# Full Text: Transcript of discussions on: "Communication as Socially Extended Active Inference: An Ecological Approach to Communicative Behavior"

> Extracted from `ActInf Livestream 048 ~ 'Communication as Socially Extended Active Inference'.odt`

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ActInf Livestream 048 ~ “Communication as Socially Extended Active Inference”

Discussion with an author

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10407413.2021.1965480

Presented by Active Inference Institute in 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqiZjjY9H7M

This video is an introduction for some of the ideas in the paper.

Daniel Ari Friedman, Dean Tickles

00:29

Introductions

07:28

Roadmap

14:34

Dynamical Systems Model

38:38

The Ecological Interpretation of Active Inference

49:31

Conclusion

56:12

Model of How to Frams Complex Ecosystems

1:04:56

Final Final Thoughts

All right. Hello, welcome. It is September 2, 2022 and we're in active Livestream number 48.0. Welcome to active coherence lab institute. We're a participatory online institute that is communicating, learning and practicing applied active inference.

This is a recorded and archived Livestream so please provide feedback so we can improve our work. All backgrounds and perspectives are welcome and will be following video etiquette. For live streams. Head to active inference.org or active active inference institute. Come to our website.

Learn more. We are in active stream number force eight series. We're going to be discussing the paper communication as socially extended active inference and ecological approach to communicative behavior. Paper in 2021 by Remy Tosson and Pierre Pouyer.

01:30 The video is a total introduction to some of these ideas.

It's not a review or capturing every aspect. For that you can read the paper and explore some of the ideas. We are going to talk about aims and claims, abstract roadmap keywords and bring up some notable points. It is still upcoming with the 48.1 and 48.2 so people are welcome to submit questions or things to discuss, write comments and join the panels live if they want. So let's begin with introduction and warm up.

I think we can share more with our big question. So Dean, why don't you say hello and introduce your big question?

02:15 Dean:

Thanks, Daniel. I'm Dean. I'm Sharon Calgary.

Well, I could read out the big question but it's pretty long winded. So I'll just say that I'm always curious about what happens when active inference isn't something that we look at as a subject or a topic, but it's something that we actually use or perceive as being around us. And so I think the question of whether or not you focus on what's inside of an ecological space or look at the biology and the system in which we believe active inference exist as and maybe within because 47 47 Livestream. We kind of test on the idea. Could be both.

If we're going to expand our horizons and look at what kind of limits are and describe that as an ecology. My question then is as communication and of communication, what is the product of communication and what is communication serve as?

03:23 So those kind of my big questions and I hope the next three live things we can start, maybe at least staking out where that biology begins and ends.

03:37 Daniel:

Nice. Well, very interesting.

Thanks a lot. Also for so much of the preparation here, we're still coming down off of 47 and so I think it's going to be interesting to see how we approach pragmatism in this discussions. So the big questions that brought me to this paper or that I was thinking about during the paper were what are the applications and implication of different interpretations of communication? Why does it matter? What would be the things in the world, including the mind, that would be changed as a factor with or downstream of how our interpretation of communication is and then what are the causes and consequences of different perspectives we take on active inference where perspective also includes

So perspective is like where one is situated to end viewing. And so it's the view from somewhere, from something rather than view from nowhere, slash everywhere.

04:45 And I think in that specificity we can have a lot of discussions about ecology as a great system to learn from.

04:54 Dean:

Dean yeah, I think when we're outside or if we perceive ourselves where we're foraging, that would be the on this slide, that would be the first box. That's our sense that we're kind of outside of the system looking in whereas the second box on the right would be, well, we're embedded.

And now the reason why I'm embedded is the genie came out and got out and now it's all around us. It's kind of like that. The perfume has now Beren distributed through the air and now we're walking through it. So which of those two things depending upon how we want to analyze which of those two things produce what results sort of thing. And I think we're both kind of asking the same question if this, then what?

If that, then what?

05:47 Daniel:

All right, I'll read the first half, the abstract. In this paper we introduce an ecological account of communication according to which acts of communication active inference lab achieved by affecting the behavior of target organism via the modification of its field of affordances. Constraining a target organism's behavior constitutes a mechanism of socially extended active inference allowing organisms to proactively regulate their interstates through the behavior of other organisms.

06:23 Dean:

In this general conception of communication the type of cooperative communication characteristic of human communicative interaction is a way of constraining interaction dynamics towards the goals of a given joint action by constructing and altering shared Fields of affordances. This account embraces a pragmatist view according to which communication is a form of action aiming to influence behavior of a target that stands against the traditional transmission view.

Sorry, I just have to pull it up here because it kind of slid on my screen. Where am I? Transmission view, according to which communication fundamentally serves convey information understanding ants of communication as active inference lab under this ecological interpretation allows us to link communicative and ultimately linguistic behavior to the biological imperative, minimize free energy and emphasize the action oriented nature of communicative action interactions.

07:25 Daniel:

All right, nice. Here's the roadmap and there's some light, sometimes consistent highlighting at play.

The paper is prose based. There are not any figures or formalisms, however many are suggested. So we'll have and interesting time, I think, making some representations, using words, maybe some non linguistic communication because there's so much to add. It's not providing visual centers, as many papers outside of especially philosophy do. So first there's an introduction.

08:43 And they're going to then in communication, active coherence focusing on human cooperative communication describe how under ecological and active inference, starting points, justified starting points as they'll argue that we can endorse a pragmatist view at the detriment to the transmission view. Any other thoughts?

09:11 Dean:

Yes, now the authors are pretty clear.

They describe this paper or these arguments as a sketch. So when we say roadmap here, I think it's not a highly detailed, highly specified zoom in on a very precise Google map. This is kind of a back of the napkin idea for a conversation starter. And so I appreciate that because at least by the authors saying we want to get this down, we ant to stake this out and then let people decide how to come at this empirically to maybe fill in some more of the precision.

09:57 Daniel:

Yeah, it's like planning a road trip.

In its implications, especially itself, is an entire completed work. Let's just jump to the aims. Well, the top two aims are some of the largest. They summarize their work as introducing a pragmatist conception of communication grounded in ecology of active inference. So the three threads are pragmatism ecological interpretation, active inference, lab about communication and they're going to argue that all of communication be understood as socially extended, active coherence be understood by whom, when?

And those are some of the points it brings us to. Secondly, there are some direct contradictions tensions described and contrasting with the transmission view which is the dancing partner of the advance of the ecological pragmatic active view is by contrast with the transmission view which can help a lot with literature continuity in setting direction for research field.

11:20 People looking for transmission view can see that there's a paper from 2021 that's connecting and finding concordances and as Dean mentioned, they will stress in several different ways that it's an initial account with many gestured to next directions that we'll get to. Any other thoughts?

11:39 Dean:

Yes, I think without using these terms, they're saying there are nodes out there, there are potential connections out there.

One way of viewing that is through a transmission line. And what we would like to do is maybe advance the idea that those links are a little bit more embellished than something simple. And so again, those aren't the terms that they use, but Daniel, you're better at this than I am. We had a recent Livestream this year, I think, where we talked about offloading as being a really important part of extending the active inference firm. Do you remember which one that was?

12:26 Daniel:

Kind of yeah, something was extended. Let's look it was with a cognitive offloading. Cognitive off communicate. This is 48. Extended active inference constructing predictive cognitive beyond skills.

Number 41.

12:43 Dean:

Right.

There wasn't anything in that idea that the betweenness was like the whole idea of how Markov blanket may function as a way of focusing or bringing down the amount of noise and raising up the amount of signal in a space outside yourself. We didn't have a lot of pushback on how that theoretically would work. So I don't think that they're endstopping into that zone by mentioning this.

13:17 Daniel:

Nice. All right, so they make several claims, they're summarized here but we'll deal them in the sections in rough order.

Anything to add though?

13:30 Dean:

Okay, they're going to come up.

13:33 Daniel:

Yeah, these are some summaries of some important claims but we're going to come up with them soon. All right. And then last stop before we jump into the background, which is one term and then the paper itself.

What are the keywords in your eye?

13:55 Dean:

We have dynamics assistance model in the last Livestream too. So there's a lot of people that are depending on that theory to advance whatever arguments they want to make. And I think the other term that comes up quite often is joint actions without really getting into some hard specifics about what that may look like on a scale friendly level. So I think when the authors join us, I think both of those things are things will have there's fertile ground there to grow some conversations.

14:31 Daniel:

Awesome.

The one I would just want to highlight is dynamical systems model. You mentioned how maybe just rephrasing that people use it in a lot of different ways and just that being raised made me think about what is being advanced by claiming that alone or together something chance through time. Does anyone disagree and would it matter that everyone disagrees? But what does dynamics mean when we're talking about time dependent real existing systems? What does it mean that you have a system or a model or a systems model?

15:33 There's so many aspects to it and it's actually going to come back at the very end. Alright and pragmatics also the top part, you could mention anything otherwise. Dean, how does this connect to what we discussed in 47?

15:51 Dean:

Well, I kind of wrote this up so I rather read it privacy and especially the question of what makes up and aim and I put in behind that the the ant act the process and aiming which is the control lining which we all know as the generative model. Given targeting with what there's still a question of what are we targeting with when we put it all under one umbrella called Active Coherence, a situational analysis tool. We've had lots and lots of people claim that that's what active inference is it's a rangefinder with a depth of filter or is active inference and affordance generator something that examples as selection given through framing and depth stabilization or both. Now, if you want to write and academic paper it's way easier to just limit it. Active inference lab is a stabilizer.

Now we have t zero, t one, t two and so on but it's also a way to delimit that temporal spatial temporal field.

16:58 So do we just ignore that because it's easier to write papers if we do that's? Where the arrow of time meaning we're kind of moving with the flow and temporal depth through the memorial and across the spectral range whatever we arbitrarily pick as our projectional integration space must both be induced or included in whatever the representation is if we analyze the entanglement along with the entailment so what is the relationship? Is the relationship in the passing of rings? No, of course it isn't but those symbols still reinforce what's going on.

So can we just say there's no representationalism in this? It would be hard to do that on realistic scales. That would be pragmatics in a nutshell to me.

18:01 Daniel:

Very interesting closure.

18:07 Dean:

Well, especially if you're recently involved in a long lasting long term relationship, right?

18:14 Daniel:

It's so true. The part I'll point out is just a few highlighted words on the top with a lot of citations provided that are going to be taking a pragmatic federation approach. Broadly disparate interests and foci that are being used by these authors in their advancement of an antitransmission view distributed language hypothesis constraint view of language participatory sense making framework. Maybe those field are or aren't connected in their citations or coauthorship, but then the authors are able to connect these as kind of three people pointing at the same process or thing.

And that's like a nice, dense usage that could be really catching people up on a few ways to navigate these topics because there's a lot of related topics. It's like aren't we just talking about how things are,

They begin in the introduction with and overview of the layout of their paper and they describe, as Dean mentioned, the sketch.

