[Fis] [SUSPICIOUS MESSAGE] Anticipatory Systems

[Bruno Marchal]

> On 29 Oct 2018, at 16:32, Karl Javorszky <karl.javorszky at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Anticipation
> 
>  
> Learned Friends,
> 
>  
> We deal with the observation, that biologic organisms anticipate what will happen next. Some concentrate on the narrative of the anticipation, some on the phenomena that are anticipated. As a human faculty, anticipation can range from intuition, guess, instinct, to prediction and certitude. Science has more or less dealt with certitude (b follows from a) and has understood prediction (if a then p(b) ~ x). Now we work our way towards understanding instinctive prediction.
> 
> The utility and efficacy of the narrative version of anticipation varies also greatly: we have the wish formulae, where faith and belief causes anticipating an effect (if I say “please” they will give that to me), magical incantations with powerful words, inputting arguments of an algorithm in the hope of receiving a result, and the classical case of the words of the narrative being one and inseparable from the facts that are the case (the DNA is a narrative of what will happen, and its predictions are in the closest possible way related to the facts of the matter the narrative talks about). (Interactive online reporting, where the narration is a part of the process.)
> 
> We do have some difficulties with a running narration, because such a thing as telling the future has no place in classical, Wittgenstein logic and the corresponding narrative about the proceedings. That, what will come into existence is presently not the case. Whichever way we turn it, we are not supposed to talk about things that are not the case.
> 
>  
> Foretelling the future (anticipating correctly) is a task that humans can despair of. This problem being with us since the beginning of time, it has been addressed by many generations using diverse lexica. Bruno’s suggestion that we have no shy using words and concepts of theology is a wise one: Our forefathers expressed themselves in allegories involving divine figures. This has given me courage to present to you an Allegory on the Seduction of Arithmetica by Amor, with a bow to Martianus Capella. May your serene judgement of this non-polished draft be softened by magnanimous mercy extended against a beginner.
> 
> 
> 
> -----------------------
> 
> 
> Seduction of Arithmetica by Amor (20181028)
> 
>  
> Amor: (enters scene of idyllic Elysian character) Oh All you Gods! Your help is needed now that I have lost my way in my quest for my beloved second-sister Arithmetica, and now I am in unknown terrain, where no human intelligence had shed any light so far. Where are you, oh Arithmetica?!
> 
> Arithmetica: (enters from behind a tree) Here I am my Amor, never far from you. You have a desire to talk to me
> 
> Amor: Please help. I have a problem I cannot solve on my own. You know, Zeus has gone more mercantilist, in the wealth-generating mood, and he tasks each of us to prepare reports the end of every quarter. How many arrows fired, how many hits, and among these how many with operational achievement. Now what is a success I know: if I hit with my arrow the heart of one individual. What they want to know is, however, how many couples I generate and how fruitful the resulting fornications will turn out to become. They are in population management up there and are obviously scheming to make me less industrious or less precise, but first they want the numbers. How can you tell me, my dear second-sister, how many healthy offspring are generated per arrow shot of mine?
> 
> Arithmetica: You, my dear second-brother, like so many others, want to know whether we can foretell the future by our dexterous fingers, using distinguishable objects which we count. The answer is: theoretically no, practically yes. You may at first not understand this reply. To help to open up your mind, let me tell you in all confidence a sordid part of my life.
> 
> Amor: Ah, my dearest Arithmetica? How come you have suffered indignities? Surely by the acts of the mortals?
> 
> Arithmetica: Yes, the bipeds have kidnapped me from the Gardens of Olymp and pressed me into their service. This would have not been necessary, first of all, but for the cruel circumstances of that rendition into the realm of the humans, the shame of it has kept my forced adoption for a long time in the dark. Everybody knows that my 6 sisters and I are of a cooperative, willing, pleasing character, because we find pleasure in what we do. No one needs to force Music to be the essence of Music, there is no need to coerce Geometry into doing geometry! We are the far relatives of the Muses, in the technical, applicational fields. We like what we do, otherwise we could not embody the spirit of that what we are. But what happened to me was of an otherworldly brutality. All the bipeds agree in praising our diligence and competence, in my case my speciality, exactitude. There is no need to subject a person of our divine breed to such indignities.
