Anticipatory Systems

Abstract

At the very outset of this work, in Sect.?? above, we tentatively defined the concept of an anticipatory system; a system containing a predictive model of itself and/or of its environment, which allows it to change state at an instant in accord with the model’s predictions pertaining to a later instant. Armed as we now are with a clearer idea of what a model is, we may now return to this concept, and attempt to obtain a deeper understanding of some of the principal properties of such systems. It is well to open our discussion with a recapitulation of the main features of the modeling relation itself, which is by definition the heart of an anticipatory system.