[Fis] Anticipatory Systems

[Pedro C. Marijuan]

Dear Karl and List,

Sorry that I could not answer earlier (accumulation of other writing 
duties). I was flabbergasted by your Allegory. Chapeau! Apart from the 
high style and the charm and the elegant Martianus Capella background, 
it is a wise move presenting your "algebra" as cyclicity interactions. 
Good luck in this new explanatory direction! I think it can contribute 
to enlighten the "stories" intrinsic rhythmicity.

Not being blessed by the Muses I must confine myself to the prosaic 
commentary... That Nature operates something does not mean that our 
disciplines can explain it coherently across logico-formal paths. How 
many procedimental simplifications are needed to traverse from quantum 
dynamics to, say, the atomic bond or the molecular structure? But I do 
not criticize those breaches, conversely they are a tribute to 
scientific ingenuity. And now traversing to the human information (or 
even to biological information) ... is it feasible without acknowledging 
the horrendous existing gaps? Even more, aren't we missing a central 
element that brings coherence to the overall dances and rhythms around 
biological/neuronal information? I mean, the life cycle.

Let us remind Gibson's ecological perception theory. When we confront an 
environment we do not perceive it piece-meal, at least in the important 
motifs. We do not feel the ineffable tiger's sensory impressions as 
disconnected, but forming a well integrated whole that motivates an 
adaptive response--either freezing, or flying, or heroically fighting. 
The tiger, or better the rabbit, is an ecosystem's "affordance" that is 
important for our life, either to eat or to not be eaten. So, we demand 
perceptual/motor coherence, but with respect to what? Of course: to the 
maintenance of our life. I mean, the life cycle.

Going back to stories, we may take them as genuine encapsulations (a 
better word of choice?) of the social "affordances" we are naturally 
immersed by living within our societies. It is our ecosystem, and we may 
see many different affordances, and we may craft many stories to 
interconnect them, to "mirror" them. Again, there should be a coherence: 
around what? Around our life cycle and the lives of our audience. The 
structure is far more complex now, but who said that solving the 
neuronal "binding problem" around our percepts was simple?

Many thanks to Mark (coherently!!). Also I would like to be able to 
respond to other demands from Jerry, but here is my counter-demand: 
could you adventure tools to formally capture such a multi-time, 
multi-rhythm being as a life-cycle in progress?

Best wishes to all,
--Pedro

El 29/10/2018 a las 16:32, Karl Javorszky escribió:
>
> _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)
>
>
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-- 
-------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group

pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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