Fictionalism of Anticipation Raimundas Vidunas Vilnius University, Institute of Applied Mathematics April 26, 2020 Abstract A promising recent approach for understanding complex phenomena is recognition of anticipatory behavior of living organisms, social organizations. The anticipatory, predictive action permits learning, novelty seeking, rich experiential existence. I argue that the established frameworks of anticipation, adaptation, or learning imply overly passive roles of anticipatory agents, and that a fictionalist, or even a mythological vocabulary would reflect the core of anticipatory behavior better than representational or future references. Cognizing beings enact not just their model of the world, but own make-believe existential agenda as well. It is instructive to see that anticipatory behavior is not without mundane or loathsome deficiencies. Compelling anthropomorphisms of anticipatory activity suggest a formulation of an anticipatory kind of panpsychism. This article constitutes a primer introduction to the overlooked fictionalist facets of anticipation and their deep going implications. Key words: anticipation, prediction, future, fictionalism, a priori, self-organization, semiotics, teleology, panpsychism, natural selection. 1 Introduction Human anticipation gives color to experiences and social life. Or does it even define what it means to be fully alive and engaged in the society? Trust is a form of anticipation that plays essential roles in economy, business 1 organization, governing, politics, technological progress (Botsman 2017). For a multi-faceted example, consider the FIFA World Cup of 2018 in Russia. Various forms of anticipation are present in organization and sponsorship of the event, in ready broadcasting industry and reliable communication technology. Prior political doubts (BBC 2014) underscore the risk of anticipation. Football itself is largely an anticipation game, especially for goalkeepers, but also for the attentive defenders, middle-field playmakers, and opportunistic forwards seeking to beat offside traps. Coaches do much anticipation work as well. And then there are expectations of football fans around the globe. At the same moment as Hirving Lozano scored a goal against Germany on June 17, 2018, seismic stations in the Mexico city registered a small earthquake (Semple and Villegas 2018). Plausibly, it was caused by jubilating fans in the city. How else can a ball kicked in a Moscow stadium cause a geological event on other side of the globe, but by powers of captive anticipation? The FIFA World Cup illustrates that anticipation is a key feature of masterly performance, better life experiences, grand scale coordination. It is indispensable for vigorous economy and functional society. An ambitious academic view is emerging that anticipation, broadly understood, is a fundamental attribute of biological life, cognition, artificial intelligence, and even of emerging, self-organizing phenomena beyond mechanical matter interactions. Certain universality of anticipation is noticed by Poli (2010): "... the major surprise embedded in the theory of anticipation is that anticipation is a widespread phenomenon present in and characterizing all types of realities. Life in all its varieties is anticipatory, the brain works in an anticipatory way, the mind is obviously anticipatory, society and its structures are anticipatory, even non-living or non-biological systems can be anticipatory." The growing interest in broad studies of anticipation is evident (Nadin 2016; Poli 2017). Nasuto and Hayashi (2016) write: "... anticipation is an emerging concept that can provide a bridge between both the deepest philosophical theories about the nature of life and cognition and the empirical biological and cognitive sciences steeped in reductionist and Newtonian conceptions of causality." 2 According to Nadin (2016, pg. 283), anticipation is "a definitory characteristic of the living". This echoes Rosen's (1985) distinction between simple, mechanical systems and complex, living systems. Similarly, predictive coding (Clark 2013; Pezzulo et al. 2018) and active inference (Friston et al. 2016) are key features of cognitive and biological processes in their free energy formalization (Friston and Stephan 2007; Ramstead et al. 2018). Working definitions of anticipation in academic literature (Poli 2017, Ch. 1) refer either to future prediction (Poli 2010), or to representation of self and the environment (Rosen 1985). These definitions do not mention fictionalist aspects as a conspicuous feature of anticipation. According to linguistic definitions (Matti 2019), fictionalism accepts statements of a discourse not as literal truth but as useful fiction of some sort. Similarly, I see