19:23 It's a pragmatist account of communicative behavior grounded an ecological interpretation of the active inference framework contrasted with a transmission view of communication according to which the function of communication behavior is to convey information. So a claim is that communication is about information transmission. Then they are contrasting that in light of ecological psychology, in theory broadly and also giving an active inference twist theory integration, introduction of free energy minimization or uncertainty reduction as imperatives or modeling imperatives, or existence imperatives, whereas some of these previous threads like ecological psychology. More neutrally wouldn't have necessarily a formal or a first principles way to connect to Modern applications, though they may have a first principles grounding and pragmatism.

20:28 So many of the pieces have already Beren assembled in terms of the ecological and pragmatic and all of these areas coming together outside the paper. And so that will be a theme. What is linking out to other empirical and philosophical literature? What is active inference doing in this mediation as a framework, something that makes it an organized principle, organizing principle in a way that merely the literature corpus of these areas which in many respects have been connected like the pragmatics of linguistics. So what active inference lab doing?

Anything to add on that?

21:11 Dean:

Well, again, I don't think it's hard to argue that to focus only on the string and the two cups is probably reducing too far when we're talking about communication. I mean, they're entangled, right? Like they're now tied together. But what the authors are trying to point out here is that there also are signalers and signal receivers in it.

And as soon as you add more layers to this of what's actually going on, suddenly an ecology emerges. So let's step back and look at everything that is possibly participating in this, not just the hardware. And so again, it would be hard to argue against that. At the same time, if you and I don't have all of the things that we need to communicate from Davis, California to Calgary, Canada, no matter how much we screen, there's no communication, there's no live stream 48 right now. So again, to dismiss a transmission view I think is also probably not the best idea in the world because without that, what do you got?

22:22 Daniel:

Yes, good point. And they'll bring up that sort of enabling system perspective in the conclusion very clearly they set up the perspective of communication as transmitting information, symbolic information or other kinds of information influencing sculpting. What is it influencing? Is it modifying cognitive dials? Is it modifying the field of affordance?

Is it doing both? Is it any number of ways that people have been studying nexus of communication, intrust species, interpersonally, everything?

23:10 Dean:

23:26 Daniel:

Yeah, awesome. All right, setting the context, do you want to mention it or do you want me to mention it? Alright, well, the first footnote is about the notion of information and they describe different information and uncertainty concepts which we can address in later discussions.

They do not dedicate a lot of time and space to fleshing out the transmission view and different ways that people have formally, informally addressed it, causes and consequences, et cetera. However, they have provided a lot of citations. Then in footnote four, they are describing Fridge, a writing in the 1890s, which is a very interesting connection. I don't know the details, but some information is provided in this section footnote.

24:29 It's an interesting path it'd be fun to kind of go down more because we've now brought back in Parr to the discussion as others are.

And I think walking the fine line between not using last names for equations while respecting the process and contributions of past researchers and practitioners in just different areas will be really part of what active inference brings together.

Alright, anything else?

25:06 Dean:

All I would say is that I think what this maybe points out again this is not what they wrote in their notes but with every transmission there are things like conflict embedded in that or complexity embedded in that. I mean, and good writer knows that you can't just transmit a bunch of information. There are expectation around what are you moving towards and why would I continue to communicate? And so you have to have a context around which that continuing regime of attention is held up.

25:45 Daniel:

Yep, share attention, regimes of attention, joint action. So setting logic here, they are going to flesh out two primary reasons to explore theoretical alternatives to TV. So not they're wrong, they thought bad. But there are two reasons to explore we're at camp and we're going to explore some theoretical alternatives. Firstly, TV entails a commitment to an account of the putative contents conveyed via communication.

Providing such an account is notoriously difficult, especially if linguistic practices cannot be invoked as part of the explanation. Very deep points about what is linguistically accessible, consciously accessible, perceptible under different situations through different kinds of memory and anticipation and all these features which we know do play roles in semiosis.

26:50 And then the second reason why to explore a theoretical alternative is how it's not clear that communication conceived of as the transmission of content could be relevant to the basic allostatic processes which drive the behavior of organisms. So you might say biosemiotically the pancreas communicates with different cells in the body through hormone signaling. But in a transmission view, would one be committed to the viewpoint insulin means do XYZ to whom, under what conditions, in

So especially at scales and systems that aren't quite literally humans talking about language which is quite common, then there's going to be an account that's non linguistic. So to what extent are we going to privilege or center this type of linguistic discourse in communication, in a broader biology of communication?

27:53 Dean:

So if the content by itself cannot help us derive meaning then what this essentially is saying is that we need more than that in order to get the equal sign or symbol to equate to meaning. Right? So that's essentially what they're trying to talk about here is if we're going to go past TV, why?

28:22 Daniel:

Yeah, it could be a supplement to TV or an extension of TV which as I'll point out later, can never be denied or rejected. So then pragmatism, they trace a thread of scholarship in which language is viewed as a form of action. And I'm reminded of Professor Deborah Gordon's paper bickenstein and Ant watching seeing the behavior ecological as they're observing ant behavior the active states and steps and ways that knowing and acting and naming of different kinds naming of activities and the association of activities as named with identities. And that naming process that comes in very late in the game in terms of the actions taken to prepare the context for that conversation. So I thought that was a very interesting link.

29:23 And here are those green highlighted words from earlier. So what else would you add about pragmatism?

29:29 Dean:

Well, I think what they were moving towards, or Ant least alerting us to, is that the fact that there are aspects of a pragmatist view, although it may sound a little strange to say it at first, I think is true. At least with a pragmatist view, you can now conjure things that you can't do simply with content. I mean, I can have a whole bunch of ingredients and not have a recipe, but at least with a pregnancy view, now I can start experimenting.

And I think that's all they're basically asking us to contemplate. It's the experimentation piece. It's not just sort of leaving everything out on the bench and going, whoa. Well, I can take an account of this or an inventory of it, but not really do anything with it. So that's what I took away from this part of the paper.

30:23 Daniel:

Nice. Alright, here's a discussion around what signals mean. Anything to add?

30:29 Dean:

No, just read it. It's pretty straightforward.

30:33 Daniel:

Yes. Okay. In this section Setting active coherence framework, we've informally introduced the

There are so many routes to explore with linguistic and non linguistic communication, even only keeping with active inference as the gripper and the drift.

31:20 Dean:

Right.

31:22 Daniel:

They provide a description which is copied here, and one key line that they'll bring back in service of communication is organisms can reduce free energy either by adjusting the sensory input to the generative models active inference, or by adjusting the generative model to the sensory input perceptual inference, which correspond respectively to action and perception. So one could ask whether active inference only applies to adjusting sensory input or whether action corresponds to active inference and perception to perceptual inference. That's one way to think about it.

It certainly is one sense of active inference, which is inference about action, planning, decisionmaking, and also the consequences of action being able to introduce preference into future and current actions. And we're talking about active inference also as a framework for considering this view.

32:25 So that was just the connection with active coherence. There one connection.

32:32 Dean:

So part of this I'll ask you because I may ask the authors, when you do the dot one is of this stuff that they just wrote out here, because we've seen this many, many times, people just want to make sure that they're following what the free free, free energy principle.

This point has generally been agreed to mean. My question from that last organisms can reduce free energy either by so if I were to give you the metaphor of getting the toothpaste back into the tube, how does communication serve that purpose? Right? Because it's really easy to squeeze it out. But how does communication serve to get it back in?

Because it can. But how does what they're describing here as an ecological view speak to that?

33:35 Daniel:

Let's explore. They then go to the ecological interpretation of active inference. So after introducing just purely in principle, using some active inference ontology terms and key ideas like embodiment of generative models and reduction of surprising bounding, that through variational and expected free energy, they continue to add in ingredients to the recipe and contrast a abstract, theory neutral description of active inference, which is their framing of vanilla or standalone or somehow, perhaps archetypal active inference as being theory neutral and hence compatible and therefore compatible with many conceptions of cognition, pointing to a citation where it's described as a state theory compatible with many different process theories.

34:39 Which is why potentially someone could and probably has argued for a transmission view using

Anything else?

35:22 Dean:

DAG well, I dot one notes I ant to talk about on the dog one, but I think this is interesting because it would be at this point where if they wanted to introduce formalisms, which basically are just a bunch of symbols set up operationally that they could but they haven't. So how do we explain or how do we take into account all of those formulas that we've looked at through a number of live streams? If we're talking about something that's ecological because they are there. So are they floating around us or are they only something that we keep inside of a very contained, very constrained, very condition Seth aspect of this diverse, very complex situation that we find ourselves under.

36:24 So yeah, as soon as you say of I would assume that one of the products of an ecological interpretation would be a whole bunch of formalisms because you could derive those pretty I can't I'm not Karl or Thomas or one of those super math people, but they can.

How do we account for that?

36:51 Daniel:

Yeah, one note on that is some of the famous models of predator prey type dynamics are those dynamical equations are used in neuroimaging to model, for example, winner list competition amongst brain regions or with different signaling regimes. So in many ways, the SPM package specifically, as well as neuroscience more broadly, many threads and precursors are here, which is why I really appreciate that by interpreting the way you are about active inference lab is being interpreted. There aren't just the bullet point or the visual abstract of active inference. If that is active inference lab, that is the interpretation of the authors using active inference.

37:51 They're working through it and making a trace in a process versus just saying, well, this is the standalone author independent interpretation. I'm not sure if that makes sense. All right, here's some text on a slide to look at connecting spatial temporal structure of affordance in ecological settings. The concept known as field of affordances or the landscape of affordances and different affordances, different kinds of action capacity, introducing how salience and attention and proclivity towards an affordance is determined by its free energy, by the free energy is expected to reduce by the system entity or by the modeler.

And there's a few more notes on ecological psychology and affordances.

38:54 Dean:

There. I think it's really important to again, to go back to that, I won't ask you to go back to the previous slide, but we don't carry around those formalisms and those operations with us. But humans become attuned to social affordance by being immersed in and participating in shared social culture practices very early in their development. That seems pretty obvious. This immersion leads to the

Okay, well, then there is math involved in this, which is the set of structured and systemic social contingencies available in an environment of development. So even if we can't identify what those formalisms are, those formalisms must be present in order for this early this thing that we call early development and integration to exist. We can't just say, oh, it's there, but we can't explain it. There actually is something symbolic and representational even if we can't conjure it ourselves.

40:02 There are those aspects which we need to include.

Right. Just because I don't think of it as math doesn't Dean the map isn't present. So I think that's a really important one here in terms of making their argument. Even though it's biology, there's still a lot of formalism that would seem to be abstract but presents as something real, so might as well do since it is.

40:40 Daniel:

That's an interesting direction and made me think about attractors dynamics, gravity in social settings.

