Our Anticipatory Cosmos and the Music of Science

On the subject of music, I was thinking of how it has three characteristics -- or at least these three must exist in both composer and listener: memory, present moment, and anticipation. One must have a present memory of what has transpired, flowing in anticipation toward what is to come; in order to apprehend music, the unheard must somehow be implicitly present to the already heard.

A clever composer or soloist may play with our anticipation and give us one note -- or sometimes just silence -- when we were expecting another. Thelonious Monk was famous for this: sour when we are expecting sweet. I'll bet this unexpectedness is a metaphor for something more important. 

Off the top of my head, it seems to touch on the very nature of creativity, the products of which are always unanticipated. Machines are never creative, because they are linear, not complex, systems.

Now, creativity is synonymous with emergence, in the sense that it is not, and can never be, predicted from its lower level constituents. But if the world is regarded as a machine, then genuine creativity and emergence must be impossible. To the extent that they do appear, then we can be sure that they are reducible to lower level causes.

Along these lines, theoretical biologist Robert Rosen's first book was called Anticipatory Systems. I've never read it, because I'm not about to pay $60 for a book. But I can check out the amazon preview, and sometimes with a scientific book you have only to read the introduction in order to get the main point, the rest of the book consisting of proof. But we don't need no steenking proof, because we are metaphysicians. Our proof is in the very nature of things.

Time out while I raid the preview for any useful bits.

Rosen notes that while writing the manuscript in 1979, 

I felt (and still do) that I had arrived upon the threshold of some entirely new perspectives in the theory of natural systems, and of biological systems in particular.

He's not talking about a mere scientific discovery, but rather, the meta-discovery of a new and deeper paradigm for understanding living systems. 

This itself, in my opinion, is an example of the creative emergence alluded to above. Importantly, this doesn't render it merely "subjective" -- just his opinion, man -- but explaining why would require a lengthy foray into Polanyi's post-critical philosophy of tacit knowledge. We'll probably circle back to Polanyi in due time.

Anticipation. It sounds like something that could only be present in a mind of some sort, but what if it is "fundamental in its own right" and built into the nature for things, into the rug-like fabric of being? And in what type of cosmos is anticipation even possible? 

Strictly speaking, an anticipatory system is one in which present change of state depends upon future circumstances, rather than merely on the present or past.

This obviously touches on teleology, but not in a fixed way, as in a machine, rather, in a more open ended manner. But what does it mean to be open to future circumstances that do not properly exist? 

Well, it must be similar to what we were saying above about music: we can only appreciate it in the present moment, but in so doing, this moment is reaching forward to some future creative development and resolution.   

Rosen's book is "about what else one is forced to believe if one grants that certain kinds of systems can behave in an anticipatory fashion." Forced? Since I'm not a materialist, you'd have to force me not to look at the world this way. Indeed, the weirder the better. 

It seems to me that the anticipatory paradigm cannot replace the mechanistic paradigm, but rather, complements it. For example, in the human body -- or any other organism -- there are machine-like  "closed-loop" and more creative "open-loop" subsystems. Indeed, if the entire biosphere weren't in some sense an open system, then evolution itself would be impossible. Rather, the identical process would simply repeat itself like any other machine. 

Here again there is a great deal of overlap with Polanyi, for whom living systems are under "dual-control": such a system relies on the principles of a lower level -- e.g., the laws of physics and chemistry -- to serve as boundary conditions for the emergence of a higher level. 

Analogously, we require the fixed structure of grammar and spelling in order to say something novel or creative, and one cannot deduce meaning from the lower level structure. Or as Rosen puts it in a later book, semantics cannot be reduced to syntax, meaning to order. Take that, DNA!

Back to Anticipatory Systems:

Living organisms have the equivalent of one "foot" in the past, the other in the future, and the whole system hovers, moment by moment, in the present -- always on the move, through time....

The truth is that the future represents as powerful a causal force on current behavior as the past does, for all living things. 

Oh, I get it: reality is musical. 

In her preface, Rosen's daughter suggests that 

Perhaps time is not quite as linear as we have always presumed it to be. My father's view, in fact, was that, "Time is complex."

(Speaking of which, a true and embarrassing story which I've mentioned before: when writing my book, I contacted Rosen's daughter -- herself a biologist -- for a blurb, and she sounded excited that someone should be interested in the work of her late father.) 

(But after sending her an excerpt, I never heard from her again, nor do I blame her, because I think it might have actually included the sub-Joycean prelude. I'm only surprised she didn't obtain a restraining order. But the whole darn point of Finnegans Wake is that time is not only weirdly complex, it is more complex than we suppose and more complex than we can suppose!)

(In my defense, I ask you: if we want to understand the complex weirdity or weird complexity of time, is science somehow more competent than literature?)

(According to Campbell & Robinson, "The Wake, at its lowest estimate, is a huge time-capsule, a complete and permanent record of our age. If our society should go to smash tomorrow, one could find all the pieces, together with the forces that broke them, in Finnegans Wake. The book is a kind of terminal moraine in which lie buried all the myths, programs, slogans, hopes, prayers, tools, educational theories, and theological bric-a-brac of the past millennium. And here, too, will be found the love that reanimates this debris.)

The love that reanimates the debris? Didn't anticipate that one, but enough about the Incarnation. To be continued...

Nothing that satisfies our expectations fulfills our hopes. --Dávila