anticipatory cognition as having a pragmatic, heuristic rather than rigidly representational character, and as generally resilient to possible and inevitable errors. This article constitutes a primer introduction to the overlooked fictionalist facets of anticipation and their deep going implications. It is worth mentioning that fictional expectations in economics are accentuated by Beckert (2013). The fictional character of anticipation is demonstrated amply by the current COVID-19 pandemics that causes huge disruptions in the global economy, travel, various events (CNET 2020), and thereby reveals the regular expectations as fictitious plans at heart. I highlight two fictionalist aspects of anticipation that appear to counter the leading contemporary paradigm of cognition based on predictive coding (Friston et al. 2016). Firstly, anticipatory action includes not only exciting possibilities of learning, novelty seeking, rich experiential existence, but also mundane or even repellent facets such as prejudiced behavior, stressful reactiveness. If human judgement can be patently biased, fallible, irrational (Kahneman and Tversky 1973), more primitive forms of anticipation can be expected to be even more superficial, fallacious, crude. With a contrasting reference to behavioral economics (Minton and Kahle 2013), the ambitious thesis of predictive coding that cognitive and living systems are effective probabilistic prediction machines is comparable to rational choice theory (Gilboa 2010). Secondly, I argue that the established frameworks of anticipation, prediction, autonomy still under-appreciate active, generative drives whereby 3 anticipating beings seek to fulfill or impose their existential agendas. The frameworks of representation, predictive coding, autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela 1980) portray a reactive, stasis-oriented manner of observation, learning and adaptation. Even the time-centered approach (Poli 2010) has a flavor of reactiveness to future. But anticipation can be spacial as well, as in venturing to new locations or encountering new objects. New experiences and exploits are often attained by own new behaviors, improvised persistence. Complementarily to the approach of enactive embodiment (Varela et al. 1991) of the environment, cognizing anticipators effectively seek to enact their destined actions in the world. The next section reappraises the scope of observed anticipatory behavior, including mundane or loathsome manifestations. Section 3 defines the emergent fictionalist stance of anticipators, and finds similitude in several philosophical currents, particularly in Kantian a priori categorization and American pragmatism. Section 4 gives key definitions of anticipatory myths, existential agendas, and discusses formalization of anticipation itself. Section 5 explicates embodiment and semiotic unfolding of anticipations and existential agendas. Section 6 adopts compelling anthropomorphisms of anticipators and defines an anticipatory kind of panpsychism (Brüntrup and Jaskolla 2016). The last section briefly underscores wide significance of fictionalism. 2 The scope of anticipation Fragility and forcefulness of being alive constitute a subtle polarity. On one hand, the environment is ever changing and rudimentarily unpredictable. There is no certainty that an acorn will turn into an oak tree. At best, an acorn effectively anticipates favorable conditions for appropriate employment of its nutty nutrients and DNA guidance. Even animals have objectively limited control over own fates. Some of their maturation phases - such as winning a duel for status, finding a sexual partner - are only roughly determined by the fixed biochemical mechanisms or scenarios. The whole trajectory of the Aristotelian telos of a living being depends on many things going right, sometimes sporadically, extraordinarily right. Figuratively speaking, an organism lives in anticipation of favorable luck and certain outside help. 4 On the other hand, organisms act powerfully on the environment. Fulfillment of anticipation is followed by resolute activity that intervenes in the ambient dynamics of the environment and own organic development. In aggregate, the biosphere changes the geology and the atmosphere of the Earth. Representational models of anticipation poorly capture this polar dynamics. Rosen (1985, §6.1) defined an anticipatory system as a natural system that contains an internal predictive model of itself and of its environment, which allows it to change state at an instant in accord with the model's predictions pertaining to a later instant. This presupposes significant cognitive capacities that normally require a brain. The advance from prediction to action at an instant