The anticipation of order in biosocial collectives

Written to honor David Loye's work on precognition and prediction, this essay presents a scientific account of the information processing mechanisms by which a social collective anticipates future order. Loye's concept of the hololeap (Loye, 1983), a metaphorical leap of information, is found to have a number of similarities to Gabor's (1946) concept of information, the logon, used in the physics of signal processing. An energy‐based elementary unit of information, Gabor's concept is combined with the concept of least action to develop a theory of information processing in social collectives. The theory shows how two orders of social relations, flux and control, act on the energy of the collective's members to create quantum‐like, elementary units of information. Each unit of information enfolds a description of the collective's endogenous organization. The interpenetration between the two orders operates as a communication system that in‐forms (gives shape to) the moment‐by‐moment expenditure of energy and results in a stable, effective collective. Because each unit of information overlaps with the unit that succeeds it, each unit enfolds data about the [potential] future order of the collective. In this way, the communicative system anticipates the next moment of the collective's order.

Keywords:

• information
• energy
• hologram
• future

Notes

Karl Pribram extends his best wishes to David on the occasion of this publication. He fully supports the statements (wild though they may seem to some) that constitute this essay and shares full responsibility for them. However, the material is fundamentally Ray Bradley's; he has done an overwhelming proportion of the work involved.