I turn now to a more detailed description of this anticipatory process.
Anticipating
We wait, we imagine, and we anticipate. We wait and imagine not only long-term, but also very short term. Our waiting and imagining are taking place every moment of our life. They take place while we anticipate what is about to happen and adjust our mind, body and actions to this anticipation. As I have already noted, I have proposed that there is a dominant process related to anticipation that I have labeled Polystasis.
We adjust our expectations (baseline) when assessing changes in the environment where we are operating. We also change our planned behavior based on shifts not only in our baseline, but also in what we imagine will be the impact of our behavior in the changed environment. While the anticipation and subsequent adjustments are often quite minor in a highly stable environment, they can be frequent and dramatic in an environment that “doesn’t behave itself” (VUCA-Plus).
Bubbles and Patterns
Often what we anticipate relates to deeply embedded assumptions, biases, hopes, fears and beliefs. We keep expecting something to occur, or we anticipate that the world will react in a certain way to our pattern of behavior. While this anticipation might be proven wrong on many occasions, we are likely to retain the assumptions, biases, hopes, fears and beliefs in a bubble that allows in no disconfirmations, (Weitz and Bergquist, 2024).
At a more fundamental level, our anticipations are based on the human capacity to discern patterns in the environment we inhabit. The discernment of patterns enables we humans to act quickly and to find meaning in our life. Many people in history have ascribed the existence of patterns to some divine presence, whether this pattern be the yearly flooding of the Fertile Crescent in the Mideast (leading to the narrative of Noah and the Ark), or the presence of disease when water in a community is contaminated (leading to public health reforms).
Applying his Jungian perspective, Van Eenwyk (1997, p. 66) suggests that consciousness might be closely associated with this pattern-recognition function (relating consciousness to the recently discovered presence of fractals, as natural patterns to be found in many domains of life):
“Is consciousness tantamount to the overlapping of fractal attractors? Freeman thinks it is. Based on his research, he feels that the subjective experience of adjusting to new experiences is what builds consciousness. Certainly symmetry building seems consistent with the building up of patterns over time. For not only are the patterns in fractal attractors self-similar across scale, so too are the attractors themselves. If that were not so, we couldn’t lump them together under a definition. Consequently, fractal attractors are themselves informed by patterns of organization.”
Using some different terms to appreciate what Van Eenwyk is proposing, the fundamental makeup of human consciousness might be based in or at least supported by our capacity to find patterns (fractals). We are conscious because we are aware, and we are aware because we can discern consistency in our environment. Our world is not the “one great blooming, buzzing confusion” that William James (1890) believed exists in the new-born child’s mind; rather, it is a world in which we can anticipate repeated environmental occurrence and can reasonably expect our behavior to have a certain effect. We can also anticipate the behavior of other people, even though we recognize that their consciousness is different from our own (Theory of mind). We also can anticipate that we can create a specific shared set of beliefs, hopes, fears, etc. with other people.