is not clear; say, how does a predicted scenario lead to a decision when the scenario is unfavorable? Rosen's formal structure of anticipatory modeling is particularly inapplicable to the animal behavior in predator-prey races, where the action is very fast, hardly predictable, contingent on accidental features of the environment, and the outcome is uncertain. Organisms cannot have a comprehensive model of the environment and its possible changes. Instead, an organism works from its Umwelt (von Uexküll 1957; Kull 2010), i.e., its functionalist-semiotic view of the environment (and itself). A living being filters the perceived environment for existential necessities, threats, and affordances (Gibson 1966). Action is triggered by rather few cues out of a mass of environmental information. For example, consider seasonal phenological cycles (Schwartz 2003; Forrest and Miller-Rushing 2010), particularly the spring revival. They constitute webs of anticipatory attentions, responses, and influences without any organism apprehending wholly its environs. To appreciate the scope of anticipation, we should recognize it in mundane, commonly failing, or even loathsome forms as well. Examples in human social contexts are: stereotypes, prejudice, superstition, strong first impressions, adoration of leaders, financial speculation. These anticipations determine human behavior to a larger extent than rational thinking. Comparable anticipations in the biological world are checked perhaps only by natural selection. A different example is the physiological stress response (Sapolsky 1994). For most animals, it is an episodic anticipatory reaction to adverse environmental conditions. But it is chronically triggered in the modern human life, with harmful effects on health. 5 On the other hand, higher levels of existence beyond being mere matter require determined anticipation, in a sense. Just being alive is inherently an anticipation of further favorable conditions. Anticipation or being anticipated can define agency (Poli and Valerio 2019; Simondon 1964). Most elementally, anticipators act from anticipatory fictions rather than from representations of future or the world. Most importantly, the anticipatory fictions direct action. I argue that a worldly cognitive being does more than playing "the game of predicting the sensorium" (Allen and Friston 2018, p. 2464). It has an existential agenda delineated by its anticipatory myths, as I define in Section 4. I talk about myths both in negative, delusional meanings, and in generative, stimulating meanings. The world is a natural selection of myths. The penetrative contrast between observing and active anticipation is well reflected by the famous quip of Marx (1845, Thesis 11): "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." Ironically, the prototypical examples of consequential impetuous change happen to be capitalists like John D. Rockefeller. The modus operandi of entrepreneurs is brazenly mythological rather than analytical. Their innovative action is formed by incomplete visions, ambitious anticipations, and quickly devised plans. For example, Rockefeller's success was furthered by his determined, optimistic appraisal of the risks in the early oil industry (Chernow 1998, Ch. 6, 16). He daringly expanded his oil business in an unstable market, despite uncertainty of how much oil would ever be yielded from the Pennsylvania fields or anywhere else. He entreated partners to hold onto Standard Oil shares, or willingly bought the shares over (Chernow 1998, pg. 168, 181, 380). Entrepreneurs rely on their experience largely in a mythological mode as well; high rates of venture failure attest to that. Crises are commonly resolved by essentially betting on a fortunate strategy. For example, the diverging fortunes of Kodak and Fujifilm - the two largest manufacturers of photo films until the 2000s - are attributed to different decisions in coping with the swift competition of digital photography (Kmia 2018). Fujifilm wagered on massive production of LCD screens, even if the competition from plasma technology was intimidating. I argue that the anticipatory aspect of aspirational mythology deeply unifies human sciences with biology, ecology, and eventually with self6 organizing phenomena in general. This association offers and justifies concrete anthropomorphic generalizations toward pansemiotics (Salthe 2012) and panpsychism (Goff 2017). While making a similar argument, Ulanowicz (2010) quotes Bertrand Russell (1960, Ch. II): "Every living thing is a sort of imperialist, seeking to transform as much as possible of its environment into itself and its seed. ... We may regard the whole of evolution as flowing from this 'chemical imperialism' of living matter." More benign but similarly active aspects of human experience and learning are underscored by Dewey (1916, Ch. II, XI). The direction-to-fit distinction (Searle 2001, p. 37–38) between beliefs (as having to fit the world) and desires (as seeking to alter the world) is a kindred philosophical discussion. Let us take a look at other philosophical confirmations. 