Chapter

Inference and Expectation

Authors:
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the author.

Abstract

Study of how we come to know—the nature of modeling and anticipation of our unpredictable, often dangerous environment—is the province of evolutionary epistemology. Constructivism depends upon knowledge being static or non-evolutionary and therefore cannot address the unforeseen and unknown in either our behavior or acquisition of knowledge. It has no anticipatory or feedforward mechanisms for the unanticipated. Likewise, constructivism has no mechanism for addressing error—either its detection or correction. Social or market orders (e.g., science) are sources of information used by agents to generate knowledge and to detect error. Trying to control science or the market by top-down intervention falsifies knowledge claims, fails to detect error, and reduces productivity in society. Socialism is not scientific, it kills inquiry by controlling its output.KeywordsAnticipatory systemsError eliminationCreativityControl

No full-text available

Request Full-text Paper PDF

To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Research
Full-text available
An economic analysis of the climate science boom as driven by Big Players via government funding and the IPCC of the UN.
Chapter
Full-text available
Purpose – To show that Hayek's prescient concepts on the cerebral cortex have received substantial support from modern neuroscience. Methodology – Update the terminology of The Sensory Order to adjust it to prevalent concepts of cognitive network, plasticity, association, connectivity, and cortical dynamics. Extend his concepts of perception to other cognitive functions, notably memory. Reveal significance of modern methods to study the formation and organization of cognitive cortical networks (cognits), applying the same basic methodologies that he applied to perception. He also applied those methodologies to knowledge transactions in economics and the social order. Findings – As Hayek proposed or assumed in his theoretical monograph:•Cognitive networks are spontaneously formed by associations (connections) between neuronal assemblies representing simultaneous elementary sensations.•Perceiving is classifying the world into categories of objects defined by those associations, in accord with a relational code.•Networks are hierarchically organized, with smaller networks constituting, and nested within, larger ones.•After formed and organized, a network becomes memory, which will make and shape future perception.•The interactions between the organism and its environment are governed by the perception/action (PA) cycle, a concept intuited by Hayek. This is the cybernetic interplay between the mammalian organism and its environment that courses through perceptual and executive networks of the cortex.•The dialog with an interlocutor epitomizes the PA cycle of language, unique to the human. Social Implications – The brain embodies structure and dynamics similar to those relating the individual to society. They include a complex adaptive system, the cerebral cortex, which engages the brains of others through the PA cycle. Language is the highest operation of that cycle at interpersonal level. Transactions of knowledge within the cortex are similar to those of the market place, with their attributes of spontaneity, self-organization, and incompleteness. Originality/Value of paper – This paper is unusual in that it highlights: (a) the insight of Hayek in cognitive neuroscience, anticipating by several decades the verification of his thinking on the role of the cerebral cortex in knowledge utilization and storage; and (b) the value for brain science of the principles of organization of knowledge that Hayek successfully applied to social sciences.
Book
Full-text available
Professor Joaquín M. Fuster is an eminent cognitive neuroscientist whose research over the last five decades has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the neural structures underlying cognition and behaviour. This book provides his view on the eternal question of whether we have free will. Based on his seminal work on the functions of the prefrontal cortex in decision-making, planning, creativity, working memory, and language, Professor Fuster argues that the liberty or freedom to choose between alternatives is a function of the cerebral cortex, under prefrontal control, in its reciprocal interaction with the environment. Freedom is therefore inseparable from that circular relationship. ‘The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity’ is a fascinating inquiry into the cerebral foundation of our ability to choose between alternative actions and to freely lead creative plans to their goal.
Book
Full-text available
This book explores whether the mental order corresponds to the order of structures, events, and processes in one part of the neural order, namely, the cerebral cortex. For clarity and simplicity, this means the search for a spatial and temporal order in the cerebral cortex that matches the cognitive order in every respect. A change or difference in the cortical order corresponds to a change or difference in the mental order. The principal aim of this book is to map cognitive networks onto cortical networks. It has implications for cognitive neuroscience, neurophysiology, neurobiology, neuroimaging, neurology, neurosurgery, psychiatry, cognitive psychology, and linguistics. The book will also interest students in all the disciplines of neuroscience and can be used as a text or collateral reading in courses on systems neuroscience, behavioral neuroscience, cognitive science, network modeling, physiological psychology, and linguistics.
