Before you start
Prerequisites
Almost none. Helpful if you’ve ever thought about:
- Why teams behave differently with the same people
- Why habits are hard to change by “trying harder”
- Why prediction often fails in real life
You do not need physics, formal philosophy, or complexity math for the first pass.
Myths to drop
| Myth | Better frame |
|---|---|
| “Context is just subjective perspective” | For Juarrero, context is objective structure: which constraints couple what to what |
| “Constraints only limit freedom” | They also enable new capacities (language, coordination, skills) |
| “Emergence” alone is the whole story | Emergence is a symptom; she focuses on how constraints create coherence |
| “This is anti-science / woo” | It’s a proposal about causal vocabulary for real physical and biological dynamics |
| “I must read Kant and Whitehead first” | Precursors are optional enrichment after the path |
| “I should start with the full research REPORT” | Start with the path. REPORT is the advanced handbook |
Vocabulary warm-up (no definitions yet)
You’ll meet these words. Don’t memorize — just notice them:
- Efficient cause — the “push / impact” picture of causation
- Constraint — something that shapes possibility (not only a ban)
- Phase space / possibility space — the set of states a system can occupy
- Attractor — a pattern the system tends toward over time
- Enabling / governing — constraints that generate vs regulate organization
- Coherence — a pattern that hangs together while matter/energy flow through it
Full glossary: ../03-concepts/_index.md
Tools
- Any Markdown reader is fine (VS Code, Obsidian, Preview, etc.)
- Optional: Obsidian for graph links (
<span class="wikilink-missing" title="Missing page">[[concept-name]]</span>) - Scratch space: ../07-working-notes/
Next
→ overview.md
→ or jump to ../01-path/M01-why-efficient-cause-fails.md