3 Philosophical parallels Western philosophy has been in opposition to mythological interpretation of the world since the Greeks (Robinson 2004, Lect. 2). Modernist philosophy, especially positivism (Ayer 1936), has yet greater distaste for speculative, metaphysical narratives. But reversal of Comte's (1975) theologicalmetaphysical-positive historical progression of knowledge is worthwhile to consider when formulating a primitive epistemology for simpler living or cognizing beings. A good reference point is MacIntyre's (1981, Ch. 10) view of the ancient societies, where everyone had to know own place in the community as well as correspondent privileges, duties, performance norms; where courage, loyalty determined reliance for friendship, et cetera. My proposal boils down to assigning a pragmatic fictionalist (Matti 2019) and fallibilist stance to cognizing, anticipating beings towards future, own capacities and fate, and the indirectly apprehended environment. They are corporeally ready to employ their developmental stories as useful, even vital fictions rather than comprehensive, unambiguous verities. As I discuss here, indirect support for viability of the fictionalist stance can be found in philosophy of science and post-modernist ideas. The stance embraces Kantian a priori categorization and American pragmatism liberally. The 7 fictionalist stance is anti-realist epistemically, but onticity of reality is acknowledged implicitly: there would be no set out fiction without reality. Fulfillment of aspirational expectations is never guaranteed. But rational, empirical or post-modern skepticism (Popkin 2003) leads to the conclusion that any anticipation, intuition, knowledge, conviction are open to failure. According to anti-realist currents (McCain 2016; Massimi and McCoy 2019), scientific knowledge differs only in commitment to reliability and technical standards as a set of predictions and extrapolation of perceptions. Popper (1962, p. 66) writes: "Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths." Living out anticipatory myths is similarly inescapable as falsification of scientific theories. Biological cognition, anticipation are probably closer to superstition, faith than to the best scientific practices such as Bayesian inference (Knill and Pouget 2004). Rather than focusing on a few well-defined, immediate problems of life, organisms may inherently follow behavioral myths that encompass necessary wisdom for their whole term of existence. Downsides of a priori beliefs and anticipatory organization can be mild, while probable rewards could be existentially enormous, like in Pascal's Wager (Hájek 2018). From the skeptical perspective, life is an art of being right for wrong reasons. The relation between aspirational fiction and life is reminiscent of psychophysical parallelism (Wikipedia 2020), particularly of Spinoza's notion that mental and physical events do not interact causally, but are coordinated by God. In our context, the fictions and the physical reality are coordinated by a generalized natural selection. Thereby emergent mythological meaning defines the teleology of the being and intentionality of its behaviors. The extent of the parallelism can be extraordinary: the DNA guides the development and the living of organisms; values of individuals or societies direct their fate and history. Conversely, operative myths constitute the semiotic DNA of the being, a critical causal factor of its ways. Extending Kant's (1998) transcendental turn, the myths can be seen as the synthetic, a priori knowledge of the cognizing being. They dynamically organize, mold its perception (and action!), impose "intuitive" frames of apprehension, stabilize experience and performance. Anticipation itself is a kind of categorization of future scenarios. Fictional expectations as assorted Kantian-like categories determine the Umwelt (von Uexküll 1957) and routine perceptions of the cognizing being. Evolutionary epistemology (Lorenz 1977) 8 principally asserts that the synthetic, a priori knowledge is shaped by natural selection. This implies that workable competences appeared first in partly ad hoc ways. The fictionalist stance matches well with American pragmatism (Legg and Hookway 2019), particularly with: • Peirce's (1935, 1:141) fallibilism; i.e., the epistemological view that no belief or theory can ever be certain; • anti-skepticism (Putnam