> 
> Amor: What, oh Arithmetica, what did they did to you?
> 
> Arithmetica: That subgroup of the bipeds which calls itself the Quadrivials have captured me and keep me locked up in a place with rectangular axes on which identically spaced units are measuring distances. You cannot imagine a less creative surroundings for a young girl. It is pure sensory deprivation, the intellectual equivalent of a solitary confinement. I have no permission to have anything in hand that is not of a uniform make, as such indistinguishable from any other unit element. They just eliminated all diversity from their castle. These are very strict people.
> 
> Amor: what a sad story! You with all your talents and you love of glitzy things to be left on your own among grey uniform units that have no relations among each other! You always loved arranging and re-arranging your manifold glitzy things according to their inner connections among each other. You always knew that there is a system of a-priori relations among the things: this is what their differing ways of being glitzy expresses.
> 
> Arithmetica: You, my beloved, understand my pain. It is all right if those of strong faith require that one serves them according to their beliefs and rituals, but it is not right, if these well-educated rulers discourage any parallel way of looking at things, which in my case means counting them.
> 
> Amor: As far as I know you, my dear Arithmetica, you will never give up. Every day, the efforts of deciphering the original creativity of Zeus and his ancestors will bring up new details about the world, where your unerring faculties are needed. The bipeds rejoice in thy works and bring you many spectacles and offerings, I understand?
> 
> Arithmetica: Indeed, I am not without resources. Evading the intrusive surveillance of my quadrivial masters, this maiden has imagined up her beloved glitzy things, which she so much enjoyed arranging about during chaste childhood, playing with the frolicking centaurs, naiads and nymphs. To evade any malign attention, I have replaced the actual form of the glitziness with a number, and only worked on the first few natural numbers.
> 
> Amor: Indeed, I have been hearing you muttering to yourself:
> 
> Position ( (a,b), d, (b,a) ) = b * (b+1)/2 + a,
> 
> Position ( (a,b), d, (a,b) ) = d * (d+1)/2 – (d-a+1) * (d-a+2)/2 + (b-a+1)
> 
> the other day.
> 
> Arithmetica: That was the x,y coordinates on a plane of pairs (a,b) which can have any of d degrees of glitziness. These coordinates can be grouped into what is called cycles by lines that connect elements that change places with each other in a sequence of push-aways. The concurrent running of several cycles creates rhythms. This is pure arithmetic, no one can deny that. Still, the Lords distrust the idea of order, as long as it comes from ordering by one’s own free will. They learned well, how Poseidon orders water, how Helios throws his bolts, but they would never think of sequencing just for the sake of it, to see how far they get until they overdo it. They do not believe that if you generate all of the possible alternatives, the reasonable ones will turn up among these and will be recognised. The a-priori relations that exist in the world, do have something to do with order, or am I mistaken on this point? What mortal people don’t notice is that you can stick axes into each other in a rectangular fashion and completely valid Descartes spaces emerge, just on the glitzy properties of the first 16 numbers. They haver a deep revulsion against considering objects that are different to each other.
> 
> Amor: So, you can build rectangular spaces just from natural numbers? Just by re-ordering them? You can demonstrate what is called gravitation by the bipeds to be an implication of linear order (of the Peano axioms)?
> 
> Arithmetica: Now we come to the answer to the question you have started out with. Can we foretell Future? Only the Gods can do that in a full sense, but we are catching up. The problem is that my overlords, the Quadrivials, do not like conflicts and unpredictable outcomes. As if an unpredictable outcome would be on average any better or worse than a predictable one. It is the subjective tension they do not like, and this is why they discourage a relaxed, rational view of predictability.
> 
> Amor: Well, I was always an admirer of your countless fingers, tentacles and other appendices that you can bend to a high number of distinct degrees each, but do your arithmetic calculations allow me to foretell the number of living births per woman between 15 and 45 years of age?
> 
