On Anticipation

Michael provided some nice references to the concept of Anticipation. It is also crucial to the Rosen relational theory perspective that Judith and I have in mind to resurrect in ISSS. Rosen wrote a book called “Anticipatory Systems” and that is a central aspect of his “Relational Biology”. Indeed, our normal understanding of anticipation is as cited historically and in modern dictionaries – to look ahead or plan ahead in some sense. But in Rosen’s sense it also has a technical, mathematical meaning that is critical to the difference between a living, complex, or simple system.

That difference can be understood in terms of imagining that complexity comes from a system possessing an internal model of itself and its relation to the environment. Possession of such an internal model means that the system becomes “impredicative” – again a mathematical concept referring to how “predicated” a system is on the rules of its external environment; in other words, to what degree one can predict its behavior from knowledge learned from its environment (not just immediate causes but also general laws true in the environment, but perhaps not transferable to the internal model). Probably such a complex system that is ‘impredicative’ becomes also anticipatory when the model is actually produced by the system. The reason is that when that happens, the system is capable of self-modification (changing its model) and hence variations can be selected and thus the set of systems becomes subject to adaptation and evolution. So, we might say that anticipation is a property of living systems because they entail (i.e., produce and respond to) their own self-generated and contextually selected models.

There are other views of anticipation, as in Ulysse de Corpo’s Syntropy, after Fantappie, in which they are not shy about saying it is a system responding to the future. The language may be problematic, but I think largely they agree it is not “the” future, as though it is already decided, or that there is only one possibility, but a modeled future that is present in the system. We could then discuss to what degree the model can predict what actually comes about, but also to what degree it may be involved in creating what happens.

It is that last sense that may be most important in the context of socio-ecological sustainability, because we are trying to create a better future – to realize an anticipatory model.