And that puts quite a spin on Bayesian mechanics as a social physics and sociophysics has been approached from the classical Billiards case, from the statistical thermodynamic informational case and probably more speculatively by some from the quantum case. So it's those three mechanics, classical statistical, thermo info and quantum three five, however many there are, are what are being proposed in their integration by Bayesian mechanics. Which we'll be discussing in the next Livestream, actually in 49, with some really interesting formalisms to reenter into.

41:44 So I think it's like seeing what's not there, but seeing depth in what they're pointing to. Even just by discussing integration of social physics, we don't need to provide 100 citations to social crises or tragedies.

It is just what is gestured towards with what the domain of the work is.

Alright. In section communication as socially extended active inference. Here's some quotes. Anything you want to add?

42:23 Dean:

I just want to read Bull three communication.

Is Brett understood as what we might call socially extended active inference situations where the organism reduces free energy by influencing the behavior of another organism in such a way that its sensory input will correspond action prediction of its generative models, thereby regulating its own internal states by the behavior of the other organism other than through formalism. How could we prove that? Would be my question.

42:56 Daniel:

Yeah, great question. And what if there are many routes and one can ask somebody to stop writing on the sidewalk with chalk, or they could just wash it while they're gardening, or they could go in so many ways, it's like the adjacent possible of the social physics is open in a way that contrived or designed settings agent.

Which isn't to say they agent useful or educational, but that's not the same.

Right. The only way you could prove it, though, I think, is through representational, symbolic, operational, like, I don't know, because every time you try to repeat it, someone like Dean comes along and says, oh, I think I know what the game is here, I'm going to disrupt the game. Right? So there really is only one way to prove it.

And so, yeah, I like that. They put this in here. Now, one of our colleagues, Esteves, likes to talk about the prefixes added active inference lab. And so again, do we need those prefixes in order to be able to explain our argument? Is it for the coherence of our argument or do those things really happen?

And can we say they really happen because we can prove it?

44:23 Daniel:

All right. Nice. The following section is some cases of communication and three areas are highlighted. Some cases of communication.

And for those cases one could ask what is or could be a transmission view on that setting? Or how have people framed a certain case or instance or type of communication as transmission view? And then how is an ecological active inference interpretation changing? That challenging, that going beyond it. And three areas that they are looking at are aggressive behavior, mating or sexual reproductive signaling and alarm signaling.

And they write about in each of these cases how one might see the type of behavior exhibited there as kind of a canonical signaling case. Like when you look up signaling, you'll find these keywords describing it as categories of signaling and communication.

45:31 And one very excellent book to follow up on is Helen Longano's 2012 book studying Human Behavior how Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality. There are two of the goto areas in behavioral study, two of the goto approaches and Phenomena and framings of Action and interaction. And this is a very multi and transdisciplinary book that addresses in the context of some recent historical debates around the relevance of genetic inheritance, ecological inheritance, social structuring, all these different topics approached in a really edifying way.

I think it speaks to the gripper and the Dean gripped, which is kind of the role of what history and philosophy of science has been doing in a disciplinary academic way with a certain approach and time frame and feedback method.

46:34 Dean:

Cool.

46:34 Daniel:

Okay. Human cooperative communication. Anything to add?

46:42 Dean:

I'm always curious about I put a little note on the actual paper, my copy of the paper about cooperation.

And I'm no expert on cooperation, so I'm sketching this out like the authors are sketching certain things out. But I think this is what I wrote.

Let me see here. Yes, neither the transmission version. Noor, the ecological field of affordance model

47:48 We can say that there's a type here, but just naming it doesn't mean we've actually tamed or been able to explain why that type exists.

So that's one of those things. Again, when we have the authors with us, I like to chat about that a little bit more.

48:07 Daniel:

Yeah, what that makes me think about is even non communication can be considered part of the perhaps shaping the landscape of affordances, perhaps being communication of non linguistic type. And so how could we have a model of communication where the special cases of which there are infinite special cases are communication in their embodied sense? And we can also abstract to people who only communicate through social networks, through breathing the same air all these kinds of very loose, only ecologically align, if only on Earth align views of communication, seeing that as like the field from which different forms of communication of cognitive entities arises from, rather than something symbolic and transmissive which could only be instantiated, kind of from the top down, by a symbolic, subsystem or sub functionality which isn't denied by a bottom up of view, but it's contextualized as part of a process that includes the ecology and the shaping of the field of affordance and landscapes and the stigma g as something fundamental.

49:24 Dean:

And that's where the ecology of the context does act as a constraint.

49:31 Daniel:

Alright. Conclusion so they introduced a pragmatist conception of communication grounded in an ecological interpretation of the active inference framework. There's a lot more to develop. So where do papers end? Where do projects begin, right?

And then they attention two different directions which are relatively well confirmed empirical results. First is the work on joint attention and seeing joint attention as a relevant aspect in relationship to correlation on landscapes and relevant for language development. And then the second point of empirical evidence that they want to bring in is neuroimaging data showing co activation or partnership in some way of different parts of the body and brain associated with certain actions that seem to be linked in a way that's best understood or course grained as being ecological or embedded.

50:33 And then here is the part mentioned earlier to conclude it is trivially true that pretty much any episode of communication can be described as a transmission of information as suggested in the section some cases of communication so no bird call, no bird call. Hard to get around that one in practice.

Maybe there's some theoretical tricks but what if communication is preplanning? Really hear a bird call in five minutes, really want that to happen or make that happen and then what happens?

However, there would be no communication if there was no information. In some sense that is some form of association between a signal and affordance which constitute general ecological information.

51:55 Maybe just making your body visible in a certain way and using that as part of a joint, socially co expected free energy minimization.

Pointing the way towards models that would do that, but not as the only end point, but it's in a framing where models could conceivably do that, like through software packages and model design processes.

52:20 Dean:

I sometimes choose words not carefully and I know that I don't think that the word trivially was placed in that last bullet as a way of provoking but maybe it was. I think basically it's basically true but saying it's trivially true is like saying okay, well a math proof is trivial because it just is there I think it's sometimes hard to overstate how some of the basics matter. That doesn't mean get locked in just and then stop because you got the basics right. I mean there's a whole bunch of stuff that pops out of that and include that too if you're looking at something realistically.

However, I don't know if it's very trivial or not. I don't know that it's that common. Some of these more interesting mathematical proofs we could say they are because they've already been proven but that doesn't mean everybody has access to it or even understands the importance of it.

53:27 So that's just a little side comment because I know I catch myself regretting sometimes describing things in certain ways.

53:36 Daniel:

All right, to defend the trivial I looked up the definition I really wanted to know.

It turns out it is originating from Triviam, which is an introductory curriculum at a medieval university involving the study of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. So maybe it's so trivial, it's just the kind of trivial details that you end up spending quite a long time working on.

54:06 Dean:

Good defense.

54:08 Daniel:

That would be a funny interpretation. Bring back the trivia.

Our hope is that the model it describes inspires experimental designs that can lead to such theoretical or applied treatments. Okay, what are your thoughts?

54:28 Dean:

Well, as I wrote here, I think that means keeping active inference on the bench axel Costa to a control setting. I mean, again, if you ant to be able to compare to a control, this is your next step. However, since Wendy's setting a condition to liberate communication to do what communication does, which is release understanding and not just aggregated for the sake of control, and I wrote your time to break up the meme watches. And you've got more direct experience with writing about active inference and

55:03 Daniel:

Yes, that's the slide.

55:06 Dean:

Here we go.

55:07 Daniel:

Yeah. Well, just wanted to kind of explore this and leave some open space to go into it more. Building on the work of our colleague Margula, who is a professor in Monterey, California. She had written about memes as qualified arguments and about the kind of space that opens in between enduring the meme and specifically image meme interpretation or interpolation process.

So in addition to or an alternative to the purely dynamical, descriptive and evolutionary fitness oriented meme definition commonly used by dawkins and all synths, this is a very media and cognitive interpretation of artifacts. And through a paper in 2021 and in 2022, we used some previous work that had been done by Equiha at all 2020 on a three tier model of how to frame complex ecosystems, the kinds that people are usually talking about when they mention ecosystems, like the non metaphor.

56:22 If there were a non metaphor and it wasn't just app ecosystems and social ecosystems, the one with, you know, the trees but don't they all three layers being an instrumental layer of pure observations, basically mapping onto observed states. Then a contextual layer which can bring in some knowledge about how different measurements or inferences about measurements are linked, like to common entities. And then using this type of statistically inferred information and augmented information from the contextual layer to do inference on pure unobservables.

Those might be things that are observable, but you didn't observe, like the temperature at some point where there wasn't a thermometer or the true unobservables could be like propensity of this mile square of land to be used for this purpose in the next five years. But that's not something that COVID be measured. There's no measuring device other than the modeling process.

57:24 But it's an important modeling process, and they did amazing work connecting complex systems and ecologies and on the rise in term and in spirit is discussions of digital ecosystems and ecological approaches to communication, as noted by the authors here and hence by extension ecological approaches to digital communication. And so we were able to modify or to translate and respect the ecosystem integrity three tier model provided by those authors onto the kinds of digital discourse analysis platforms that would be align in that ecological interpretation and way.

So I think there will be a lot to explore. Maybe now, maybe next time. Go ahead.

58:15 Dean:

Yes, just quickly. So would you describe what you did from A and transition to B as an action?

58:24 Daniel:

It was an inaction in the slides software of one type and then it becomes a different inaction when it is shared as and asynchronous file or through live communication with a colleague. It's a different action

Gasp skirms 1996 and Skirms 2010. These are actually really excellent books. I hope that is not taken as dismissive, but it goes to show what views are seen as and justified to be often needing support and what that means or why that behavior is that way.

59:34 What is that linguistic string for in this quote from 2022, written originally in 2010 and then the author's right what fundamentally matters is the controller behavior, not the transmission of information, even if the controlled behavior may be described as a form of information transmission. So very much a syntax semantics question how many bits is the file?

What does the file mean? Syntax and semantics in the specific unfolding of the interpretation. You can take a top down overview like 55% of people who did this also did that. And then there's a bottom up cognitive view, which is the ecological embodied engagement with the image meme or with something like that, with the animal signal or mark or smell and then to paraphrase sperms, the Information Transmission Gloss footnote 35 with some agent citations.

1:00:38 The Information Transmission Gloss on communicative behavior, if it is to prove useful at all, might be thought of as an aspects of the control of behavior rather than the other way around.

Reversing privacy, but not denying we propose that conceiving communication in such a way provides better insights into the pragmatic nature of communicative behavior and its evolution as a free energy minimizing activity. End of favor.

What do you want to add? That's basically it. We have a few things written down, but what would you like to ask on that?

1:01:16 Dean:

What I like about the conclusion is that they say I'm taking and paraphrasing in my own thinking, in my own words just because you transmit doesn't mean that you're actually sussing out or determining or confirming the difference between play as one kind of action planning and then and played. So they really want to incorporate that temporal piece, which I think is really smart, which again, I'm a big believer that there's a logic that supports that which delimits, which direction you're necessarily asking to look at time.

