Evolution is the preservation of contingency

There is a difference between prediction and regulation. I suspect also there is a difference between anticipation and prediction. An anticipatory system - which all biological systems are - does not simply make bets on the future. Of course they make choices, but in the process they remain open to contingency. Predicting machines do not do this. They make choices and throw away contingency. 

Evolution is the name we give to the ongoing process of maintaining contingency while making choices. Taken as totality, evolution is a process of regulating homeostasis, at the level of organism, species, ecosystem, universe. Exactly how this is done we don't know. Our AI systems do not do it, that's for sure. The many different biological theories (for example, Friston Free Energy) are deficient because they too discard contingency. 

Music is a phenomenon (or at least the human relation with music is the phenomenon) that does preserve contingency. Studying its mechanisms for doing this can perhaps help reveal how it does it... But we are a very long way from understanding it. It is analysable in terms of information flows, as I've argued many times, and in those flows, no information is discarded - every element of contingency is necessary in order to construct the conditions for closure of music. It is a highly complex evolving system whose evolution occurs in front of us, unlike evolution itself. 

But we do not live in a musical world. If we did, we wouldn't have so many problems. We live in a world of language - and language does not have the property of music. As St Anselm said in his "De Caro Diablo":

We ought not to be 
held back by the way 
in which the improprieties 
of speech hide the truth, 
but should rather aspire 
to the precision of the 
truth which lies hidden 
under the multiplicity 
of ways of talking

Music gets closer to the truth. 

I'm currently working on a project which tries to get beyond the improprieties of speech. I don't want to dismiss LLMs - they move the bar in terms of the realisation of new technical explorations in ways which would previously have been impossible (or perhaps improbable). But it is possible to explore the deeper music of language.. not it's sound, but it's dynamics. 

We use words to refer to concepts without really having a clear idea of what a concept is. But we can say a few things about concepts which sheds light on these dynamics. Gordon Pask regarded concepts as stabilisations in recursive processes (there's recursion in the idea of explaining concepts!) - more technically they are eigenvectors produced in the process of organising a cognising system in an unknowable environment. Pask saw the perception of objects no differently - "reality" is stabilisations of recursive circularities. The process of eigenvector formation is difference and similarity which arises in the multi scale conversational dynamics between actors. Another way of putting it is that in these processes we detect states and transformations. 

We can't know directly what drives these dynamics except that the words that we use and the concepts they refer to leave a "trace" which  challenges a biological system to adapt. When we analyse conversation we are analysing the adaptation to all these traces. The interesting question is what happens between one trace and another. The in-between moments of traces sees a dynamics of dealing with information and contingency. This is the energy of what is going on. These dynamics are very similar to music. 

Our present AI can help us get off the starting blocks to analyse this. But it cannot really help us harness the energy of language because it throws away information - it is a prediction engine. This is probably why the LLMs are not particularly practical in real life - present obsessions with them are likely to fail. The increased efficiency and productivity of organisations depends of better regulation of their operations. That in turn depends on conserving contingency. Where we are at the moment is we have AIs which discard contingency by making predictions, and meanwhile idiotic managers, transfixed by the technology, will further discard organisational contingency by replacing humans with robots. It's not going to end well. 

We are going to need a new kind of technology which doesn't generate language, but somehow helps us to feel language and it's organisational context more deeply. It should help us to feel the energy of speech. It should tell us how and when meetings are pointless and dull (as if we need telling!), or identify the energy of creativity, or spot the telltale signs of psychopathy. 

This technology will be useful, and more importantly, it won't replace people, but in fact enhance the potential of effectively organised human systems. That is what maintaining contingency really looks like.