Journal of European Baptist Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, January 2009

ly, then, constraints pertain to an object’s connection with the environment or its embeddedness in that environment. They are relational properties rather than primary qualities in the object itself. Objects in aggregates do not have constraints; constraints only exist when an object is part of a unified system. From information theory, Juarrero employs a distinction between context-free and context-sensitive constraints. In successive throws of a die, the numbers that have come up previously do not constrain the probabilities for the current throw; the constraints on the die’s behaviour are context- 9 Ibid., p. 252. 111 Alicia Juarrero, Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 11 Ibid., p. 126. 12 Ibid., p. 132. How to Keep the ‘Non’ in Nonreductive Physicalism 11 free. In contrast, in a card game the constraints are context-sensitive: the chances of drawing an ace at any point are sensitive to history. She writes: assume there are four aces in a fifty-two card deck, which is dealt evenly around the table. Before the game starts each player has a 1/13 chance of receiving at least one ace. As the game proceeds, once players A, B, and C have already been dealt all four aces, the probability that player D has one automatically drops to 0. The change occurs because within the context of the game, player D’s having an ace is not independent of what the other players have. Any prior probability in place before the game starts suddenly changes because, by establishing interrelationships among the players, the rules of the game impose second-order contextual constraints (and thus conditional probabilities). . . . [N]o external force was impressed on D to alter his situation. There was no forceful efficient cause separate and distinct from the effect. Once the individuals become card players, the conditional probabilities imposed by the rules and the course of the game itself alter the prior probability that D has an ace, not because one thing bumps into another but because each player is embedded in a web of interrelationships. 13 Thus, a better term for this sort of interaction across levels might be ‘whole-part constraint’ rather than downward causation. Application to a Simple Complex System The goal of this paper is to argue for the applicability of the notion of downward causation (or whole-part constraint) to the problem of relating psychology to neurobiology. In the terms I have developed here, it is to understand human beings as complex dynamical systems, with their immense neural complexity, enmeshed in an immensely complex cultural environment. Such systems are beyond human capacity to describe fully. Juarrero has already applied her work on dynamical systems to the topics of meaning, intentional action, rationality, and free will, but time does not permit an overview of the rest of her work. What I shall do instead is to p