Are you going with time and there's only one direction. Are you enacting it or are you delimiting and able to place some sort of gap between the memorial and the projectional?

1:02:21 And the other thing is, I think when we walk into these situations and see them as ecologies, we are going to miss things. So I think we just have to accept that there will be laterals and collaterals on the margins that will sort of bleed into what our regime of attention is. And so I think if you only focus on the transmission my turn, your turn, my turn, your turn.

You don't have a hope of trying to bring those very important things that are essentially building up whatever you are taking away from this communication exercise. So again, I think that's something important that they raise in sketching this out, there's actually a benefit or a feature in not filling it in with too much detail because how could they? Every time there's a communication act going on or a diet happening, the openness of that means there's going to be some scale friendly follow up that can't

1:03:33 I really like their conclusion, actually.

There's my thoughts on those last couple of slides.

1:03:44 Daniel:

A lot to think about, I guess, and discuss in the coming weeks. I think a few last pieces here seeing transmission as enablement for semantics and connectivity that to the Bayesian Triad and Abductive logic and as a escaping the nosedive of descriptionism and reductionism by holding space for the pragmatics, if nothing else, of higher order levels of analysis and course foraging. So whether you need to appeal to computational resources we won't be able to finish the analysis or other kinds of pragmatics, including meaning as pragmatics in the socially extended cognitive space, then there's a very rich view in which we don't need to like, reject digital signal processing in order to have an ecological interpretation.

1:04:44 I think there's a few other areas we can go into. So with that, there's other relevant works to share.

Okay. Any final, final thoughts?

1:05:00 Dean:

No. What I appreciate is how smoothly and quickly we're able to kind of go through this paper. I think that's a testament to the authors being clear about what they wanted to ascribe and what they wanted people to be able then extend off of.

So it kind of reinforces their idea of this extended active inference. Instead of them having all the answers, they just planted some seeds and let people kind of take it off in different directions, which I think maybe it was one of their goals. I don't know.

1:05:34 Daniel:

Very nice. Totally agreed that it's very readable clear paper that laid out a nice path with berries to pick from, a lot of footnotes and paths to explore and it is going to be great to discuss it in the coming weeks.

So Dean, thanks so much for the preparation and for joining live and we'll see you very soon.

1:05:58 Dean:

Same back right back at you, buddy. Take care.

1:06:01 Daniel:

Peace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWFM5zrdmG8

First participatory group discussion, with author, on the 2021 paper “Communication as Socially Extended Active Inference: An Ecological Approach to Communicative Behavior” by Tison & Poirier.

Rémi Tison, Daniel Friedman, Dean Tickles, Bleu Knight

00:29

Livestream #048.1.

01:23

Discussion of Communication in an Ecology.

10:55

Oh, no content!

19:23

What is content and context in mathematics?

20:57

Content and context in ecological psychology.

26:25

Philosophy of Ecology and Cognitive Science.

31:23

Is the possibility a Product or a Process?

39:19

On Prereflexive Consciousness.

41:47

The autonomy of the field of affordances.

51:14

Perception of collective and shared affordances.

55:12

Communication as a platform for the possible.

59:01

Cognitive control and the simulation of affordances.

1:03:11

Enactive Inference and Nested Affordances.

1:05:50

Shared action, including shared planning.

1:07:08

Language and the evolution of communication.

1:19:16

Notes on the Information of Communication.

1:27:45

The Transmission of Academic Discourse.

1:31:19

Instructionism and Interactionism in Learning.

1:34:24

In the World of Communication.

1:40:28

Optimal Grip on the Field of Affordance.

1:44:30

What is the optimal grip?

1:47:50

The couch moving example.

1:49:48

How to Talk to People.

1:51:38

The Optimal Grip of Communication.

1:53:39

A Week in the Life of Science.

00:29 Daniel:

All right, welcome everyone. It is September 7, 2022. We're here in ActInf Livestream number 48 Dot One in the second discussion on the communication as socially extended active inference and

This is a recorded and an archived Livestream, so please provide us with feedback so we can improve our work. All backgrounds and perspectives are welcome and we'll be following video etiquette for live stream head over active inference lab to learn more about getting involved in different learning groups and projects at the institute. Well, we're here in Livestream number 48.1, continuing our discussion on communication, active inference, ecological approaches and so on.

01:36 This is going to be really exciting discussion and we're appreciative of the first author joining us. We'll jump right in with some introductions and then on to the discussion.

So if you're watching live, feel free to write any questions in the live chat. And I know that on our side we have a lot of things to explore and also, of course, looking forward to learning more and seeing where it goes. So I'm Daniel, I'm a researcher in California and I guess the ecosystem of today is chaparral because it's very warm where I am. And so I was thinking about how different ecosystems and ecotones might facilitate different kinds of communication in a regional way. And I'll pass it to Dean.

02:30 Speaker B:

Hey, sonny. I'm Dean. I'm in the Rocky Mountains in Western Canada right now. And what would you be in Fahrenheit? It's about 45 Fahrenheit this morning, but it's going to warm up to about 90.

So yeah, there's a bit of an biology going on around here too. I think it's going to be a really interesting day because I think what we're going to do is take this ecological approach and lens and with the background of everybody here, we're going to really be able to pull up a lot of different interesting things that otherwise we would not pay attention to. If we only got stuck on the transmission piece. And I'll pass it down to Bleu. Hi.

03:16 Speaker C:

I'm Bleu. I am a researcher in sunny, beautiful New Mexico at the other end of the Rocky Mountains from Dean. Literally, if you just go straight down, I'm in the Sangre Christmas and we are recovering here from a torrential summer of rain and I think maybe we're finally getting back to some sun. It's starting to get hot now, finally. So I think that the sun is here to stay.

We still have a hot month, I guess, but the desert ecosystem and the Chihuahua Desert is special and fun and always excites me. And I'm interested too in this paper, in how it more applies broadly the communication as compared to the vassal Parr. And we then apply to animals and also to maybe human animal interactions and what those look like, and maybe not only cooperative communication, but also like, competitive communication.

04:20 And I think extending this work into those avenues is interesting and exciting.

04:27 Daniel:

Awesome.

Thank you. Bleu. So Remy welcome. And please take it away. Feel free to introduce yourself and give any context on the paper.

All right? So thank you for having me. I'm really pleased to see that we'll discuss our paper. I'm Rene. I'm a researcher based in Montreal at Yukon, and it's sunny.

It's a nice day here, too.

The paper was an attempt to devise a view of communication that could be like a starting point for ecological and inactive approaches to language and communication. The problem that we saw is that in most language sciences, like linguistics, in philosophy of language, in mainstream philosophy of language, and in biology of communication, most researchers, most people adopt automatically a view of communication in which communication is essentially transmitting information or transmitting content or an idea to another being.

05:53 So usually, like in linguistic communication, that would be like, I have the belief that it's a sunny day outside. I say it's a sunny day outside. And then by doing this, I'm transmitting to you the belief that it's a sunny day outside.

So that's the basic view of communication, the transmission view, that is more or less adopted by everybody in linguistics and in cognitive science, but a lot of people at least. And that's a view of communication that is problematic from an inactive and ecological perspective because it relies on the notion of content, on the notion of representation, to transmit axel Constant I must have a representation in my head, and then I can transmit it to you so that you can entertain this representation in your head. But as is quite well known, active and ecological approaches to cognition reject the notion of representation, the notion of content, as basic building block of cognition.

07:01 So the transmission view is a problem from an ecological view. And so what we tried to do was to develop a view of communication from which ecological and inactive approaches could start to understand language and communication without having to rely on the notion of content or representation.

So that's like the basic motivation of the paper. That's what we were trying to do. And we thought that active coherence and especially a psychological interpretation could be useful for doing that. And yes, the thing that you mentioned Bleu the aim was to device a view of communication that could be perfectly general, so that could be applied to animal communication, maybe communication between cells ant a more small scale level, and eventually maybe communication between groups at a larger scale.

08:09 So the attempt was to produce a view of communication that is perfectly general and that can be precise along the way, so that we can, for instance, precise the concept of communication, to apply it to generative communication, for instance, which is the kind of communication that is characteristic of human communicative interaction.

And that was treated notably in the cell paper to which you alluded to. So that's the aim of the paper. And so because of its generality, it's a paper that is really, in a way, superficial because it really treats a lot of topics really quickly. But that was like a big road map for a view of communication that could be used by ecological and active researchers. So that was essentially what we try to do in this paper.

09:06 Daniel:

Awesome and just one more follow up question we often ask would be how did you come to use active inference? What about the collaboration or your direction led to the fusion of these approaches? Were

09:29 Speaker D:

Yeah, so earlier in my academic career, so to speak, I was really more in Philadelphia of mind, sort of more of a philosophical background and not really in cognitive science. So that's where I became acquainted with issues about content, about meaning, et cetera.

And then I came at Ukam work with Kia Pouri, which is really more centered in Philadelphia cognitive science and was really interested in predictive processing theories and eventually active inference lab framework because of its link with predictive processing. So coming at you camp with Kia forage I really became acquainted with these ideas, with these framework, and that's where I linked these new frameworks with my earlier interests in language and communication that came from my background in Philadelphia of mine. So that's kind of how it happened.

10:29 And talking with Kia and the community of researchers at Jukam who is really using the predictive processing and active inference framework, that's how it all came together.

10:45 Daniel:

Awesome well, many places to pick up, perhaps Dean first, if you'd like to.

10:55 Speaker B:

Well, okay, I'll start with a question. If we're going to take an enactivism approach to this or we're going to look at what communication is through that philosophical approach and take all that active inference affords in terms of opening up what communication is. Maybe remy could you talk a little bit about how people who want to argue that there is no content? How could we then describe our experiences, the things that we've played out, the things that we're going to play towards?

But mostly what I'm curious about is the things that have been played, because we've got a record of that. We don't have to call it content, but I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of people who live in an activist thinking community, and they come up with they twist a whole bunch of things around, but they really have a hard time coming up with an argument that says, my experiences aren't something something.

12:11 So maybe you could talk to us a little bit about that.

12:15 Speaker D:

Yeah, so that's a good question. I think that one of the answers that I could provide is that from my perspective, there are some people in ecological and active circles who refuse all reference to content.

They see content doesn't exist at all. But that's not my perspective. From my perspective, content is just not at the basic level of cognition. I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Juto and Dayan. These are radical enactivism and they claim that their concept is not like at the fundamental level.

It's something that gets added up once there are a particular kind of social generative practices that can give rise to content. So that's my view. I think that we can describe the basic cognitive functioning of organisms and animals and in many cases humans, without the use of the notion of content, of the notion of representation.

13:25 I think that we can do that. But at some point in our social interactions there are multiple things

And that's a complicated story. That's something that I might come back to later on. But the idea that content is not at the basic level, it's not something that we can presuppose in a theory of communication. It's something that can be explained by a theory of communication. But it's not something that can be taken as something that can explain.

