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Biological Roots of Foresight and Mental Time Travel

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Abstract

Studies of future-oriented capacities today are based on Cartesian epistemology. In this paper it is suggested that, following this epistemology, not only the answers to scientific questions, but even the questions themselves should be replaced. Particularly, instead of asking whether some form of future-oriented cognition might be unique to humans, and what are the “causes” of such capacities; it might be more productive to ask, in the framework of the structural-systemic epistemology, what level of analysis corresponds to future-oriented capacities, and in what form their structure is organized. The structural-systemic theory of functional systems by the Russian physiologist Piotr Anokhin is described, where it is shown that future orientation is the central characteristic of living systems. Furthermore, it is an essential property of all life-forms as wholes. Therefore understanding of future-oriented capacities requires description of what Anokhin called functional systems, systems that can be found in all life forms. Starting from Anokhin’s structural-systemic epistemology, it is possible to go further and build a developmental theory of different kinds of future-orientation. It is proposed that future-orientation as a characteristic of life has evolved into psychical future-oriented cognition. From there, in turn, qualitatively novel forms of semiotically mediated future-oriented processes have emerged. Building a theory of future-oriented capacities in this direction seems to be scientifically more productive than continuing the theory-building following the fundamentally limited Cartesian epistemology.

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This work was supported by the Estonian Science Foundation Grant No. 7490.

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    Aaro Toomela

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Toomela, A. Biological Roots of Foresight and Mental Time Travel. Integr. psych. behav. 44, 97–125 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-010-9120-0

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