Science

Agentic Calculus and the Concept of “Information”

Newtonian mathematics assumes an observer outside the system it describes. Living systems don’t allow that assumption — and neither can a mathematics built to model them.

The problem

Newton’s blind spot.

For over three centuries, science has described nature using a mathematical framework inherited from Newton. The central assumption of this framework is that the observer can be placed outside the system being studied.

In Newtonian mechanics, the observer is effectively at infinity. The observer measures but does not participate. Reality evolves according to fixed laws independent of who is watching.

This assumption works remarkably well for physics because planets, electrons, and falling objects do not possess agency. They do not interpret information, remember past events, or alter their future behaviour based on observation.

Living systems are fundamentally different.

A cell is not merely a physical object. It is an observer embedded within the system. It senses, remembers, interprets, decides, and acts. Every observation made by the cell changes the future state of the cell and its environment.

Biology therefore cannot be described adequately using a mathematics that assumes the observer is external.

The difficulty of mathematical biology is not primarily biological complexity. It is the use of the wrong mathematics.

Diagram: Agentic Calculus, the general case. Newton's calculus is the special case where the observer is at infinity (lambda = 0); Agentic Calculus is the general case where the observer is within the system (lambda not equal to 0).
Agentic Calculus generalizes Newton’s calculus — Newton’s calculus is recovered as the limiting case where observer participation λ → 0.
Information

Information — what is it?

If you know force F, mass m, and initial position x0, in principle you can compute trajectory as x(t). But this requires knowing velocity at some initial time.

Velocity (or equivalently, momentum p = mv) is an independent piece of information.

Position alone does not uniquely determine the future — two objects at the same place but with different velocities evolve differently. Therefore, to predict motion you need both position and momentum — this is the phase space idea. So, momentum is not just a convenience — it’s the minimum extra ingredient beyond position which makes the framework for mechanics complete.

Diagram: Information is an interactive, agent-centered process — showing information existing only through interaction, no observation without disturbance, information flowing through agents, entropy reduction requiring an agent, and cognitive/physical constraints making the agent local.
Information is not a thing — it is a dynamic relation between an agent and a system.
The Chronodynamic engine

The equation.

\[ \lambda \left(\frac{d\mu}{\mu}\right) - P \left(\frac{dG}{G}\right) = dV \]

The above equation captures the flow of information missing from current mathematics framework where we are only working with one aspect — entropy. The contrast between the classical Thermodynamic heat engine and Reuben’s Chronodynamic engine is shown below.

Understanding the Conjugate

Item
Conjugate
Formalism
Mechanics
01
Position
Momentum
Hamiltonian formulation
Circuits
02
Voltage
Current
Kirchhoff’s laws and Tellegen’s theorem
Signal Processing
03
Time
Frequency
Gabor transformation and Wavelets
Aerodynamics
04
Aero lift
Aero drag
Special case of infinite wingspan (Zhukovsky formula)
Computation / Information Processing
05
Probabilities
Reuben’s Lambda Variable
Chiral hydrodynamics of time
Diagram: Information is an interactive, agent-centered process — showing information existing only through interaction, no observation without disturbance, information flowing through agents, entropy reduction requiring an agent, and cognitive/physical constraints making the agent local.
Information is not a thing — it is a dynamic relation between an agent and a system.
Formal notes

On éclaves categories.

An éclaves category is a category \(\mathcal{C}\) with products and an associated generative primitive, an object \(\mathbb{A}\) of \(\mathcal{C}\) whose objects are necessarily of the kind

\[ V \rightarrowtail \mathbb{A}^{I} \]

for some finite index set I with some requirements which rather than axiomatising and adding to the burdock thicket of generalities we ask the reader to imagine to arise from imagining the category to be a subcategory of the category of sets and regarding the above monic morphisms as set-theoretic inclusions. We denote this agreement by rewriting in all that follows the above monic morphism by

\[ V \subset \mathbb{A}^{I} \]

and say that V is a \(\mathcal{C}\)-subobject of \(\mathbb{A}^{I}\).

Examples of \(\mathbb{A}\) are:

  • \(\mathbb{A} = \{0, 1\}\) (primitive for the category of all Boolean éclaves).
  • \(\mathbb{A} = \mathbb{R}\) (primitive for the category of “affine manifolds”).
  • \(\mathbb{A} = \mathcal{C}^{\infty}(\mathbb{R}, \mathbb{R}),\ \mathcal{C}_{c}^{\infty}(\mathbb{R}, \mathbb{R}),\ \mathbb{R}\text{-valued distributions on } \mathbb{R}\).