It's something that has to be explained, so to speak. I don't know if I'm clear. So we can, I think, use the notion of content to characterize the kind of experience, the kind of phenomena that you allude to, but this notion must not be taken as granted.

14:34 That's the view that I take. And I think there are some ways to explain how content Atreides on the scene, but it's not something that can be taken as granted in a theory of communication.

And that's what I'm predicting in this paper. It's like in traditional transmission view of communication, people pre suppose that there is content, that there is representation and communication is defined as the transmitting of this content, of this representation. What I'm saying is that representation is not an exploration, something that can be used as this basal explanatory notion. It's something we have to dis describe communication without the use of this notion. And then with various tools of social interaction and particularly social normative practices, we can explain how content can then arise.

So if you want to give more detail on that front but that's my two cent.

15:40 So content exists, it's not just at the basic level of communication.

15:48 Daniel:

Awesome. That reminds me of, and to stay on our philosophy wavelength, the difference between the explanandum and the exploration. So just quoting Wikipedia and explanandum is a sentence describing a phenomena that is to be explained.

And the explanations are the sentences adduced as explanations of that phenomena. And so it's a very interesting difference amongst these theoretical views and framings which I'm sure we'll be able to unpack a lot of implications of that content as a phenomena or descriptive category sign or symbol, we could have many ways of even describing what that is. However, under the transmission view, you're suggesting that content is seen as what is able to explain different phenomena like communication or cooperative communication. No matter how far out you go in the sub discussions, content is doing something to explain.

16:51 Whereas in the radical enactivism approach radical meaning from the root so with and activism at the root.

That doesn't mean that there couldn't be a branch that summarizes and reflects content, but it's something that is explained through inactive. Means rather than something that we're going to put like the cart before the horse and then use the semantic content representation view and the transmission associated with it to then try to explain and enactivism.

17:25 Speaker B:

Dean yeah, I think I'm on the same page as both of you. I take an example. In 2019, I'm walking up the street room St.

Beni and I'm heading to the potisserie and I don't have any firsthand experience with that, but once I arrive there and I taste those chocolate pastries, now all of a sudden I have content. So it wasn't that I

18:40 But I do think the timing of when we see it as the important thing or the central aspect of what communication is, I don't think it destroys the fact that we still have it.

It's just when does it matter in that continuum piece. So yeah, and by the way, thank you for just reminding me of that trip in Montreal in 2019 before all the heck broke loose with all these viral things. It was a beautiful time.

19:14 Daniel:

I also went to Montreal in 2019.

19:17 Speaker B:

Very cool.

19:21 Speaker C:

Yeah. I'm curious about the difference between or maybe there's no difference or how can we clarify the difference between content and context?

19:40 Daniel:

Yes, great question. What do you think for me?

19:45 Speaker D:

Okay, so content is essentially something that has accuracy conditions. So the idea of content is it's something that can be false or true. It's something that can be or more generally, something that can be satisfied or not satisfied.

So for instance, usually we'll say that our propositional attributes have content. So for instance, when I have a belief, my belief has a content and this content can be true or false force. Instance, if I believe that it's sunny outside, I have the belief that it is sunny outside and the content it is sunny outside, it can be true or false. And if it's sunny outside, then my belief is true. So that's the basic idea of content is something that is attached to our mental states.

It's usually associated with the notion of representation. There are complex debates to be had there.

20:47 But that's the idea of content. It's something that it's like something that has conditions of correction in which it can be correct or incorrect. That's content and context.

I don't know if you mean in general or in the specific way in which we use it in the paper.

21:10 Speaker C:

How do you use it in the Casper hesp?

So context is a set of elements that are relevant to a joint action. So that's how we use it. A context of action. In particular, in the paper we're talking about joint action.

So when two people or more people are performing a joint action, they're doing something together. There are going to be some elements, some events, some objects of the environment that will be relevant, on which some action has to be done in order to advance the joint action. So the context is like this special, temporary structured set of elements on which action has to be taken to progress the joint action. So that's the notion of context that we use in the paper. I don't know if that clarifies well.

22:08 Speaker C:

So it implies the Seth of elements is therefore also content.

22:14 Speaker D:

Is that true in the paper? We don't think that my describing it as a set of elements is a contentful description because I'm talking about it and there's a content to the sentence of me who's saying that there's a set of elements. But the set itself, the thesis that we're pushing forward in the paper is that it can appear in a field of affordance of an organism without it having to represent it. So that's what we are going to in ecological psychology, there's work on the notion of a field of affordance.

So it's like the structured set of affordances to which an organism is sensible. And it's like there are some elements that will drive its action differentially depending on various internal factors.

23:14 And this sensibility of an organism to its environment doesn't have to be characterized in terms of content if we believe the ecological psychologist to develop this notion. So this set of elements appears in a field of affordance and these organisms who are sensible to their field of affordances don't have to entertain a representation of this set of elements. They're just sensible to their field of affordance and that's how they respond to these sets of elements of their environment.

23:53 Speaker C:

Maybe when you talk about content, maybe that is what needs to actually be clarified. Like so content is specifically some kind of semantic representation or semiotic representation. So it's something that is explicit, but like, can you give me an example of what would be an element in like a set of elements. How is that also not like content?

24:20 Speaker D:

Yeah, these are obviously complex questions but typically an affordance is a relation between an element of the environment and and action capacity of an organism and the thesis that is taken by an ecological psychologist, not everybody will agree with that but is that the perception of affordances does not need the mediation of a representation. You can directly be sensible to a certain pattern of energy, for instance in the energy array around you and you respond to this pattern of energy by, for instance, taking the affordance that is specified by this pattern of energy and you don't have it's not necessary to have a representation of the affordance to which you're sensible. It's something that you can directly perceive and that's like a central idea of ecological psychology some people will disagree with that will say that you cannot be sensible to an affordance if you don't represent it.

So in doing that they say that we don't need the notion of content or representation to characterize the way in which an organism is responsive to the affordances of its environment and that's what we presuppose in this paper. But obviously there are agreement to be had there. There are people obviously think that as if an organism is to act on its environment it has to be to have a representation of its environment in order to ant correctly. So that's obviously something that can be defended too.

26:25 Speaker C:

Great, thank you so much, that's super helpful.

Thanks.

26:29 Daniel:

It makes me think of a tug of war game or just two people pulling on a rope. They're engaged in joint action, which is Hohwy action and activism are placed at the center of the account of context one individual pulling the rope. They might be thinking or thinking that they think any number of things. But through the field of affordance is being shaped through the regularities and the arrays of energy that you described in the niche that is going to alter the field of affordances of someone on the other side of the rope and that could be mediated through their appropriate exteroception.

Or maybe the rope is now not graspable but it was graspable previously. None of that requires a symbolic or even necessarily semantic component to be transmitted along with the rope pole.

27:30 Maybe they had a pre play and they said two tugs means this and three means that and that can also reflect planning to communicate. However, in the act of communication as we're exploring, we're putting action and the embodiment in the environment as primacy and then seeing certain types of cognitive agents as being able to develop representation like properties on top of some physical regularities in the niche. Dean.

28:03 Speaker B:

What would you think of this idea? We haven't defined ecology here in this conversation, but if someone like me came along to you and said can we define it as both a process, biology as process and biology as a product, would you push back on that ambiguity to see it two ways? And then, I guess on the general level to Blue's question then can we see it as content and context? This idea, this placeholder of ecology, if we keep it on that general level, can we have our cake and eat it too?

28:53 Speaker D:

Yeah. So biology here really refers to something specific. It's not ecology in general, like in the branch of biology in Philadelphia cognitive science. When we talk about ecological psychology, it's a particular movement that began with the work of Gibson in the it's an approach to psychologists that states that the cognition of animals is a matter of its direct relation with its environment and is a matter of the kind of skills that are exhaust by this animal in this environment. And the central notion of ecological psychology is the notion of affordances.

30:00 And the thesis of Gibson and all the ecological psychologists that followed after that is that organisms and animals primarily perceive affordances in their environment. They don't perceive objects, they don't perceive events or properties. What they perceive first and foremost is possibilities for action.

And they are pushed and pulled by their environment in various ways and responsive to their environment to take some affordances and don't not take some other affordances. And that's how that's like in a constant interaction with their environment. Organisms will respond to these affordances and do some things and will be attracted by some affordances, will be pushed by some other affordances. And that's how an organism interacts with environment. So that ecology Beren really refers to that body of ideas that came from the work of Gibson in ecological psychology.

31:04 There are obviously links with ecology more broadly as a branch of biology, but it's really specifically this set of ideas linked to ecological psychology and Gibson's work.

31:23 Speaker B:

Do you think that what you just described, the possibility could be for people like yourself, both a product and a process? Is that possibility something that can be categorized two different ways at once?

31:42 Speaker D:

That's a good question. You mean like.

31:47 Speaker B:

Is it category errors to say it's only a process? That would be another way of asking the same questions.

31:54 Speaker D:

I think that cargo psychologist would more prefer the description of the interaction of an organism with its environment in terms of process because the organism is always changing through its interaction with its environment. And obviously the organism is also changing the environment, culture as is described in active inference accounts of niche construction. So there's always an evolving interaction in which the organisms gain skills and the environment is transformed.

So the field of affordance is like never static. So it can never really be described as a product. I don't know if that answers your question.

32:43 Speaker B:

Well, are the products within what you just described? So for example, if I'm an organism, I've had experiences and I can now use those experiences to continue my process.

Are those things that I've experienced, do they just have to stay in the same category as now processed as in past? Or have they solidified because I can't go back and change my history per se. I can build off of it, but those are pretty absolute. Now this sentence that I'm getting out is going to have a record that I can't erase. So are those things products now in the enacting of whatever I've decided I want to focus on in terms of possibility?

33:34 Speaker D:

Maybe I'll just say something quick. Maybe when you take like a definite time slice of an evolving organism, you can say that at that point there's a product that can be defined. You can say, okay, at that point there's this set of abilities, this set of skills, this Seth of experiences that can be attributed to this animal. So there's a product at that point. But if you take the organism evolution, like in its entirety, there is always changing.

So it's always a process. There's always a process. But if you freeze frame, maybe you can say, okay, at that point there's this and that is a product of the introduction. But I don't know if I answer correctly your question, but that would be my idea.

34:32 Speaker B:

Yeah, you are answering and that's great.

I'm just trying to get in my mind if we're going to talk about relativity and I know that I step into a river and step out and then step into it a second time, I'm not stepping into the same river. So what gives me the affordance to realize that difference is it a product? Is that first time I went in now a product because I can't go back and change it. I can move off of that and see the relative the relative distance or the relative time. But I don't know how we do processing without product.

That's I guess what I'm asking.

35:16 Speaker D:

One.

