Susanne Vrobel – författare

This book is concerned with the notion of strong anticipation. Clearly defined necessary and sufficient conditions are laid out.The focus lies on strong anticipation as delay and distance compensation (as in temporal recalibration and synchronization of coupled systems). Of particular interest are delays which correspond to a boundary shift between a systemic whole and its context. Such boundary shifts result from assignment conditions which determine what belongs to the systemic whole and what belongs to its context. Delay and distance compensation is described, along with long-range correlations, against the background of a theory of time capable of describing anticipative systems. My Theory of Fractal Time describes anticipatory systems in terms of two temporal dimensions: succession and simultaneity, which are defined and measured in Δtdepth, Δtlength and Δtdensity. These extensions form an extended present and allow a quantified comparison of obserpants' (observer-participants') temporal interfaces. Compensated delays are revealed as phenomenal blind spots, which result in a new kind of relativity: What may be compensated for obserpant A is delayed for obserpant B.Compensated delays are ubiquitous and can be found in both cognitive and physical processes. Examples are temporal recalibration to restore degraded visuomotor adaptation, coupling environment and brain, biosemiotics and homeostatic processes, dynamical diseases, embedded and situated robots, control loops with inserted or removed delays, cellular automata, analog and digital notions of trust, transitional objects and potential spaces, our perception of time and judgement of duration. It is proposed that compensated delays emerge as natural laws.

This book presents an interdisciplinary approach to the question of how observer-participant perspectives are generated, what constrains them and how they may be modified. These questions are of vital importance and must be addressed in any discipline before formulating a hypothesis or designing a model about reality. Both epistemological questions about the nature of temporal nested structures and practical applications of our ability to contextualize are discussed. The resulting temporal observer-participant perspectives reflect approaches to the concept of simultaneity from the viewpoints of philosophers, logicians, cyberneticists and systems theorists, mathematicians, psychologists, medical practitioners, physicists, educationists, economists and musicologists. Although the main focus is on the cognitive sciences, as constraints to observer perspectives arise primarily from this field, the book will appeal to researchers of all disciplines and interested layman readers.