Back ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... Send comments to review committee. ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... Forward

This is a note from Paul Prueitt to New England Complex Systems Institute Forum , October 22, 1999.

To New England Complex Systems Institute Forum

I will state that the notion of final cause may be "enriched" or extended, if there becomes evidence that a type of cause goes not only from inside of the anticipatory system (as Rosen and Mikulecky suppose) but AS WELL AS from outside the system.

The notion of "environmental affordance" (generalized from Gibson's notion of perceptual (vision system) affordance) is one way to enrich and extend.

So actions taken by an anticipatory system would be partially directed by the needs of the environment. "Information" in the anticipatory systems "endo-physics" would, presumably, supply control over choices. But what is the ontological status of the notion of "information"?

The issue seems to have two parts: the posing of choices, and the selection of a choice. The origin of a posing-of-choices might be ecological affordance outside and independent of the anticipatory system. The selection of a choice would be due to information internal to the anticipatory system.

The entanglement of these two parts might be seen as within the "epistemic" cut separating the endo and exo physics of the anticipatory system. Thus the dynamics of interaction are quite outside of the rules for either the endophysics or the exophysics. The dynamics is cross scale, and is subject to paradox in any real observational experiment.

The notions of "action at a distance" and "structural links into specific paths to future states" seem to sit on the horizon of the notion of environmental affordance. It seem to me that we simply can not be conclusive, at this time, about what a new science will find on this horizon.