35:16 Daniel:

Quick thought on that is that product doesn't necessarily mean singular, final static. There are working products that can be versioned which digital files have helped us see. And then also we could say that the past is produced, but also it's reproduced when it's remembered, when it's brought back together and even in the directions you point to towards the end of the paper with what kinds of empirical neurophysiological accounts are helping bolster the ecological claim? The realization that memories are not being accessed as static files but are recreated contextually and relived is an interesting angle.

Yes. Bleu.

36:11 Speaker C:

So the recreation of memories, contextually in dreams is really interesting because it's like the recreation and also recombination in a different context and just before we leave context entirely, I guess I think I have a hard time with all of this because even a field of affordance has content, right? I can go fly a kite if it's windy outside. I have a set of actions that I can choose from and I think because we have to talk about it in a way that's semantic, it's difficult to experience my field of affordance because I'm a human and dot one, that I'm a very verbal human.

So I think that there's like that. But wait, even the field of importance is concept, but I realized that it's the mental representation aspect that is the distinction between content and context.

37:13 And I just want to point to the quantum paper where we had the quantum reference frames and

It's not possible to have a full contextual alignment here. And it makes me think of in the paper how you were describing like there's this person on one end of the tug of war and then there's another person on the other end of the tug of war and then there's actually the tug of war itself. And I just wonder about so person A has their context, person B has their context. What is the context of the tug of war itself? It's another entity.

Anytime you have this like introduction and this is something that I've said to Daniel before, like you have a relationship with a person, you have a sense of communication with the person.

38:14 That's its own thing, that it has to be loved, protected, nurtured, you have to keep it up, it has to undergo like auto poisons, it has to self ensemble. It's its own entity. And I wonder about modeling in that way. If I model my communication, like there's me and the person and then the interaction or the collective behavior or whatever it may be.

I don't know, I've been thinking about it and yeah, that's all.

38:49 Daniel:

It's like a view from the bottom or inside or however of communication where there's two entities and a partially aligned reference frame and then there's also view where it is just one thing, albeit maybe with partial information encapsulation, but it still becomes one thing. And then is that one thing atomic even though it contains divisions and partitions as well? Remy on that or anywhere you want to go.

39:19 Speaker D:

Yeah, I think your interventions were really, really interesting so far for the first thing that you Sajid. I know that's hard to remove our habits of describing things in terms of content because we have language and we describe things in terms of content.

But it's something that has been remarked, really by phenomenologists. Like Mer, Ponzi and Adegar that our primary contact with the world is not like a description. It's not like a representation. It's not like a reflexive consciousness. It's a prereflexive consciousness.

And in your day to day interaction with your environment, you're not using this kind of languagelike description to experience your environment.

40:20 Like if you're playing a sport and like, for instance, if you're playing soccer and you see like, a path that you can make, you're not reflexively thinking that you could make that pass. It's like a push or a Bull in a tractor field kind of thing. And that's how we experience. And at the second, whereas humans especially we begin to think about our experience, then we cannot help but describe it in terms of content, in terms of representation that we entertain in linguistic means.

But in our prereflexive engagement with the environment, that's the thesis of the phenomenologists and ecological psychology. It's really just a push and a pull from the environment that drives us in different directions. And we don't have this kind of reflexive consciousness, this kind of representation on which we rely to describe and understand it with these linguistic means.

41:23 I think that's really the difficulty that we have of getting to this prereflexive consciousness when we are so used to ant the second that we describe something, we are describing it in terms of content. So it's hard to say, oh, there's no content.

He's working on language too. And I've been really inspired by his work. And he's describing situations where, like, there are two people interacting and these two people have goals that are aligned, but because of the particular dynamics of the interaction, these goals don't come to fruition. For instance, when you're walking in the corridor somewhere and you're facing somebody and both of you want to, like, fluidly, like, past each other, but you're both trying to go on one side and then on one side and you're blocking each other, you're trying to achieve the same goal, which is individually passing past each other.

42:47 But because of a dynamic that Atreides from the interaction, you cannot achieve this goal.

So there's really like this autonomous dynamic at the interaction that is really important. And I don't think that obviously that's something that we wanted to put in the paper because we're talking about interactive dynamical systems. But I don't think that I've succeeded in translating this in the way we think of shared field of affordances because I define shared field of affordance as the subset that is common to both individual Fields of affordance. But I think that neglects this autonomy of the field of affordances that is shared in the interaction. I don't know if I'm being clear, but I define the shared field affordance as a product of the communication of the two individual Fields of affordances.

43:47 But it seems that there's a lack of autonomy in the shell field that I don't know how to account for.

43:56 Daniel:

That makes me think of the ant case where one nest might be able to grab a single seed andy Clark it home. So that would be compatible with a view on communication as shaping the field of affordances because it modifies the capacity for another nest mate to pick up that seed because it's been moved. It doesn't need to have any representational concept, although especially when we're linguistically describing it does. So I definitely want to come back to that.

Then there's this seed grabbing ability which is predicated on a lower level affordance, like the ability to grasp with the mandibles. And that lower level affordance enables true joint action like multiple nest mates working together to drag something bigger home. But dragging something bigger isn't an affordance that even exists at the single nest mate level.

44:56 So there's like shared affordances enjoy action at the level of what we can both do. And then there's also this very interesting higher level view where perhaps novel affordances become accessible.

But then whom or to what or when do these special affordances or maybe nested system affordances come into play and how will we mediate the hand off? Or like the way that those different levels of affordances come into relevance or out of relevance? Bleu?

45:38 Speaker C:

So in terms of that modeling, the field of affordance, it changes through time. And this is why I was thinking about a competition, like in a tug of war between two people, both of them have the affordance to win or there could be a tie, but like, it's a potential opportunity for either one to win, but

46:20 Speaker D:

Yeah, that's true.

And the idea about the cognitive affordances, there's been some interesting work on that and clearly some organisms like ants don't perceive collective affordances. If they perceive something, they perceive their individual affordances. And at the cognitive level there's the taking of this higher level affordances, this collective affordance affordance, but they don't perceive individually probably. I don't think they do perceive individually the affordance. But some organisms, such as humans, I think because we have maybe the progenitor model or something, we are able to perceive some collective affordance because we're sensible to them.

For instance, if I'm moving with a friend, I can perceive that a couch is unmovable by me, but I can perceive it as movable by us. And then I can say like, oh, we could move this couch together because I perceive it as something that can be acted upon not just by me but with somebody else.

47:26 And then I have a exteroception, it appears in my individual field of affordance as a collective affordance. But that's different from the ants who achieve a collective action but without having the perception in their field of affordances of this collective affordance.

47:46 Daniel:

That's awesome.

It makes me think of the human capacity to have counterfactuals and speculative realism on teams and projects like hey everybody here, we could do x. So there's the ability to communication semantically and representationally where needed, plausible narratives or little sub niches. New things can be suggested and arise that are specifically about shared or collective affordances. And then additionally there are special names for when we take individual level affordances that have consequences on other levels of decisionmaking. Like there might be a multisig wallet in cryptography or a voting system in democracy where an individual's affordance is like to pull the lever or to fill in a box or to sign a transaction and then it's being engaged in specifically because there's knowledge.

48:53 If 100 people do this, then this affordance is going to happen. So it seems like there's many cases where we do our mandible closing the kind of lower level individual task. Also with an explicit knowledge and a communicated knowledge around how someone's individual actions will influence group outcomes, that could be like weekly emergent, like merely summating the affordances taken by individuals as well as strongly emergent or more strongly emergent in the sense that there's nothing different about anyone's pulling lever and voting. But there are phase transitions and dynamics that can be like top down. Dean.

49:49 Speaker B:

Yes. So when we have these experiences and they are kind of absolute in the sense that they've happened, they've occurred and whether we can recall them or not, they seem to have some kind of an effect on this relativity piece and the relationship piece. I don't think it matters whether we see Newton

So how do we move from the absolutes, the modeling piece to the process piece, the things that are out there that have not happened yet that are still in that possibility category. And now we're going to use communication not just to narrow down to the workbench, the biology which Daniel and I are fast friends except when it comes to the specifics of ontology, the generalities of that and the potential and possibility of that.

51:05 Maybe you can talk to us a little bit about that from the ecological lens.

51:11 Speaker D:

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think the one interesting thing about collective and shared affordances is I think they are learned in the same way that we learned individual affordances.

So for instance, how do we learn how do we learn to perceive an affordance? We learn to perceive an affordance when we gain a skill. When we gain a particular skill we then can perceive in the environment the situations where we can apply the skill. So for instance, when we're really young, I guess we can maybe crawl a little bit so we know where surfaces can be crawled upon and we can grab things. So we perceive where things can be grabbed.

And so we start from this like basic skills and then we explore environment. We do some things that we're gaining some abilities and when we do that probably a little bit bio and errors but we begin to perceive some higher level affordances because we can do some more complex things and so our field of affordance depends and becomes more complex as our set of skills becomes more complex.

52:31 But I think that interacting with others, with others so sorry for my accent, it's not really good. I didn't want to say interacting with the animal others.

So when we interact with others we are also learning to do some particular things. For instance, if I try to pick something up alone I might not be strong enough to do it. So I don't have the skills, so I don't perceive there for them. But if in some cases I pick something up and I see something, somebody else picking it up with me and we succeed in lifting it and then I have gained the ability to see that with somebody else I can lift the stick. But it's not a different kind of learning in that case from the kind of learning that I apply when I'm learning individual skills.

It's just that interacting with your environment you acquire skills sometimes with somebody else, sometimes not and you understand how you can apply these skills in your environment and then you navigate your field affordances accordingly.

53:45 So how you perceive a possibility is about how you have learned to do some things in the past and then because of this learning you perceive situations as affording. These kinds of actions, they can be individual but in communication they are usually about what others can do and what we can do with others. And that's how you perceive the possibilities that can be brought upon, that can be done with the person with which you're interacting. I don't know if that Heins, but that's how I see it.

54:19 Speaker B:

From a modeling standpoint, if you move away from the constraints and you look at the emancipation and the freedom piece, it obviously becomes combinatorially explosive very quickly because it can go

I was wondering what you Beren what you're thinking is around that in terms of communication as a platform for the possible.

55:22 Speaker D:

Yes. So the idea of communication is that the role it plays in interaction is a constraint. It's a constraint on the set of possible action that can be achieved. So the idea is that what communication achieves it helps to limit the scope of affordance that will be salient at a given moment. It's like you will center like the shared field of affordance around a certain set of certain affordances and this will limit, this will restrict the set of affordance that will be considered or that can be acted upon by the individual participants.

So that's the role that it plays. I don't know if that helps, but that's how communication works I think in interaction. What it does in dynamics systems terms, the idea was that it helped to create interpersonal synergies in order to active the joint goals of the introduction.

56:27 That was the suggestion in the paper. So for instance, two people being together in a room, they can do a lot of things there's like allostat infinite set of affordances that are open to them.

