Anticipation Science – serie

This volume presents a selection of the Proceedings of the Workshop on Anticipation, Agency and Complexity held in Trento (Italy) on April 2017. The contributions contained in the book brilliantly revolve around three core concepts: agency, complexity and anticipation, giving precious insights to further define the discipline of anticipation.

This book is a critical examination of the philosophical and moral issues in relation to human enhancement and the various related medical developments that are now rapidly moving from the laboratory into the clinical realm. In the book, the author critically examines technologies such as genetic engineering, neural implants, pharmacologic enhancement, and cryonic suspension from transhumanist and bioconservative positions, focusing primarily on moral issues and what it means to be a human in a setting where technological interventions sometimes impact strongly on our humanity. The author also introduces the notion that death is a process rather than an event, as well as identifies philosophical and clinical limitations in the contemporary determination of brain death as a precursor to organ procurement for transplantation. The discussion on what exactly it means to be dead is later applied to explore philosophical and clinical issues germane to the cryonics movement. Written by a physician/ scientist and heavily referenced to the peer-reviewed medical and scientific literature, the book is aimed at advanced students and academics but should be readable by any intelligent reader willing to carry out some side-reading. No prior knowledge of moral philosophy is assumed, as the various key approaches to moral philosophy are outlined early in the book.

These include meditations on the very nature of future studies, visions of preferred futures, ideas about alternative futures, and details on future theories and methods.

These include meditations on the very nature of future studies, visions of preferred futures, ideas about alternative futures, and details on future theories and methods.

This book identifies and describes five megatrends that will define the landscape of the Travel, Tourism & Hospitality industry, with a particular focus on the European context.

This book identifies and describes five megatrends that will define the landscape of the Travel, Tourism & Hospitality industry, with a particular focus on the European context.

This book is an argument for moving beyond culturally/historically/ethnically/biologically-grounded identity as the necessary foundation of an authentic self. It highlights examples of people who are attempting to inhabit identities they feel are more appropriate to themselves, by deploring the damage done via claims about authentic identity. The sole theme of this book is “becoming beyond identity”. We are not fixed human beings but rather perpetually-dynamic human becomings. As intelligence is enabled or recognized beyond the merely human, we should welcome our continuing evolution from homosapiens, sapiens, into many varieties of intelligences on Earth and the cosmos. This book builds from tiny ripples into a tsunami of examples from conventional identity studies, to Confucian human becomings, to apotemnophilia, to DIY biohacking, to cyborgs, to artilects, to hiveminds, to intelligence in animals, plants and fungi from the Holocene through the beginnings of theprecarious, climate change-driven Anthropocene Epoch, with hints far beyond and throughout the cosmos. From a lifetime of work in future studies, anticipation science and space studies, the author balances frank tales of his own experiences and beliefs concerning his uncertain and fluid identities with those of others who tell their stories. In addition to material from academic and popular sources, a few poems further illuminate the scene.

This book is an argument for moving beyond culturally/historically/ethnically/biologically-grounded identity as the necessary foundation of an authentic self. It highlights examples of people who are attempting to inhabit identities they feel are more appropriate to themselves, by deploring the damage done via claims about authentic identity. The sole theme of this book is “becoming beyond identity”. We are not fixed human beings but rather perpetually-dynamic human becomings. As intelligence is enabled or recognized beyond the merely human, we should welcome our continuing evolution from homosapiens, sapiens, into many varieties of intelligences on Earth and the cosmos. This book builds from tiny ripples into a tsunami of examples from conventional identity studies, to Confucian human becomings, to apotemnophilia, to DIY biohacking, to cyborgs, to artilects, to hiveminds, to intelligence in animals, plants and fungi from the Holocene through the beginnings of theprecarious, climate change-driven Anthropocene Epoch, with hints far beyond and throughout the cosmos. From a lifetime of work in future studies, anticipation science and space studies, the author balances frank tales of his own experiences and beliefs concerning his uncertain and fluid identities with those of others who tell their stories. In addition to material from academic and popular sources, a few poems further illuminate the scene.

This book focuses on Robert Rosen’s contributions to relational system theory, which is the science of organization and function. Rosen was the first to apply category theory to scientific problems, outside of pure mathematics, and the first to think about science from the point of view of category theory.

