ABSTRACT
In the course of the main experiment described in Chapter 6, each subject selected a "preferred" period and amplitude for each wrist-pendulum system on eight separate occasions, divided evenly over two days. How were the cyclic parameters arrived at? Wrist-pendulum systems are not mechanical pendulum systems; their cyclicities are not defined by closed, determinate, bookkeeping strategies defined over the conservations. Rather, wrist-pendulum systems are open, nondeterminate systems whose behavior is based on, but not caused by, information.
Wrist-pendulum systems are guided primarily by haptic perception and moved by muscular and nonmuscular forces. In concert with the analysis of complex atomisms advanced in Chapter 4, it is suggested that information for the haptic system can be defined as kinematic (or geometric, or spectral) abstractions of the underlying mix of forces. These abstractions are morphological and macroscopic, and describable in a state space of relatively few variables (they are low dimensional). A quasi-formal analysis is provided of the kinetic attractor state (a limit cycle) of a wrist-pendulum system with implications for the apposite abstract description—the kinematic flow field property—by which it is specified.
The generating of these kinematic flow-field properties by kinetic processes, 159 and their playing back as constraints on those kinetic processes, yields the circularly causal process of force→flow→force—>flow . . . that may be the hallmark of self-assembling information systems. By the arguments of Chapter 4, the consistencies of such systems rest largely with the lawfulness of the generated information that guides them. It is supposed, therefore, that the periodic behavior of wrist-pendulum systems can be reliable and reproducible because information—in the kinematic, specificational sense of Gibson's—is law based and determinate. There are, as it were, information laws, roughly of the form:
Consonant with standard law forms, information laws should meet the criteria of structural stability. The data of the main experiment are presented in a way that identifies structurally stable relations among period, amplitude, mass, and length: Over subjects, over hands, over trials, and over days the periodic times and amplitudes of the various wrist-pendulum systems were shown to order invariantly.