Article
Full-text available
The relationship between government and science is surveyed focusing on the situation in the United States in the 20th century. Evaluating the theoretical rationale of government funding, it is shown that its model of market failure in science is highly suspect and its implications for the remedial effects of intervention do not stand up to even casual empirical scrutiny. Focusing on a more comprehensive treatment, attention is given to the various ways in which government funding interacts with scientists and the system of scientific activity to produce the unanticipated effects concerning humans. For clarity purposes, the effects referred to are presented as incentive effects, "Big Player" effects, problems of boom and bust and problems of bureaucracy.
Article
Full-text available
Considers 2 paradoxes in Plato's Meno: we cannot learn anything unless we already know it; we cannot learn anything new from prior learning. The Platonic epistemology rendered these paradoxes explainable with the doctrines of forms and anamnesis. Contemporary philosophers and psychologists have rejected Plato's solutions in favor of Aristotlean dissolutions of the paradoxes. However, the rise of psycholinguistics and with it the problem of creativity and the recognition of the conceptual primacy of the abstract in epistemology have resurrected the platonic approach. No claims can be made for any advance over Plato's original formulations. Rather, despite 2 millennia of study, virtually nothing has been learned about either the nature of knowledge and its aquisition or the productivity of behavior. (44 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Article
Full-text available
Robert Rosen instituted a rigorously mathematical treatise on the subject of anticipatory systems, the theory of which provides the conceptual basis for foresight studies. This article is an expository introduction[1]. The ubiquity of anticipatory systems in Nature is explained. An anticipatory system’s present behavior depends upon ‘‘future states’’ or ‘‘future inputs’’ generated by an internal predictive model. This apparent violation of causality is, however, simply an illusion. The topic of anticipatory systems in particular, and methods of relational biology in general, provide important tools for forecasting and planning.
Article
Full-text available
Our commentary on this special issue devoted to Developmental Biodynamics: Brain, Body, and Behavior Connections is divided into 3 main sections. The first section is an overview of the individual contributions. 5 major themes are identified: (1) inappropriateness of computational treatments of development and the need for more biologically and physically relevant treatments; (2) significance of tailoring muscular to nonmuscular forces in developing movement coordination; (3) importance of spontaneous movements as exploratory and formative mechanisms; (4) influences of action capabilities on the development of perception capabilities, and vice versa; (5) applications of methods and techniques of nonlinear dynamics to developmental processes. In the second section, we provide a synopsis of current ways of thinking about prototypical developmental processes, namely, pattern formation and pattern differentiation, in various classes of physical and biological systems. It is suggested that efforts to understand the progressive formation and differentiation of patterns in terms of very general principles provide a valuable resource of concepts and methods for students of child development. In the third section, hypotheses about the development of perception-action systems are generated from juxtaposing the themes and conjectures of this special issue with general principles of pattern formation. The hypotheses suggest the possibility of a pattern formation or dynamics approach to child development as an alternative to the conventional approaches emphasizing maturation (nativist), specific learning experiences (empiricist), cognitive stages (Piagetian), and strategies of encoding and retrieval (information processing).
Article
Full-text available
Synopsis Hayek’s cognitive theory, which seeks to describe the operation of a particular order, in fact provides a paradigmatic account of knowledge-generating orders in general. We claim that this paradigm provides a fertile conceptual framework for exploring a variety of problems in economics and social theory. In particular, we shall show that Hayek’s conception of the ‘map’ and the ‘model’, which he uses to explain the operation of the complex adaptive classifying system called ‘mind’, are promising analytical devices with applications extending to social structures of various kinds and complexity. We use Hayek’s notion of the map and model to analyze how different social structures – regarded as classifying systems – work in terms of their input, processing, and output capabilities. The adaptive characteristics of such systems, via communicative routines, multi-level classification, and feedback, form central motifs for our discussion of markets, science, and other social structures. We show that by analyzing the knowledge-generating characteristics of such structures we are also able to gain insights about the circumstances affecting their adaptive properties.