This book focuses on Robert Rosen’s contributions to relational system theory, which is the science of organization and function. This science was originally developed by Nicolas Rashevsky, and further developed by Rashevsky’s student Robert Rosen, and continues to be developed by Rosen’s student A. H. Louie amongst others. Due to its revolutionary character, it is often misunderstood, and to some, controversial. The formal and conceptual setting for Rosen’s relational system theory is category theory. Rosen was the first to apply category theory to scientific problems, outside of pure mathematics, and the first to think about science from the point of view of category theory. To better understand the work of Rosen, this book provides an overview of his theory of modeling, complexity, anticipation, and organism. It presents the foundations of this science and the philosophical motivations behind it along with conceptual clarification and historical context in order to present Rosen’s ideas to a wider audience.

This book shows how multiple developments have caused the world to move from “an information society” to a “dream society”. Rather than deny or reject this transformation, this book argues that one should understand and embrace it as waves of new futures that the world must strive to surf for fame and fun.

This book shows how multiple developments have caused the world to move from “an information society” to a “dream society”. Ongoing social and technological forces are pushing us from a world of words, rationality, and truth into a world of images, performance, and make-belief. Rather than deny or reject this transformation, this book argues that one should understand and embrace it as waves of new futures that the world must strive to surf for fame and fun. As a political scientist and futurist, the author also offers hints of new goals and forms of governance fit for a dream society, as he demonstrates that all current systems are ineffective and dangerously obsolete. This book is of great interest to political philosophers, futures scientists, sociologists, and those interested in cultural studies.

Anticipatory Biographies is a collection of future scenarios written in the form of individual biographies that span the breadth of human experience: from the privileged to the marginalized and across diverse cultures. Grounded in design fiction, futures research, anticipation science, and scenario writing, the essays in this book envision how the world will be reshaped by artificial intelligence, technological automation, climate change, political disintegration, and the decline of higher education. Each chapter brings readers into the perspective of a fictional person living in this anticipated world, capturing how future technologies and societal shifts will impact daily lives. and personal choices. In exploring the the inner lives of these individuals, Anticipatory Biographies innovates beyond conventional scenario writing ,inviting readers to contemplate not only the technological and political dimensions of the future but also the emotional, ethical, and existential aspects. This work of creative non-fiction bridges literary and scholarly forms, blending biography and design fiction with research-based insights. to offer an immersive, narrative-based method for exploring futures. This work pushes beyond speculative visions toward an experiential understanding of the future.

This book presents the theory of anticipation, and establishes anticipation of the future as a legitimate topic of research. The book first summarizes the research on anticipation conducted within a range of different disciplines, and describes the connection between the anticipatory point of view and futures studies.

This rare publication continues an exploratory journey in relational biology, a study of biology in terms of the organization of networked connections in living systems. It builds on the author’s two earlier monographs which looked at the epistemology of life and the ontogeny of life. Here the emphasis is on the intangibility of life, that the real nature of living systems is conveyed not by their tangible material basis but by their intangible inherent processes.  Relational biology is the approach that hails ‘function dictates structure’; it is mathematics decoded into biological realizations. Therefore, the work begins with a concise introduction to category theory, equiping the reader with the mathematical metalanguage of relation biology. The book is organized around three parts: Part I is a comprehensive study of the most important functor in relational biology, the power set functor.  The author lays the set-theoretic foundations of the functorial connections in relational biology, exploring relations, mappings, and set-valued mappings. In Part II, Natural Law receives a new mathematical formulation founded on two axioms: ‘Everything is a set.’ and ‘Every process is a set-valued mapping.’ The reader sees how Metabolism–Repair networks, equipped with set-valued processors, expand their role from models of biological entities to generic models of all natural systems.   Part III expounds the various shades of invertibility in general, and the inversion of encoding to decoding in particular.  A plethora of mathematical and biological examples illustrate the category-theoretic concepts of equivalence and adjunction. This book's algebraic approach to biological models will appeal to researchers and graduate students in mathematics, biology, and the philosophy of science.

This book presents the theory of anticipation, and establishes anticipation of the future as a legitimate topic of research. The book first summarizes the research on anticipation conducted within a range of different disciplines, and describes the connection between the anticipatory point of view and futures studies.

This rare publication continues an exploratory journey in relational biology, a study of biology in terms of the organization of networked connections in living systems.