A theory of plasticity: capacity for change as inverse configurational constraint
Abstract
Plasticity is invoked across the sciences to explain how systems can change, yet it is inferred from the very change it is meant to explain. A system may have many alternatives, realize none and still be plastic. Another may be driven far toward its only alternative, but the magnitude of that change does not establish its plasticity. What matters for plasticity is not how far the system moves but how strongly its present configuration constrains alternatives. Here I propose that plasticity, understood as a prospective property, is inverse configurational constraint: a system is plastic to the extent that its present configuration weakly constrains displacement toward alternatives within a declared representation. For systems sharing a functional partition, structural representation, and normalized architecture, increasing plasticity lowers every positive finite structural barrier separating the current state from its alternatives. With a fixed accessibility criterion, the accessible repertoire can expand but cannot shrink. In network representations, aggregate coupling is identified as configurational constraint, whose inverse defines plasticity. Barrier reduction and repertoire nesting are consequences, not components, of the definition. This connects two research traditions: quantifying connectivity without interpreting it as plasticity, and treating plasticity as a capacity for change without a prospective operational measure.
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BibTeX
@misc{branchi2026theory,
title = {{A theory of plasticity: capacity for change as inverse configurational constraint}},
author = {Igor Branchi},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.25312},
eprint = {2609.25312},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25312},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A theory of plasticity: capacity for change as inverse configurational constraint
AU - Igor Branchi
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/18
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.25312
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25312
AB - Plasticity is invoked across the sciences to explain how systems can change, yet it is inferred from the very change it is meant to explain. A system may have many alternatives, realize none and still be plastic. Another may be driven far toward its only alternative, but the magnitude of that change does not establish its plasticity. What matters for plasticity is not how far the system moves but how strongly its present configuration constrains alternatives. Here I propose that plasticity, understood as a prospective property, is inverse configurational constraint: a system is plastic to the extent that its present configuration weakly constrains displacement toward alternatives within a declared representation. For systems sharing a functional partition, structural representation, and normalized architecture, increasing plasticity lowers every positive finite structural barrier separating the current state from its alternatives. With a fixed accessibility criterion, the accessible repertoire can expand but cannot shrink. In network representations, aggregate coupling is identified as configurational constraint, whose inverse defines plasticity. Barrier reduction and repertoire nesting are consequences, not components, of the definition. This connects two research traditions: quantifying connectivity without interpreting it as plasticity, and treating plasticity as a capacity for change without a prospective operational measure.
ER -