Worldview: context
Chapter 1 - Worldview
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Welcome to the 'Worldview: context' page (the third inferring)
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A billiard ball does not start rolling because the laws of nature allow it but because another object from its context (e.g. a queue, another billiard ball, wind or a slope, ...) gives it energy.
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Core idea
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How do we define context?
According to Whetten (1989: 492), context refers to the “when,” the “where,” and the “who” of a given phenomenon. He maintains that “these temporal and contextual factors set the boundaries of generalizability, and as such constitute the range of the theory” (Whetten, 1989: 492). In support of this conceptualization, Welter (2011: 167) argues that “by introducing the who, where, and when dimensions of context, Whetten (1989) draws attention to the diversity and manifold facets of context.
The idea of context spans time as well as space. (See also Worldview: Reality - Universe - Relational Quantum Mechanics).
| Content source |
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| Now that's interesting and important! - Scott L. Newbert - Journal of Business Venturing - 2022 |
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Deep dive
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Key take-aways from the deep dive
- Entanglement is is inextricably linked to context
- Restrictions and constraints from the context are the main drivers of progress
- They create self-organising and/or complex adaptive systems
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Against context: the physics-based worldview
Reductionism
Reductionists argue that chemical, biological, psychological, socio-cultural, and ecological processes or reactions, combinations, transformations, changes, and rearrangements of elements are all fully explained by the internal, context-independent, and fully quantifiable essential properties of their fundamental particles.
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Efficient cause
During the sixteenth century, the term causality and related terms came to mean exclusively efficient cause: the transfer of kinetic energy from a cause to a body. With the advent of Newtonian mechanics in the seventeenth century, cause-effect relationships can be understood exclusively in terms of driving forces.
(Efficient causality cannot explain how parts become interwoven into interdependencies that bind coherent wholes together and allow them to continue to exist. Even less can it explain the top-down causality of the emergent properties of coherent wholes in relation to their behaviour.)
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Thermodynamics
The First Law of Thermodynamics holds that that the total amount of matter and energy in the universe is fixed. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed; it can be transformed (into energy) and back, but the total amount is always conserved.
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The impossibility of a double cause
If intentions (such as the intention to raise my arm) as a meaningful mental state can produce goal-directed action, that arm movement would be caused both by my intention to raise my arm and by the neuromuscular processes required by the principle of efficient causality. Such a double cause overdetermines the universe.
(Recall that on the standard notion of efficient causes, causes and effects must be logically and in space and time distinct. Therefore, intentions must be different from neurophysiological processes, which would also violate efficient causality and themodynamics.)
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What creates context: managing elements
Entanglement
Context cannot be understood separately from entanglement, meaning a situation or relationship that you are involved in and that is difficult to escape from. Below are some works from quantum to everyday life that support this idea.
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- Quantum Entanglement
Jed Brody - MIT Press Essential Knowledge series
This relatively recent interpretation, an abbreviation of “quantum Bayesianism,” holds that there's no such thing as an absolutely accurate, objective probability “out there,” that quantum mechanical probabilities are subjective judgments, and there's no “action at a distance,” spooky or otherwise.
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- The Tangled Tree
David Quammen – William Collins
In The Tangled Tree, he explains how molecular studies of evolution have brought startling recognitions about the tangled tree of life—including where we humans fit upon it.
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- The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are
Alva Noë – Priceton University Press
In The Entanglement, philosopher Alva Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature.
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- Welkom in het symbioceen
Jos de Mul - Boom
Over de verstrengeling van natuur, cultuur en techniek
Life is inextricably linked to competition, struggle and destruction, but just as important is symbiosis: the coexistence and cooperation of people, other life forms and technical artefacts. Jos de Mul shows that symbiosis is an inexhaustible source of innovation. Time and again, the wonderful intertwining of nature, culture and technology creates unexpected solutions and new challenges.
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Restrictions
An example of a restriction is how it affects traffic flow. Traffic flow depends on vehicle interactions. As the density reaches an instability threshold, the behaviour in the traffic jams begins to correlate, and interdependencies emerge. These interdependencies exhibit new properties. For example, if even a minor accident occurs, it creates a stop-and-go pattern called “congestion shock waves” due to constraints caused by vehicle speed, flow and density. Congestion shockwaves are population-level properties generated by constraints. They reveal new – relational – characteristics that arise from interdependent behaviour. These characteristics are qualitatively different from those of the individual vehicles taken separately. For example, congestion shock waves propagate backwards (upstream) from the point of impact even though none of the vehicles is moving backwards.
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Contraints
In response to constraints, vehicular motions become correlated and interdependent, enacting the shockwave by moving in concert. The constraints that hold the shockwave coordination together ensure that the moving waveform persists long after the vehicles involved in the collision are towed away.
More generally, contextual constraints that intertwine individuals with one another generate coherent dynamics that influence those caught up in them. The workings of constraints explain how such coordination dynamics emerge and affect the constituents; the dynamics are simultaneously constraining and constrained.
Complex systems, living and nonliving, are coherent dynamics analogously generated by enabling constraints.
- Symbiosis, homeostasis, and ecosystem stability describe such coordination dynamics in biology
- Social behaviour and human cultures also exemplify the workings of context-dependent constraints
- Economic systems are coherent wholes, interdependencies enabled by constrained interactions among producers, consumers, and traders of goods and services
These interdependencies, in turn (acting as governing constraints), modify the behaviour of those caught up in them. All are energy, matter, and information flow patterns with emergent properties resulting from interlocking enabling and governing constraints.
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Who experiences context
Dissipative structures
Dissipation is the process of gradually disappearing or losing energy, for example by cooling down. (Cambridge Dictionary)
Dissipative structures are:
- (physical) open systems far from equilibrium that exchange matter, energy, and information with their environment
- they self-organise and act as coherent totalities in response to constraints
- they persist as themselves in a paradoxical state of dynamic stability despite being in non-thermal equilibrium
Examples are:
- candle flames,
- tornados,
- whirlpool vortices in water,
- traffic,
- epidemics,
- the stock market,
- the planetary environment,
- weather,
- cities, ...
They are “dissipative;” that is, their characteristic features only emerge spontaneously in presence of a flux of energy.
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Complex adaptive systems
A sub-category are complex adaptive systems. They are a 'complex macroscopic collection' of relatively 'similar and partially connected micro-structures’ – formed in order to adapt to the changing environment, and increase its survivability as a macrostructure.
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| Content source |
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| Context Changes Everything - A. Juarrero - MIT Press - 2023 |
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