and Conant 1994, Ch. 8); • Peirce's inquiring logic of abduction and speculative grammar (Fann 1970; Ejsing 2007; Bellucci 2018); • James' (1896) will to believe as the necessary practical will for required, purposeful action and fulfilling experience; • James' functionalist, purpose-driven psychology (Robinson 2004, Lect. 47). Peirce (1935, 1:545) replaced Kant's preformed categories of understanding and forms of intuition by a dynamical stock of signs (Cahoone 2010, Lect. 17). Just as Peirce's (1935, 5:283) implicit theory of mind postulates that all thoughts are signs, biosemiotics (Emmeche and Kull 2011) proposes that animal perception, communication, behavior, and metabolism are ubiquitously mediated by signs. Anticipation is basically a semiotic process (Kull 1998; Nadin 2012), even bluntly a Peircian triadic sign (Savan 1988): a cause to anticipate can be viewed as a signifier (i.e., representamen), fulfillment of the anticipation as the correspondent signified (i.e., object), and the consequential process or its supposed scenario as the interpretant. Categories of cultural framing (Cassirer 1953) can be extrapolated to communalecological significations as well. The signs are linked on various scales into hypothetical patterns whose experiential affirmation is anticipated. The fictionalist perspective matches well with subtleties of post-modernism. One point of agreement is that all cognition is inferential and mediated by signs (Cahoone 2010, Lect. 31). Derrida's (1974) critique of Western logocentrism is conforming, but his radical deconstruction is antithetical to appreciation of myths. Eventually though, a workable myth is to be understood roughly uniquely. Brashly rephrasing Foucault (1980), mythology 9 is power. A backhanded confirmation can be found in Lyotard's (1983) critique of metanarratives. Rorty (1979) concurrently denied foundational justification of knowledge, representationalism of language, definability of truth, and affirmed Davidson's (2001) veridicality of existing beliefs. The truth of (mythological) knowledge could be established by the depth and the temporal extent of the parallelism with the surrounding reality and, pragmatically, with own existential purposes. 4 Existential agendas Broad universality of anticipation invites recognition of anticipatory capacities, teleological agendas in simplest cognizing, self-organizing beings. Contrary to (Rosen 1985; Nadin 2012), I consider perception-reaction cycles as prototypical anticipating entities already. Primed dynamical systems of (Vidunas 2019) can be recognized as radically open (Chu 2011), critically sensitive, causation delegating, provoking anticipators. Attribution of a fictionalist stance to anticipators provides with many engaging anthropomorphisms. Section 6 embraces them to define anticipatory panpsychism. Here I give resonating definitions of anticipatory myths, existential agendas, and discuss briefly formalization of anticipation itself. Next, Section 5 discusses material or semiotic modalities that embody or actualize anticipated items or events. An anticipatory myth is a sequence of anticipations, responding actions, set outcomes, and further anticipations, actions of a cognizing being. It is an implicit script of what could happen. Anticipatory myths address primarily autonomy, subsistence, and relational organization of the anticipator. The myths are determined by cognitive capabilities of the anticipator; excitatory (though not necessarily productive) reaction to anticipation fulfillments has to be possible or probable. The prescribed reaction may be objectively possible only under extraordinary circumstances, or with some "magic" assistance not specified by the anticipation. For example, an elephant might fly steadily under exceptional stormy conditions. Set outcomes can be seen as special cases of anticipation. Interesting anticipatory myths are those enhancing quality or probability of prolonged existence of the anticipator. An existential agenda is a set of anticipatory myths of a cognizing being, together with their semantic meaning to its existence. It is a set of implicit 10 anticipations, adumbration of what should happen. For example, a stray cat seeking an owner has an existential agenda, with several behavioral myths to attract her or him. Biological life can be defined as an existential agenda that includes metabolism, self-repair, and reproduction. Emergence and evolution of life could be described within a spectrum of existential agendas. This spectrum can be imagined starting with Maslow's (1943) hierarchy of human needs by extrapolating it to existential agendas of mammals, vertebrates, multicellular and unicellular organisms, and eventually to virtually biotic hypercycles of