Dear Marcus and colleagues,
But when it comes to drawing a hard line *within* behavioral adaptation – for example differences between instinctual behaviors and more cognitive behaviors – this (presently) is beyond my grasp. So the point you two now seem (to me) to circle around is effective differences between instinctual and cognitive behavior, between species. Entropy develops with the arrow of time, but meaning is provided from the perspective of hindsight, that is, against the arrow of time. Providing meaning can sometimes (!) reduce uncertainty. In the Shannon model, such a reversal of the time arrow (feedback and feedforward) is not possible. However, in a knowledge-based economy, the generation of redundancies (new options and expectations) is crucial for the competition. Obviously, this is not biological competition such as “between species”. The domain is not the one of biological realizations, but of cultural expectations that is exclusively (inter-)human. (This cultural evolution is constrained by the biological/physical conditions which can be considered as a retention mechanism.) The dynamics are shaped in terms of expectations (“cogitata” carried by “cogitantes”). Another way to study this is in terms of the theory and computation of anticipatory systems (Rosen, Dubois). The strongly anticipatory system that shapes its own future options is based on the exchange and codification of expectations at the supra-individual level. The future states can drive a knowledge-based development more than the historical ones. The duality between forward (historical) development and cultural evolution can be assessed in terms of mutual information and redundancy generation (Leydesdorff & Ivanova, 2014). The reduction to an a priori origin, in my opinion, is not a good idea. The formal a priori is contained in the notion of probability (which grounds also Shannon’s entropy). Best, Loet PS. Pedro: my last posting was on Sunday evening. L. _____ Loet Leydesdorff Professor, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) <mailto:l...@leydesdorff.net> l...@leydesdorff.net ; <http://www.leydesdorff.net/> http://www.leydesdorff.net/ Associate Faculty, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/> SPRU, University of Sussex; Guest Professor <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/> Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, <http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html> ISTIC, Beijing; Visiting Professor, <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/> Birkbeck, University of London; <http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en> http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en
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