But if one of the people in the room goes to the couch and say like couch or manifestly Atreides to list it, then what is conveyed? To take the transmission view, idiom what is conveyed or what the effect that it has. It will augment the affordance of taking the couch, and then it will restrict the set of affordances that are open in the shared field. And then the other person will say, okay, that's what we're doing now. And they're going to take the couch together and lift it and bring it.

That's the role of communication is there's an old set of affordances open at any moment and what communication does is it restricts and it constrains the set of affordances in order to better achieve the joint goals of the interaction.

57:39 That's what we try to do in the paper. To understand coercive communication you touched on.

57:47 Speaker B:

An important difference though between is and if. So what is does actually put pretty strong, what do we call them, guardrails constraints.

But if I ask what if I haven't put a constraint on something? I've looked now at the counterfactual and the possible and I haven't said that the first person that answers back to me is going to necessarily be now the new constraint. The whole point of if is the possible right and it is the freeing up and it's the whiteboard moment and we know all of this. So again, I understand in the context of this paper what is part of it is in terms of joint action. But is there a place in your research here for the if within the same arguments that you I believe that there is, but you didn't speak as clearly to them as you did to the is parts, the constrained parts?

Yes, I think what you're talking about here is the communication about the future or counterfactuals situation. That's what you're talking about. Okay, yeah. So what De Vries to do in the paper is we introduced the action of a simulation of a field of affordances. And that's where we're dancing really closely with the notion of representation because is it a representation of an affordance?

It's like a fine line to tread. So there's this notion of a implication of an affordance field. Some sufficiently cognitively complex organisms such as humans and probably some primates can produce a simulation of an affordance that will enter in this hierarchical affordance competition. So you can activate an affordance that is not immediately present in order to affect your current field of affordance to, for instance, go towards this distribution of affordability that's based on the work of Paul Chisel, which is at Montreal and his work on affordance competition.

1:00:02 And he argues that a lot of phenomena linked to cognitive control, such as executive function and these kind of things and working memory can be understood as these effects of affordance at higher entorhinal levels that will constrain the lower levels of the field of affordances in order, for instance, to act accordingly to this higher level affordance.

So the example that chief gives is, for instance, suppose that there's a monkey on a branch that sees a little berry just beside it. So there's the affordance of eating the berry. But suppose that there's an apple which is a bigger fruit, a bigger price further down on the branch and the monkey has an understanding that there's this apple further there with this implication of the affordance of eating this apple at a higher level.

1:01:05 So like if I do that, if I go there, I will get this apple. This simulation of an affordance at a higher level will constrain, will diminish the salience of this immediate solicitation and it will help him to ignore the immediate theory and it will continue on the branch in order to get to the bigger to the apple.

So there's the basic idea of how the simulation of affordances can play a cognitive control role in order to constrain our behavior according to further goals like in future, future situations. So that's the idea on which we speak about it really, really quickly in the paper because it's already a really big paper. But that's an important point and that's the key to understanding the communication about future and counterfactuals situation. We talked about it in the last section, it's the displacement or the absent reference discussion.

1:02:10 So how can we talk about things that are not immediately present in a special temporal sense.

And the idea is that we can activate shared simulations of affordances. So I can speak about an affordance that is not immediately present, but it can affect our shared field of affordance and it can drive our behavior towards this affordance, for instance, even if it's not immediately present. But yes, this poses the question of are these simulations of affordance representation? I'm on the fence on this question, but if they are, they are probably like action, action oriented representation maybe would be acceptable to an activist and ecological psychologist. Sorry for my really long answer.

That's something that I've really thought about a lot.

1:03:02 Speaker B:

Nice.

Yeah.

1:03:04 Daniel:

Do you ant to add anything or there's a few ways to go.

1:03:09 Speaker C:

I'm good.

Go ahead and take it away.

1:03:11 Daniel:

All right. Well, one interesting connection with active inference you mentioned there's nested affordances, including ones that include that are plausible. So that reminded me a lot of the attention and metacognition as mental action which we explore in live stream 25 with Santhed Smith at All's paper where the same way that at the kernel layer of the partially observable Markov decision process or however we're doing active modeling at the most basal or kernel layer. Those PiS, those policy selections, and those e's, those affordances have to do with the level of affordance that is embodied, like the actual actions that the eyes are taking in the ocular motorcase or the actual direction that's taken left or right in a team.

1:04:12 A's example. And then nested modeling is using an analogous graphical structure where policies of nested levels reflect attention being paid to various lower levels of that hierarchical architectures. So there could be one lever that can go left and right and one that can go up and down, and then there's a higher level decision like which of these two levers should I be paying attention to and how aware am I of which lever I'm paying attention to and so on. So I think the paper itself does not present any formalisms, but there's extensive linking to work in active inference and also to really resonate ideas that are in a non active inference lab foraging that are immediately compatible, like nested levels of affordances.

1:05:21 The distinction between the primacy of the bodily affordances but also for certain cognitive systems, the existence of what appear to be cognitive affordance and the desire to model those jointly, perhaps without taking on strong or specific baggage around how we are then constrained to think about the bodily or the cognitive aspects of that modeling.

Bleu and then one other thought was on like, shared action, including shared planning. So planning to act together and about how event or activity planning in the future is like an activity that one person can do or groups can do. But it's about preparing a context so that a process can occur.

1:06:24 And sometimes all that's needed is to send the calendar event invite. Other times, there might need to be a lot of work to be done before the event itself.

However, what is the transmission view on planning that might be able to describe? And I think the paper does an excellent job of saying that the transmission view is not refuted by the ecological and inactive angle. You said no transmission, no communication. No communication. It's like it's an enabling aspect of this action prediction.

And this focus here are some other areas that we had written down from before.

One I'm really curious to follow up on is about, like, language and maybe the role of how we're talking

1:07:32 What other media or formats have you found to be insightful? Do any enactivism do presentations with silent films or with objects that are mailed to you and you play with? Or do this? I mean, how else can we point at the moon and not have it be confused that we're talking about finger anatomy?

Remyfirst deadlow.

1:08:13 Speaker D:

Okay, yeah. I think that's hard to talk about academic subjects like this without having an explicitly transmission view, like appearance of communication, because these kind of interactions are so far from the basic interactive activities that were, like, the context of the evolution of communication, which is what I'm trying to explain here. It's not like, imagine a tribe somewhere in the police station and they're not trying to explain academic subjects to each other. They're trying to do things, concrete things together. And that's really the context of where communication evolves and what purpose it served.

1:09:14 But I think that it's hard to envision an academic discussion such as the one we're having now that would be like that would be more evidence towards the ecological view than for the transmission view. I don't know if that's fair, but clearly, like moving a couch together is a better instance of the communication that takes place in this joint activity is probably a better example of our view than speaking together about active and friends and communication because this is really a specific and really highly complex form of social activity that is more readily described. For instance, in terms of the transmission view, I think.

1:10:05 Daniel:

Yeah, nice. A lot to say there Bleu.

1:10:09 Speaker C:

So I think all of those things, like, even silent films are also representations, right? So whether it's a communication with communication or even pointing to the moon would be like, well, maybe that would be different. I don't know.

I like this idea of communication as an action that we take, and I'm not leaving information transmission behind in the dirt. I don't think it needs to go there. But I do think that all actions are in some way some kind of information transmission.

Remy, you studied a theory of mine, so I assume you're familiar with integrated information theory and the emergence properties that information can help us represent.

Eating food, like, tells the environment that you're hungry and takes away the food.

1:11:14 And so there's always some level of informational exchange, even if it's just trivial information exchange, even if it's not meaningful, it doesn't create some bigger emergence thing. Right.

1:11:29 Daniel:

Thanks, Bleu Dean.

I think it's an easy again, I won't say it's easy. It's really did a good job of explaining this and not making it too obtuse. If you if you use an example of moving a couch, the physical manipulation, it's not hard to extend that to communication and symbolic manipulation. The manipulation stays, then that sort of reinforces the idea that there is a process at hand, something that we can observe, but I'm still kind of confused about. So once the chair has been lifted or the words have come out of my I heard and expression because I was watching the John Vervaki thing yesterday and something comes out of my mouth hole now.

It's done. It's a product, we can resubmit it or reflect on it or whatever, but it's there, it's now historical. And so that transition from process to product, I think, is something the manipulation by itself doesn't explain.

1:12:41 We have to kind of delinquenk and see the sort of timelessness aspect of this. Karl talks about deep temporal models and so I'm not sure how communication manipulation, symbolic manipulation gets explained in these deep term senses.

And I'm not just talking about chiseling it into the stones, the tablets. Right. Like there's got to be another piece to this that you've looked into, Remy, and obviously much deeper than I am. What is your sense of that? Once we get past the manipulation processing and start seeing the products pile up.

1:13:30 Speaker D:

Yes, it's hard to answer this question, but that's true of everything that is something that happens at some point, it's there and you can't change it. So any event communicative or not, or like a rock that falls or something that has that property too, once it happened, it's something to which we can go back. And I don't know if that's in the same sense, if you talk, you say something. This is something that has happened and it's now a product and something to which you can allude to. It has influenced your cognitive system.

And then I struggled to see what's the question exactly.

1:14:34 Speaker B:

One of the things that you pointed to right at the very start of your paper was these symbols that have been manipulated and now set down in this paper is not the end, it's the start of something. This product, this paper should be the start of a dialogue or a trialog or in this case, a quadrilog. And it has become something. Right. So it's the back and forth part that I find really interesting.

And it's something you spoke to very clearly at the very start of your paper. You didn't say, okay, so if we get stuck in the transmission view when I stopped talking, that's it, that's over. And now we're going to start something else. No, you basically said there's a continuum aspect to this. It isn't strictly episodic, that we have to look at something more than just what Remy says, which I think is a brilliant way to start a paper and an even better way to start a conversation.

1:15:34 There is a product piece to this, and there's a process piece to this. You put something down, and a child will start manipulating it, and then they'll start manipulating the symbology that they're applying or affiliating or associating with that. So, again, you've looked at that far deeper than I have, obviously. Cue. Listen to how I ramble.

Right? But I wondered, how do you take that transition piece now and hold it up to other people who

1:16:20 Speaker D:

Yeah, I think that with communication, there's a sedimentation.

Dipole talks about this too. Like, the symbol that we use, the words that we speak.

There's also talk about first order languaging and second order languaging. So first order languaging is like the flow, the dynamics, where every interaction is new. Everything is always, like, on the fly, and there's always a transformation of the linguistic forms that we use. And the second order languaging is like the abstraction where we can say, oh, that's the same word that has been used. That's the same sentence, that's the same meaning.

And this second order languaging is like something that's added up, and that's an abstraction. That's something traditional. Linguistic chaos really focused on this second order in languaging, which is, like, the product of language, which is like, okay, the language that we speak is a set of sentences, a set of words, and that's something that is identified at the level of the second order languaging.

1:17:29 But when we're speaking, when we're talking, it's not at this level that we're doing it when we're acting, it's always new. We're always reconfiguring.