Book
A classic and influential work that laid the theoretical foundations for information theory and a timely text for contemporary informations theorists and practitioners. With the influential book Cybernetics, first published in 1948, Norbert Wiener laid the theoretical foundations for the multidisciplinary field of cybernetics, the study of controlling the flow of information in systems with feedback loops, be they biological, mechanical, cognitive, or social. At the core of Wiener's theory is the message (information), sent and responded to (feedback); the functionality of a machine, organism, or society depends on the quality of messages. Information corrupted by noise prevents homeostasis, or equilibrium. And yet Cybernetics is as philosophical as it is technical, with the first chapter devoted to Newtonian and Bergsonian time and the philosophical mixed with the technical throughout. This book brings the 1961 second edition back into print, with new forewords by Doug Hill and Sanjoy Mitter. Contemporary readers of Cybernetics will marvel at Wiener's prescience—his warnings against “noise,” his disdain for “hucksters” and “gadget worshipers,” and his view of the mass media as the single greatest anti-homeostatic force in society. This edition of Cybernetics gives a new generation access to a classic text.
Chapter
The conference that generated this volume focused upon brain and consciousness. Consciousness is the major mental phenomenon discussed, and recent data from brain science, neuropsychology, and technology are assayed in an attempt to understand how consciousness is related to brain, and what problems that relationship poses. Since these are focal issues on many pages, I wish to point out that consciousness is just one exposed tip of the mental iceberg, and that fundamental mind-body issues remain no matter what is said of consciousness. My primary task is to overview a major cluster of mind-body problems from which consciousness may become a focal problem. This is not to demean consciousness as a problem, but to put it in perspective as one of many pressing issues. Having located the major issues, I wish to turn to the second focus of the conference: the role of data in conceptual problems. This book contains empirical data relevant to the mind-body problems, but none of them are decisive, and some remarks why this is to be expected are in order. Finally, the manner in which mind and body are manifested in the natural order has always been puzzling, and I believe that recent conceptual advances in linguistics and cognitive psychology help clarify the issue. Integral to this issue is an explication of the relationship that obtains between mind and the physical and biological orders, and the focal problem of the causal efficacy of consciousness.
Book
Scitation is the online home of leading journals and conference proceedings from AIP Publishing and AIP Member Societies
Article
It is convenient to append as a comment on Beckner’s stimulating paper some remarks made in part in reaction to other presentations, including those of Medawar, Edelman, and Monod, and in a final section to the presentations of Dobzhansky, Thorpe, Eccles, Birch, Rensch and Skolimowski. Beckner, Medawar, Edelman and Monod are among my fellow ‘reductionists’, in so far as there are any ‘reductionists’ present at this conference.
Article
Purpose This article aims to be an expository introduction to Robert Rosen's anticipatory systems, the theory of which provides the conceptual basis for foresight studies. Design/methodology/approach The ubiquity of anticipatory systems in nature is explained. Findings Causality is not violated by anticipatory systems, and teleology is an integral aspect of science. Practical implications A terse exposition for a general readership, such as the present article, by definition cannot get into too many details. For further exploration the reader is referred to the recent book More than Life Itself by the author. Originality/value The topic of anticipatory systems in particular, and methods of relational biology in general, provide important tools for foresight studies. It is the author's hope that this brief glimpse into the world of relational biology piques the interest of some readers to pursue the subject further.
Article
Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata
Article
1. publ. Paperback ed
Article
What would you do if faced with the choice of a smaller reward that you could have today versus a larger reward that you would receive after several weeks' delay? Such questions are explored by Ainslie and Monterosso in their Perspective, which discusses a recent study that uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the brain activity of student volunteers as they are faced with immediate versus delayed monetary rewards ( McClure et al.).
The nature and function of scientific theories
  • N R Hanson
  • NR Hanson
/1999). The sensory order
  • F A Hayek
The great betrayal: Fraud in science
  • H F Judson
Unsettled: What climate science tells us, what it doesn't, and why it matters
  • S E Koonin
Critical race theory: What it is and how to fight it
  • C F Rufo
  • CF Rufo
Gender Ideology Run Amok
  • A Shirer