Anticipatory Systems – Philosophical, Mathematical & Methodological Foundations by Robert Rosen (IFSR series on Systems Science and Engineering) (1985, Maxwell / Pergamon Press – Photo – “related” automatica, computers, industrial engineering and operations research. )
[British Library, Friday 16th May 2025]
Foreword – Focus on “Anticipation” itself.
“Strictly speaking, anticipation depends upon future circumstances, rather than merely on the present or past. [As such,] anticipation has routinely been excluded from any kind of systematic study, on the grounds that it violates the causal foundation on which all of the theoretical science must rest, and on the grounds that it introduces a telic element that is scientifically unacceptable, Nevertheless biology is replete [with organisms which act on internal predictive models].
[A way to] study anticipatory systems in a scientifically rigorous way.”
Core point of mine – yes, scientifically rigorous studies, but emergent (organic) system behaviours are not themselves scientific in causally predictable / objectively repeatable ways.
Hence my preference to drop “science” from the whole subject area, and be clear which parts are science and those which are more than science. But this is really a linguistic preference such that if we are not to confuse public, non-expert, generalist audiences, we must each individually not be overly precious about our linguistic choices, or consolidate in potentially divisive “camps” around those preferences > #GoodFences.
Single Bergson reference p21 Whitehead also p22 – and H Weyl also p22 Whole intro after Robert Maynard Hutchins (!!!) – See Adler, McKeon Chicago “great books” curriculum > Pirsig. Whole introduction in fact [pp1-27]. (Bergson reference is in passing – one of a number of confused views on teleology.)(Whitehead reference also singular, but as source for others W E Agar, Jacques Monod, J M Burgers) [Have Intro 44 pages as PDF]
Lousy typeface !!! BUT fell open at set-theory pp56-71 ???
Paraphrasing – Natural vs formal systems really about real world vs conceptual (mathematical “in the broadest sense” / logical / symbolic) world. Related obviously, but its a modelling relationship. Set-theory “foundational” in the concept of formal systems. Assumed familiarity (no mention of ontology, but there is taxonomy later p172)
p172 Paraphrasing – Characterising basic organic qualities and how these are related to (observable) qualities which can be encoded as real-valued functions. We will always have both precisely because we recognise an organism above all as a natural system. We must use these (observable) qualities, properties to distinguish between organisms and between other kinds of natural systems. This (discrimination, discernment, distinction) is the basis of Taxonomy.
“[The] quality of being an organism is represented by an observable which takes its value in the taxa of the taxonomist.”
Continues in the language of taxons & taxa, (but not holons or ontology).
Teleology pp9-10 (Photos)
Ergodicity – p153, p229, p243, p248 – WOW! (Photos)
- p153 – Conservation laws are great cornerstones of statistical mechanics and physics generally. Ergodicity is (should be more widely recognised as) another.
- p229 in Time and Dynamics – the opposite (non-ergodic)
- p243 in Probabilistic Time – “prototypic Boltzmann problem”
- p248 also in Probabilistic Time – “biology is in principle irreducible to physics”
Game Theory – p262 – von Neumann and Morgenstern – “Theory of Games …”
p403 – Theory of Games – more phenomenological – awaits a more basic theory arising from fundamental principles (I suspect this may never happen and it will always be emergent in systems with agents, always “more than science”.)
Poincare Mappings – Gumowski and Mira – “Recurrence and Discrete Dynamical Systems”