Constructor Theory

• Constructor Theory of Physics is a new vision of physics, but it helps to answer a very old question: why is life possible at all?

• The essence of constructor theory is to break the pattern of a reductionist approach to creating predictability

• [Natural science as counterfactual]
  • I am using counterfactual here in the sense of Constructor Theory which was first published in 2012 by David Deutsch
  • So when his collaborator Chiara Marletto ran a session at the Hay Festival a few years later I attended it and took copious notes
  • I’ve been playing around with the ideas for some time since and of late I’m starting to see links to my earlier work on knowledge management back in the late 1990s and current work in naturalising sense-making
  • I realised in the exchange with Mike Jackson that using this might give an easier explanation of the way I see natural and social science
    • No need for social science to rigidly follow the natural science model

• Constructor theory also focuses on transformations rather than components which fits well with most of us in complexity who argue that interactions are more important than the entity which interacts
• This switch is critical as it means that while we need a sense of direction, goals aren’t possible and neither are statements about what should be the case; a type of implicit goal all too common to methods that depend highly on facilitated workshops