Anticipation in Social Systems: the Incursion and Communication of Meaning

TL;DR

This paper models social systems using anticipatory dynamics derived from the logistic map, illustrating how meaning and information exchange influence social interactions and observer reflections.

Contribution

It introduces an anticipatory formulation of social systems based on the logistic map, integrating meaning processing and observer reflections.

Findings

Anticipatory models enhance understanding of social interactions.

Observer reflections improve system representations.

Logistic map approximates social system dynamics.

Abstract

In social systems, meaning can be communicated in addition to underlying processes of the information exchange. Meaning processing incurs on information processing with hindsight, while information processing recursively follows the time axis. The sole assumption of social relatedness as a variable among groups of agents provides sufficient basis for deriving the logistic map as a first-order approximation of the social system. The anticipatory formulation of this equation can be derived for both anticipation in the interaction term and in the aggregation among subgroups. Using this formula in a cellular automaton, an observer is generated as a reflection of the system under observation. The social system of interactions among observations can improve on the representations entertained by each of the observing systems.