Chapter 137 22.7 Seek the same despite all changes

The earliest cybernetician, Norbert Wiener, was at pains to explain the immense power of feedback control.All he had in mind at the time was simple flush toilet feedback.He noticed that constantly feeding the system little bits of information about what it had just realized (“the water level is still falling”) led the system in a sense.This force, Wiener concluded, is a function of time translation.In 1954, he wrote: "Feedback is a way of controlling a system by re-inputting the results of its past operation into the system, thereby completing the control of the system." There is no suspense in the sensors that perceive reality.Is there anything else to know about the present besides the here and now?Obviously, focusing on the current is worthwhile for the system, since it has few other options.But why spend resources on something that has passed and cannot be changed?Why bother with the past for control of the present?

A system—whether it's an organism, a business, a company, or a computer program—expends energy feeding back what happened in the past to the present because it's more economical for the system to deal with the future.Because, to predict the future, you must know the past.The past, constantly pounding along feedback loops, informs and controls the future. For a system, though, time shifting has another path to the future.The sense organs in the body, those that pick up sound and light information from miles away, function like gauges for the present, and more like gauges for the future.Geographically distant events are, in practical terms, events from the future.An image of an approaching predator, now a message about the future.A roar in the distance quickly becomes a rushing animal; a whiff of salt signals an imminent change in the tide.So, an animal's eyes "feed forward" information that happened far away in time/space into a body located here/now.

Some philosophers believe that it is no accident that life could have originated on a planet shrouded in two media, air and water, because water and air are surprisingly transparent in most of the light spectrum.A clean, transparent environment enables organs to receive data-rich signals from "distant" (future) and pre-process signals from the organism.Eyes, ears, and noses are thus predictive mechanisms capable of peeking into time. According to this concept, completely turbid water and air might inhibit the development of predictive mechanisms by preventing information about distant events from reaching the present.Organisms living in a turbid world would be constrained both in space and in time; they would lack room to develop adaptive responses.And adaptation, at its core, requires perception of the future.In a changing environment, whether that environment is cloudy or clear, systems that can predict the future are more likely to survive.Michael Conrad wrote: "In the final analysis, adaptability is the use of information to cope with the uncertainty of the environment." .” A system (invariant by definition) adapts (changes) in order to survive (invariant).Flamingos change themselves in order to survive.

In this way, those systems that are stuck in the present moment are more often killed by the surprise surprise of change.A transparent environment, therefore, rewards the evolution of predictive mechanisms that give life to complexity.Complex systems survive because of their ability to make predictions, and a transparent medium helps them do so.In contrast, turbidity can completely hinder the prediction, adaptation, and evolution of complex living systems.