chemical reactions. Existential needs will vary across the food chain, within territorial or hierarchical species, down to parasitic organisms, and so on. The variable complexity of agendas allows variable complexity of requisite biochemistry, information processing. Graves' (1970) levels of existence follow Maslow's hierarchy to a great extent, and fit into the delineated spectrum of existential agendas even better. A technical definition of anticipation itself may be premature while usage of this notion shifts with newly appreciated limitations of representational models and future prediction. Radical openness of anticipation is well characterized by Deacon's (2011, p. 27) ententionality; he uses the term ententional as "a generic adjective to describe all phenomena that are intrinsically incomplete in the sense of being in relationship to, constituted by, or organized to achieve something non-intrinsic". Cryptically, ententionality encompasses self-preservation, adaptation, functionality, satisfaction conditions, purposes, subjective experiences (Logan 2012) - in a word, anticipation. The primary aspect in my focus is structural readiness for favorable conditions and a predisposed self-enhancing reaction, behavior or dynamics. That constitutes a whole anticipatory story. Delegated causality in (Vidunas 2019) stipulates structural readiness for external perturbation, but the positive value of the ensuing interaction may be missing. We would not say that humanity anticipated the COVID-19 pandemics with its unpreparedness and institutional vulnerability. Another disputable detail is negative specification of anticipation, say, of "a future nonfunctional and deleterious internal state" (Hofmeyr 2017) as driving life. Even if some organizational constraints are there to prevent specific things from happening, there are always affirmative scenarios or objectives that sustain living and should specify the anticipation. This context is similar to the psychological ironic rebound effect, as in the exercise "don't think of a white 11 bear" (Wegner et al. 1987); our thinking is deeply affirmative. The selfenhancing value and the affirmative style of anticipation can be captured by the introduced notions of existential agenda and anticipatory myths, respectively. 5 Embodiment and semiosis Working representation of anticipatory myths or enaction of existential agendas require material embodiment and a whole logistical system of furnishing essentials. A prime example is the chromosome DNA that constitutes basically an embodied mythological story of the development and the living of an organism. The DNA molecules and the supporting machinery of ribosomes, RNA polymerase, transfer RNA (Berg et al. 2006) exemplify existential, material modalities of the biochemical mythology. Normative organic functionality comprises other class of biochemical myths. Besides genetic guidance, resourceful systems rely on nutrient supply, waste removal, homeostasis, neural and hormonal coordination on various scales. Most interestingly, allostatic (Sterling 2012) mechanisms regulate bodily states through anticipatory change of somatic parameters. Importance of the functional logistics is acknowledged by constructor theory (Deutsch 2013; Marletto 2015). For any physically possible circumstance or transformation, constructor theory postulates existence of a constructor, that is, an object or a process that can repeatedly and reliably bring that circumstance about. Like relational biology (Rosen 1985) or the notion of autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela 1980), constructor theory focuses on abstract organizational requirements and processes. The organizational relations have an anticipatory character, really: each involved substance fills in an expected requisite role, and more importantly, the material substances are radically open to particular demanded interventions or informational guidance. Anticipatory relations can buildup innately bottom-up as the primed structured materials define abstract demand for particular interventions, and that demand is normally satisfied eventually by distinct substances. The whole vehicle of living relations is reconstructed in a biological organism as a market of primed genes and proteins (mainly). Emerging demands of the functional organization can be satisfied only by present substances which are likely to have unrelated other roles or original 12 conditions of existence. The substances become new affordances (Gibson 1966) for the most open-endedly anticipating components. This dynamics constitutes a form of embodiment (Glenberg 2010) and semiotic scaffolding (Hoffmeyer 2015). For example, biological information careers probably evolved as successful targets of