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Published on: August 25, 2023
Foundations of anticipatory logic in biology and physics
Jesse S Bettinger1, Timothy E Eastman2
1Johns Hopkins University - Center for Talented Youth, Baltimore, MD, United States; Center for Process Studies, Claremont, CA, United States.
Abstract:
Recent advances in modern physics and biology reveal several scenarios in which top-down effects (Ellis, 2016) and anticipatory systems (Rosen, 1980) indicate processes at work enabling active modeling and inference such that anticipated effects project onto potential causes. We extrapolate a broad landscape of anticipatory systems in the natural sciences extending to computational neuroscience of perception in the capacity of Bayesian inferential models of predictive processing. This line of reasoning also comes with philosophical foundations, which we develop in terms of counterfactual reasoning and possibility space, Whitehead's process thought, and correlations with Eastern wisdom traditions.
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