Alicia Juarrero: Context Changes Everything

Grounding her work in the problem of causation, Alicia Juarrero challenges previously held beliefs that only forceful impacts are causes. Constraints, she claims, bring about effects as well, and they enable the emergence of coherence.

Alicia is the author of multiple books, most recently Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence. Helen says in this interview that it feels like this book is from the future. It’s about using the tools of complexity science to understand identity, hierarchy, and top-down causation, and in so doing, presents a new way of thinking about the natural world but also the artificial world. In this interview, we discuss how to use concepts from complexity—including the important role of constraints—to enlighten our perspectives on the community of humans and machines.