guidance "requests" from the anticipators, starting from arbitrary, "superstitious" sensitivities of the anticipators. This fits the paradigm of extended cognition (Clark and Chalmers 1999), epitomized by the behavior of consulting a map or a notebook. Other example of the embodied fulfillment of this anticipatory inquiry could be quick organic development of rich motor repertoire and mannerisms by referring to loosely related experiential memory, perhaps most completely encoded in one perceptual-motor modality in a manner insinuated by the theory of visual, auditory or kinesthetic learning styles (Pashler et al. 2008). In a similar vein, behavioral economics (Kahneman and Tversky 1984) describes how human choices are primarily determined by largely emotional framing rather than objective merits of the choices. Embodiments arise as spandrels (Gould and Lewontin 1978) rather than adaptations: they are incidental scaffolds for emerging new capacities and substantive purposes. As mentioned in Section 3, anticipation is basically a semiotic process (Kull 1998; Nadin 2012). Affordances, recurrent sequences of events become Peircian signs whereby initial perceptions or triggers signify eventual benefits or outcomes under "interpretant" action or dynamics. Semiosis translates resources, dynamic processes into potential utility. The meaning of the signs is pragmatically fictionalist rather than precise, logocentric. Bounds of the recursive semiosis (Peirce et al. 1935, 1:339) - presumably, toward fundamental physical interactions in one direction, and some cosmic selection in the other - are disregarded by the fictionalist stance of anticipators, as their operative level of interpretation ignores dynamical details, thermodynamic limitations, higher meanings. The most reliable signs establish persistent patterns of behavior and experience, habits (Fernández 2012), and embodiment frame for semiotic scaffolding. Less reliable signs are the focus of emergent creative manipulation become leverage points for flexible adjustment, learning, communication. Semiotic scaffolding may recursively continue beyond material embodiment. This virtual embodiment across cognitive levels can be recognized in the techniques of competitive memorization through rich association or navigation scenarios (Foer 2011; 13 O'Connor 2019), and in abstract cognition through metaphorical bodily sensations (Carpenter 2011; Sapolsky 2017, Ch. 15). An example of the latter is moral disgust registered as physical disgust. The James-Lange theory (James 1884) that emotions are initiated physiologically rather than mentally is another exemplar of embodiment dynamics. To recapitulate in other words, the demands of existential agendas are satisfied by haphazard, opportunistic embodiments of affording services in various forms of material modalities and cognitive constructs. This interaction of bio-economic demand and supply should extrapolate to anticipatory capacities and teleological agendas of simplest cognizing, self-organizing beings. The simplest Umwelt, existential agenda, or Peircian habit (West and Anderson 2016) of a primed dynamical system can be recognized in mere organization of the particular reaction. The existential agendas of many entities may include becoming effectively well-designed, strangely familiar (Botsman 2017, Ch. 3) affordances to others, or fitting competitively into a centripetal (Ulanowicz 2009, Fig. 4.3) autocatalytic flow. These emergent drives are analogous to the objectives of the design industry (Hinton 2014, Ch. 4). 6 Anticipatory panpsychism Compelling anthropomorphisms arise easily under the introduced view of fictionalist anticipation. Here are several anthropomorphic characterizations of anticipators: they are persistent, observant, and have tendencies, habits, behavioral character; they are strongly biased toward satisfying triggers; they need or demand them as living necessity or economic utility. Within the thermodynamic perspective, Salthe (2012) refers to dissipative structures (Prigogine 1980) as "entities with needs". Panpsychism (Brüntrup and Jaskolla 2016) is the philosophical view that all or most things in the world are mental. The strong anthropomorphisms suggest a concrete form of panpsychism which can be called anticipatory panpsychism. Rather than postulating elemental consciousness or cosmopsychism (Goff 2017), a vital force or, say, Spinoza's self-preserving conatus (Schmitter 2010; LeBuffe 2015), I propose that cognitive activity emerges from specific physical, chemical, topological interactions of primed, anticipatory dynamical elements. Mentality is thereby not fundamental 14 ontologically, but it is a ubiquitous feature in the natural world with plenty of various anticipators