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Authors: Shimon Edelman
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decisions that steer behavior take shape there through constant give-and-take among the internal representations of perceptual qualities, motivational drives, and action affordances. These intelligence items, which all originate in the more or less recent past, interact with each other and come to a head during what William James called “the specious present”—“no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time.” 4
This “look in two directions” is sustained through the action of memory. Inasmuch as the representations that it deals in are momentary and fleeting, the grand map in the mind’s war room is like a mirror that reflects all things as soon as, but only for as long as, they face it. Adding memory to the “mirror” stretches the mind’s representational capacity from the immediate present to the past, and thereby to the future: the mirror becomes capable of reflecting also the shape of things to come.
But getting information back from the future is utterly incompatible with the foundations of contemporary physical theory, so what does remembering the future—that is, having foresight—actually mean in practice? It appears that an explanation of this bit of seemingly physics-defying magic has been discovered by J. R. R. Tolkien, who worked it into a scene from The Lord of the Rings that involves, very appropriately, an Elvish Mirror (with a capital M). In this scene, the Lady Galadriel offers Frodo a look in the Mirror, but warns him that
the Mirror will also show things unbidden, and those are often stranger and more profitable than things which we wish to behold. What you will see, if you leave the Mirror free to work, I cannot tell. For it shows things that were, and things that are, [and] things that yet may be.
Just as the Mirror of Galadriel shows those who dare look into it things that may be, not things that will be, so does foresight. In full compliance with the laws of physics, foresight is never about the actual future, only about possible ones—or rather, the likely ones, given memories of the past. The magic of the Mirror is thus revealed to be merely advanced information-processing technology, whose glamour is wholly due to its computational sophistication. 5
In a world that is predictable often enough and closely enough, the technology of foresight works by scouring memories of the past for patterns and trends that may apply to the future, turning retrospection, as it were, into prospection. Such learning from past experience happens over a range of time scales. The shortest of these may span just a fraction of a second, as when you mentally project the path of an incoming tennis ball into the future and move your racquet into a position to intercept it. The longest time scale on which learning happens is evolutionary. By driving some members of our species out of the genetic pool, selection pressure made it fractionally more likely that those who remained (a group that includes all of your ancestors and all of mine) were somewhat better at predicting whatever it was that made the difference.
Mirroring the World, Mustache and All, One Step at a Time
The most literal manner in which the brain may attempt to anticipate the future is by learning representations whose unfolding over time reflects the dynamics of the events that they stand for. Such mirroring of one dynamical system by another is not a trivial matter. Unless the two systems are in every detail identical and are identically connected to the rest of the world, their trajectories will sooner or later diverge, even if initially they unfold in lockstep. This representational falling out receives an exemplary treatment in the mirror scene in the Marx Brothers’ 1933 movie Duck Soup .
As any card-carrying Marxist will tell you, in this celebrated scene Chico sets out to impersonate Groucho, with the aid of a painted
This “look in two directions” is sustained through the action of memory. Inasmuch as the representations that it deals in are momentary and fleeting, the grand map in the mind’s war room is like a mirror that reflects all things as soon as, but only for as long as, they face it. Adding memory to the “mirror” stretches the mind’s representational capacity from the immediate present to the past, and thereby to the future: the mirror becomes capable of reflecting also the shape of things to come.
But getting information back from the future is utterly incompatible with the foundations of contemporary physical theory, so what does remembering the future—that is, having foresight—actually mean in practice? It appears that an explanation of this bit of seemingly physics-defying magic has been discovered by J. R. R. Tolkien, who worked it into a scene from The Lord of the Rings that involves, very appropriately, an Elvish Mirror (with a capital M). In this scene, the Lady Galadriel offers Frodo a look in the Mirror, but warns him that
the Mirror will also show things unbidden, and those are often stranger and more profitable than things which we wish to behold. What you will see, if you leave the Mirror free to work, I cannot tell. For it shows things that were, and things that are, [and] things that yet may be.
Just as the Mirror of Galadriel shows those who dare look into it things that may be, not things that will be, so does foresight. In full compliance with the laws of physics, foresight is never about the actual future, only about possible ones—or rather, the likely ones, given memories of the past. The magic of the Mirror is thus revealed to be merely advanced information-processing technology, whose glamour is wholly due to its computational sophistication. 5
In a world that is predictable often enough and closely enough, the technology of foresight works by scouring memories of the past for patterns and trends that may apply to the future, turning retrospection, as it were, into prospection. Such learning from past experience happens over a range of time scales. The shortest of these may span just a fraction of a second, as when you mentally project the path of an incoming tennis ball into the future and move your racquet into a position to intercept it. The longest time scale on which learning happens is evolutionary. By driving some members of our species out of the genetic pool, selection pressure made it fractionally more likely that those who remained (a group that includes all of your ancestors and all of mine) were somewhat better at predicting whatever it was that made the difference.
Mirroring the World, Mustache and All, One Step at a Time
The most literal manner in which the brain may attempt to anticipate the future is by learning representations whose unfolding over time reflects the dynamics of the events that they stand for. Such mirroring of one dynamical system by another is not a trivial matter. Unless the two systems are in every detail identical and are identically connected to the rest of the world, their trajectories will sooner or later diverge, even if initially they unfold in lockstep. This representational falling out receives an exemplary treatment in the mirror scene in the Marx Brothers’ 1933 movie Duck Soup .
As any card-carrying Marxist will tell you, in this celebrated scene Chico sets out to impersonate Groucho, with the aid of a painted
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