions is that all changes are produced positively by the addition of things or forces, for example, that there must be something added to matter to cause it to come alive.
In recent centuries, scientists have come to recognize that changes can result negatively through processes of elimination not of things, but of possible dynamic paths. Dynamics are the interactions throughout large populations of things. For example, consider water molecules flowing in various currents. The currents can get in one another's way, creating impasses that reduce the likelihood of water molecules moving down some paths compared to others. In other words, constraints can emerge through dynamic interaction.
... life is not something added to physics and chemistry, but rather a reduction in physical possibilities that emerges through dynamic interactions.
Take the molecules that compose your body and consider the vast number of ways they could interact. Now think of how few of those ways are possible within the living self your are. There's what's possible in physics and chemistry, and there's what possible in selves, and the possibilities within selves are less, not more. A dead body's materials can be in vastly more arrangements than a living body's materials.
With selves, nothing is added, nor is a greater quantity magically produced through a synergistic combination. Rather, when things interact dynamically, possible paths of interaction are subtracted or eliminated though a process somewhat like gridlock - paths block paths. According to Deacon, selves and aims are the result of emergent dynamic constraints: not something added, but possible paths subtracted. Self-regeneration, the self's first purpose or aim, is make possible by emergent constraint, a reduction in the likelihood of paths that are not conductive to self-regeneration.
Under certain conditions, the tendency for dynamics to become irregular reverses. For example when a stream flows around an obstacle, it briefly forms turbulent (irregular) currents and then settles into a whirlpool path, with water flowing in a regularized spiral pattern that's not imposed by an external constraint. ...
What causes the whirlpool to form, if it is not being stirred in a circle? What exactly imposes the constraint on how the water flows such that, rather than staying turblent and irregular as we might expect given the second law, it instead becomes regularized into a spiral current?
The spiral-forming constaint is not imposed. There's nothing pushing, pulling, or stirring the turbulent currents, molding them into a spiral. The whirlpool is emergent, meaning it arises from the interactions taking place throughout the dynamics. In the case of a whirlpool, it arises from the interactions between the water molecules.
Turbulent water currents get in one another's way, generating impasses, congestions, or gridlock, which slows and stops some currents. Conflicting currents that were intially common become progressively less common while the spiral current remains, having become relatively more likely because they do not get in one another's way - the path of relatively less resistance for water throughput.
The whirlpool's spiral current may seem to be cause by some thing or force added or imposed from the outside upon the water flow, but it isn't. It's the elimination of alternative paths - likely paths becoming unlikely - not because new constaints were imposed, but because new constraints emerged through dynamic interactions.
That's how I'll use the term emergence throughout this book. Constraints can be imposed, or they can emerge from interactions occurring throughout dynamics that processively reduce the variety of likely currents.
Emergent constraint is decidedy different from imposed constraint. With the whirlpool, the imposed constraints include the running water, whatever channel the water runs down, and the obstacle in the channel. These imposed constraints are necessary but insufficient conditions for explaining the whirlpool's regularized spiral flow, a regularity that emerges from the congestion throughout the turbulence and the ways that the congestion constrains the paths that the flowing water can take.
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... The sort of emergent constraint exhibited by a whirlpool is commonly known as self organization ...
Unfortunately, self-organization is not a great name for the process. There's no self that organizes the water into a whirlpool, nothing imposes the organization, and "organization" is an ambiguous term. If it means arriving at a perfectly organized state, that's not what happens. The current is only more or less regularized. And organization can refer to whatever configuration dynamics might take, for example, an irregular organization. So I will refer to self-organization as emergent regularization instead.
Many researches assume that emergent regularization (self-organization) will prove sufficient to explain the origins of life. Get enough regularization going and it either becomes a real self or, if not, at least dynamics that are evolvable by natural selection.
But life isn't just regularization. With selves, something else emerges, the capacity for self-regneration. With the whirlpool, water flows in a constrained spiral pattern, but there's nothing about that spiral that regenerates the spiral if disturbed. If you change the flow or reposition the obstruction, the whirlpool does nothing to resist these modifications. The whirlpool does no self-directed work.
We need therefore to distinguish emergent regularization from emergent self-regeneration, a second kind of emergent constraint. Regularization and self-regeneration are both emergent, meaning that they're constraints that aren't imposed, but instead arise throughout dynamic interaction. Yet what emerges from each is different. With emergent regularization, all that emerges is an ephemeral regularity like the whirlpool's spiral. With emergent self-regeneration, a self emerges. ...
Emergent self-regeneration is the emergence of constraints that channel energy into work that regenerates these selfsame constraints. That's what selves do. We regenerate outselves by constraining, indeed, by aiming out work.
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Self-regeneration is thus our first and foremost aim. It's our first means and end, and it's circular: the means by which we can regenerate our means, the end or purpose being the ability to continue to pursue our ends.
In constrast, a whirlpool is actually degenerative. It constrains water flow into work that creates a spiral that is the water's path of least resistance. This can be seen in the case of the whirlpool that tends to form as water exists a bathtub. Water drains more rapidly with a whirlpool than with turbulence at the drain. So a living self, modeled as emergent regularization, like a whirlpool, would be a short-lived, self-eliminating self.
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... Emergent self-regeneration yields three capacities that emergent regularization doesn't yield:
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There's a fundamental conflict between self-regeneration's three capacities. Self-repair and self-reproduction require a throughput of energy and resources. Selves need to be open in order to maintain access to these. But selves can't afford complete openness or the second law wins, and they just degenerate. That's why selves need self-protection too, a limit on the energy and resources with which they can interact. They need, therefore, what I'll call selective interaction - openness to the right, and not the wrong, interactions for maintaining their capacity for self-regeneration overall.
Emergent regularization results when countertendencies impede one another. We see this in the whirlpool's turbulent currents getting in one another's way. Is it possible that self-regeneration emerges from countertendencies between underlying emergent regularizing processes?
That's what Deacon imagines as the origin of the first self.
He pictures two emergent regularizing tendencies working for and against each other such that each prevents the other's tendency toward degeneration. He demonstrates how two emergent regularization dynamics (known as autocatalysis and self-assembly) can be synergistically coupled such that they constrain each other's tendency to degenerate.
The result is a higher-level emergent contraint, an emergent constraint that further constrains the two underlying emergent regularization dynamics . This higher-level emergent constraint results in a tendency to continually regenerate itself by eliminating or constraining the lower-level emergent regularization tendencies toward degeneration. Deacon call his model for this emergent self an autogen in other words, a "self-generator."
Neither Ghost Nor Machine, by Jeremy Sherman
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