and good chances of their expectancies being gratified. Catalysis, molecular recognition, selective interaction or transfer in supramolecular chemistry (Lehn 2013) of non-covalent bonds can be formulated in anticipatory or panpsychic terms. Furthermore, an anticipator (of any scale) behaves like a neuron: it reacts to specific circumstances by changing own state and potentially triggering transformative changes on a larger scale. Reactively self-organizing anticipators (i.e., physical, physiological and signaling processes, chemical or hormonal modulations) may tend to imitate Hebb's (1949) dictum: "Neurons that fire together wire together". A pandemonium (Selfridge 1957) of anticipators may eventually organize themselves to a global brain (Heylighen 2011). Fundamental similarities between neural and somatic processes are noted in (Pezzulo and Levin 2018). Conceptually, anticipation pertaining to own action is arguably tantamount to intention, teleology. The fictionalist perspective gives a clear apprehension of holism and teleology in complex, self-organizing systems. The systems follow make-believe scripts so to realize (with good probability or to a workable extent) their substinence functionality and broader existential agendas. Anticipatory panpsychism is no more extravagant than speculative realism (Harman 2002; Meillassoux 2008). My view agrees with speculative realism on feasibility of avoiding anthropocentrism (i.e., giving humans a privileged distinction), but diverges in support of correlationist epistemology, psychophysical parallelism. Rather than postulating a flat, democratic ontology of things (Bryant 2011), I endorse a hierarchy of their existence in a manner echoing the hierarchical descriptions of Simon (1962), Maslow (1943), Graves (1970). The hierarchy is built locally by the relations of anticipatory need and affording service, where the "privileged" have higher and less conspicuous needs. There is no equality even among objects of the same kind, for example, among sports cars or painted art. On the other hand, recognition of causal influence of anticipations, propensities, tendencies (Salthe 2008; Fernández and Campbell 2019) democratizes them relative to physical, thermodynamic laws and principles. 15 7 More fictionalism Recognition of anticipatory behavior in complex self-organizing phenomena has enormous interpretive power. In turn, the fictionalist facets of anticipation clarify normativity, holism, teleology, striving of living or cognizing beings, and untangle complications of excess, malfunction, disequilibrium. Kindred anticipatory notions of Umwelt (von Uexküll 1957), affordances (Gibson 1966), functionality (Ariew et al. 2002) can be similarly smoothly analyzed from the fictionalist perspective. Norms, meanings, intentions, goals, beliefs, signals are fictions whose proper unfolding can be usefully anticipated. As the poet Muriel Rukeyse (1968, IX) writes: "The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms." Semiotics and even philosophy of language could embrace the fictionalist approach rather than the customary logocentric setting. The meaning of a sign or an utterance becomes a fiction that has to be construed well by every interpretant or listener. Processes of communication and learning encompass homologous fictions of proper comprehension. Even conventions are anticipatory, thus fictional tools for minimizing misunderstanding. Fictionalism can be applied to theory of mind (Demeter 2013) to the extent that an other mind is as unknown as future or a novel environment. Knowing the unknown in the messy, competitive world is accomplished primarily by daring, tricky epistemology and anticipation of the best development. I highlight two fictionalist aspects of anticipation that counter the leading contemporary paradigm of cognition based on predictive coding (Friston et al. 2016): primitive forms of anticipation look more like prejudice, superficial bias rather than objective inference; and the basic existential epistemology has a boldly vigorous rather than a soundly careful character. These wilder aspects are moderated by generalized natural selection. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Ari Belenkiy, Marianna Benetatou, Rimvydas Krasauskas, Markus Pawelzik, Joseph Riggio, Susumu Tanabe, Robert Ulanowicz for useful discussions and comments. 16 References M. Allen and K. Friston. From cognitivism to autopoiesis: Towards a computational framework for the embodied mind. Synthese, 195:2459–2482, 2018. A. Ariew, R. Cummins, and M. Perlman, editors. Functions. Oxford Univ. Press, 2002. A.J. Ayer. Language, Truth and Logic. Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1936. BBC. 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