> Arithmetica: That detail can be solved, once the Lords of Quadriviality encourage the industrious bipeds to base their calculations on recurrences and their predictability. The problem is, they officially have no concept for a future: everything in classical logic happens in the moment; classical logic is as such: timeless. They have to laboriously calculate around the concept of cycles, because to use cycles as the basis of all calculations would admit to the existence of alternatives. If alternatives a priori exist, the whole edifice of classical logic turns out to be a special case, riding the wave, surfing along a moment of truth, being in the air while running in jumps.
> 
> Amor: This might be the curse by the descendants of Cheiron the wise centaur. Being as well a horse and as well a man teaches one some insight into biology and its relation to rational thinking. The Quadrivials have decided that theirs is the rational way to determine the greenness of grass and could not suffer Cheiron’s frequent intermissions: is maybe the grass indeed greener the other side of the road? Before getting too much disturbed in their picture of the world, they have eliminated Cheiron and all of his folk. They could not stomach the common-sense approach a half-horse brings to counting. He could argue his case as eloquently as he wanted. He was all for predictability and a natural web of relationships among the parts of the world. He could have argued to electrically powered Wittgenstein machines for all the understanding and sympathy he got. They do not wish to be engaged in ambiguities. That, what can be resolved by finding the one, correct solution, that is quadrivial. That, what can be discussed, put in different lights, can have several solutions, none of which is completely right: this delineates a subject the quadrivials make a wide berth around. Conflicts are trivial. Centaurs are creating conflicts, they are as such, in themselves a conflict, so they get radically removed from the quadrivial world. How will they now try to understand what makes centaurs function, let alone reason? They were not able to understand that axiomatics begins with axiom 1: there must be recurrent feeding. Till today, they burn holy weeds in their offices if the word “recurrent” is uttered. These people are beyond the point of no return. The divine retribution for the extermination of the centaurs is presently taking place. Our ruling elite is unable to think it terms of recurrent states of a set, because they have deep feelings of guilt and emptiness for having expelled the animal spirits from their reasoning-thinking part of the brain.
> 
> Arithmetica: Is it so, that fertility rates are sinking in those parts of the world, where you induce pairing, depressive as you sound, Amor? Do not paint my overlords in such a harsh light, my friend. Rigid they may appear, but some of them are flexible and clever. Let me continue whispering in as many ears as stand open, in the low voice of reason, that working on uniform things during the day does not prohibit one from working with glitzy things, in off time. Perhaps, some of the quadrivials do like engineering, puzzles and the building of kaleidoscopes.  Do not give up hope yet, my beloved Amor. So, we shall part for a time now, but we shall meet again. Your arrow has touched me in my inner being, and our chaste meeting of minds has resulted in the creation of a new baby girl, of which you are the father, my beloved Amor.
> 
> (Enter young child, growing on stage into young woman)
> 
> Amor: Sacre bleu! A nice conversation about predictions turns out to be a love affair, with consequences, and here she is, the consequence: one maiden, quite becoming, who seems to be fully enjoying all feelings of vibes. She is the fruit of our love? What a divine end to this story!
> 
> Arithmetica: Yes, your longings have awakened in my heart the desire to be a well behaving daughter of Philosophia and, like my respected Mother, from time to time to give birth to a baby Science. Please meet your sweet daughter Rhythmonomia, who will help you and all bipeds to give different names to different rhythms and make a great work of it, deriving much pleasure from finding the correct answers to some of their questions. My Quadrivial Lords will surely forgive me for getting impregnated by an idea, once they see how pleasingly helpful Rhythmonomia will be in their everyday household tasks or in their great campaigns to achieve intellectual brilliancy.
> 
> (Exeunt)
> 

Thanks Karl, for Arithmetica. :)

My point on theology is that as long as theology does not come back to science/reason, we will let the entire filed of the human science (applied and theoretical) in the hand of the idolaters, the liars, superstition, and obscurantism, and above all, we will continue to forget that the original doubt on “god” was the doubt on the existence of a physical universe. Today, we do have precise evidences that indeed there might be no physical universe, as we can explain where that persistent illusion/dreams comes from, in a testable way. It is the unwanted (perhaps) main baby of Arithmetica. 

Best,

Bruno





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