Fictionalism of Anticipation

A promising recent approach for understanding complex phenomena is recognition of anticipatory behavior of living organisms and social organizations. The anticipatory, predictive action permits learning, novelty seeking, rich experiential existence. I argue that the established frameworks of anticipation, adaptation or learning imply overly passive roles of anticipatory agents, and that a fictionalist standpoint reflects the core of anticipatory behavior better than representational or future references. Cognizing beings enact not just their models of the world, but own make-believe existential agendas as well. Anticipators embody plausible scripts of living, and effectively assume neo-Kantian or pragmatist perspectives of cognition and action. It is instructive to see that anticipatory behavior is not without mundane or loathsome deficiencies. Appreciation of ferally fictionalist anticipation suggests an equivalence of semiosis and anticipation

Quantum Evolution and Anticipation

In a previous paper we have investigated quantum states evolving into mutually orthogonal states at equidistant times, and the quantum anticipation effect exhibited by measurements at one half step. Here we extend our analyzes of quantum anticipation to general type quantum evolutions and spectral measures and prove that quantum evolutions possessing an embedded orthogonal evolution are characterized by positive joint spectral measure. Furthermore, we categorize quantum evolution, assess anticipation strength and provide a framework of analytic tools and results, thus preparing for further investigation and experimental verification of anticipation in concrete physical situations such as the H-atom, which we have found to exhibit anticipation.Comment: 22 page

Discounting future pain: Effects on self-reported pain

Empirical results are presented showing that people who acknowledge pain anticipation when expecting an injury experience higher sensitivity to pain (GREP, Robinson et al., 2001). The positive correlation between sensitivity and anticipation is highly significant. However, no relationship is found between anticipation and pain endurance.discounting, pain anticipation, sensitivity and endurance