We're always transforming. And it's only when we abstract from this, like, basic interaction, some patterns that we see, okay, at the second order, at the second level, there is a word, there's a syntax, there's some rules that are followed, but it's not the real phenomenon of language is at the first order. And that's the so maybe that's a way to see, like, the real activity, is read, a process. But if we abstract, if we look back on this process and we analyze it and we abstract some parts of it, then we can see these forms emerging, these languages, these words that are used repetitively, and then we can have, like, a product of language. But in truth, language is always a process.

And that's the shift, the biological shift of not talking about language, but languaging, which is.

1:18:33 Something that an activist working on language tried to do that really brings forward this notion of language is always an activity, always a process, and not like a set of words, a set of symbols that are used. And these analysis in terms of repeatable symbols is something that we get when we analyze it like after the fact and we see these patterns that are used that we get the second order. But when we're doing it and at the fundamental level, it's really just a process of continual interaction. So that's maybe something to think about.

And there's something I want to say really quickly about what Bleu said about the information and the way in which information is always present. And that's true. That's what I allude to at the end of the paper when I cite Brian's terms, when I say, yeah, there's always information transmission just moving in my environment, there's information that's transmitted.

1:19:38 But yeah, that's exactly the point. And the idea is that content is not information.

Information is everywhere. Everywhere, always. When we, when anything happens in the environment, in the universe, there's information that is created as it transmitted. But the idea is that information understood in in this these terms and uncertainty reduction notion of information is not sufficient to explain communication because there's information always everywhere. That's not the point that people, all the transmission view think that they can rely on this notion of information to explain

They need a notion of content to explain what they want to explain. Because, for instance, the indoctrination that you think about when I eat, when I do wave my arms like that, there's indoctrination because there's an exchange with my environment. But that's not sufficient to explain communication because this information is everywhere.

1:20:43 And communication is not everywhere. It's a property of certain behaviors that we have to be more specific to analyze.

1:20:52 Daniel:

Thank you, Bleu.

1:20:55 Speaker C:

So the information has to have context, right? It has to have relevance for the communication, for the collective action, for the collaboration or something in order for communication that contextual, I don't know, imposition needs to exist, I think.

1:21:17 Daniel:

Yeah, nice. So just a few notes.

I really like this dimension of communication. It's a really rich, like riverbed or rock formation natural analogy that's very concordant with ecological perspective to reflect how the products of communication are indeed sequentially layered. The pen marks on the page can't be erased. We can't undo what was said, we can't unrecord, we can't untransact on the blockchain all these different aspects and even including the scientific literature being appended to continually. So there's a sedimented aspect, yet also there is something that is a process like the river that is depositing the sediment.

And then that made me think about how sometimes communication is descriptive around what was or is.

1:22:18 And this may map on to the variational free energy inference, which is kind of like now casting or even retrocasting. But once we enter into action and anticipatory or prospective informing and communicating, looking forward to reduce uncertainty about action selection is vital for systems to persist and thrive. However, as we've explored in many discussions, sometimes from a really technical angle, the introduction of action into model selection and just modeling in general introduces several complexities how the space of possible actions is enumerated and scanned over. It's a simpler and a different question to do purely receptive inference on something about the past, but to inject one into the present and embody that presencing requires one to act amidst uncertainty about what the future of the generative process will be and the consequences of action, which are either slightly or almost entirely unknown.

1:23:39 So the introduction of action puts us into that realm of expected free energy and highlights all these really interesting dynamics and how the future is not the past, but it becomes that way. Like it gets sedimented, but this is the pre sedimentation. There are some dust molecules that are right next to each other in the river. One of them is going to sediment, the other one's going to go out to the Pacific Ocean. It may not even be clear in that river which way the different particles are going to go.

And so that's like where all the complexity and turbulence can be happening. And so it's a very rich

1:24:42 Speaker B:

Dean yeah, Daniel, I don't know if you're indirectly referring back to the 47 series of the live stream, but there was what we talked about was that people who have looked through an enactivism lens really make fantastic arguments about let's focus on process, let's focus on the process. Apologies.

If you're talking about people who work in the instrumentalist, hopefully that will get answered. If you're talking about people working through the instrumentalist lens, they really want to talk about product, they really want to say this is a tool. And they argue fantastically for that. And I think what we tried to do in the 47 was say, you're both right, you both have fantastic arguments. As an agent who's trying to communicate.

Why would we stay one if we're active infers why if we're active inference first and foremost.

1:25:43 If we're always trying to scan and survey that field of affordances, why would we drop one for the other unless that was necessary? Even part of affordance, the ability to option and be able to recognize the tool product and recognize the action in that moment carrying out that data thread, which we can now act further on, as Daniel said downstream. Right. So again, I don't think anybody would argue that enactivism and that ecological approach is hugely important in order to be able to generate those affordances.

But maybe there are still people who want to argue, no, if you just bring your tool kit, all of your problems will suddenly dissolve. Or if you just walk into the room, you'll know how to talk to all of these people without really developing that sense of, okay, so as you said, first order and second order communication, right?

1:26:52 You just walked into the room, and then you reflect later on so that the next time you walk into a room, maybe you come at it a little differently each time, right? So again, Daniel, I don't know if you were consciously or subconsciously referring back to the last Livestream set, but that's essentially where I'm kind of at. Well, I've been there for a bit now, but I wonder how you can argue that can only be one if we're talking about affordances.

If we're not talking about affordances, fine, it can be one. But if we're talking about affordances and we're optioning out, how can it be less than two?

1:27:36 Daniel:

The menu is not diminished by selecting what you want for that meal. You don't rip the rest of the menu out. And then also, Remy, one just insight, I've never heard it phrased this way, but it's so interesting and hopefully gives many people, including us, some directions, is you said it's hard to discuss academic subjects without the transmission view.

And that's just such a fundamental point. One could take a sort of sociological critique of academic discourse and, well, the practices and the networks of academics and the genres that they write in the venues and the paywalls and all of these different biological features structure academic discourse to be such in such a way that can feel lifted from our first order experience.

1:28:38 And this actually takes an even more fundamental angle, which is, yes, those sociological

1:29:24 Speaker D:

I think that not just the academic discussions, but all our conceptions of education and learning are influenced by this transmission view also because the traditional views of education is the notion that you transmit a certain knowledge, a certain content to the student. You're the teacher, and you have this content and you're giving it to the that's like the traditional view of education. And there's been pushback in recent years in Philadelphia education and trying to understand education and apply more participative methods of learning that go against that. But really the view of education as transmitting knowledge, I think is really closely connected to this transmission view of communication. And I think that's not particularly good view of applying ecological practices I think that's really limited and they haven't waited for our paper in 2021 to do that.

1:30:38 But there's been in recent years a lot of work in field of field education and trying to push back against this transmission view of education and trying to put like having classrooms that are more interactive and in which there's action planning from the students and they're just not just receiving knowledge, but they're gaining skills by ActInf in a learning environment in which they're agents and not just patients. So I think that's something that's also useful to discuss.

1:31:19 Daniel:

Yes, we had some great times discussing instructionism and interactionism in the context of skillful performance and motor commands and the discussion was our descending motor commands representational? Are they instructions to be carried out or are they interactions that are being engaged in that might not necessarily taking a representationalist view? And in the same spirit and strength of the active inference framework that we can talk about patterns across systems, here is instructionism and interactionism in a very natural setting of the ecological experience of learning and one can take various critiques or angles on like tabula rasa or blank slate.

We don't need to endorse the view. However, what it implies quite directly is that there's a canvas and things are added sedimented on the canvas and one can say that some writing is on the canvas or it's a different shape or those are specifying the metaphor.

1:32:34 But fundamentally the knowledge accretion model of education, the opt in model as well as the ignorance destructive model of education, which is a kind of counterpoint to we're going to add good knowledge and then the shadow of that is we're going to destroy bad knowledge and unlearn both of those are like working in the riverbed. Are we going to settle it this way or let's modify these sediments? It's still seeing the product of education, which is a totally reasonable focus for industries and sectors that are focused on the products of education.

The products of education for the student, the certificate and the social cognition and status thereof, or just the outcomes of education for the system like amount of people with a certain professional training and what is the river that is sedimenting or desedimenting that can get dropped?

1:33:44 And that's the active turn in education learning by doing as if even a lecture is doing

But how do you communicate, differentiate with what you know and have done in philosophy and science of communication? Remy.

1:34:42 Speaker D:

I think I'm really bad at applying my own theory of communication. I think I give a class, Ant Ukam, and I always like I'm angry at myself because I really just automatically applies this really classical way of transmitting knowledge. And I'm always regretting myself because I don't apply enough. I think my own ideas about communication, but I think I should do more to provide better evidence for my own theory of communication.

1:35:27 Daniel:

It's funny. I'm sure it'll be a lifelong process for all of us because we have priors that are templated on the forms that we know that's what was and what is and what maybe. And then there's that expected free energy like active communication perspective. And are we going to select only from yesterday's menu or can new dishes and new approaches be added in that we may want to select from? Are there new modalities or approaches to communication in educational settings or otherwise that are now authorized or enabled by this perspective?

I'm sure we'll continue to discuss it, but let's just say this paper becomes a fundamental reading for a communication department or for and early life learning group like a public school.

1:36:46 What is different in the short term with the structural constraints and opportunities that exist with someone thinking and acting differently and then over slower timescales, the coevolution of those individual affordances, cognitive and bodily affordances, and the kinds of systemic attention to the education architecture? Dean, I know you'll have a thought on that.

1:37:21 Speaker B:

Part of what you Beren speaking to is simply asking, as Remy did at the beginning of his paper, and then what happens? But then not racing to provide the answers, it's essentially opening up the space. And then what happens might mean that you move out of the classroom and the classroom, migrates to the lookout on Mount Royal or you simply don't intervene. You kind of let the ecology work itself through. Now, that can be very scary at first because of course you're supposed to be the one hurting the cats.

But if you let the herd piece of it off and see what cats do when allowed to sort of free think I don't know that it provides the absolute specific answer, but it will provide you that joint action opportunity if you're really, truly looking for affordance as opposed to specifics.

1:38:30 And again, I think even in an academic setting, I don't think it's too far of a stretch to say affordances matter and we would like to see if people can exercise those things. We just want to get too crazy, right?

Norms and guidelines force affordances help. Don't know what else to say. But certainly there are things that one would prefer not to see occur in a learning setting, right, easy to enumerate. And then there are the known beneficial affordances or phenomena and then Parr of interactionism seems to leave that unknown unknown quadrant open and to allow for individual or for collective outcomes that are surprising and maybe not explicitly navigated towards or planned for. But how to leave the unknown unknowns open while derisking unknowns and knowns is a challenge.

And so, again, it's natural to see where in the derisking imperative, we derisk everything.

1:39:59 And that introduces, like, secondorder risks, and it closes the door on what may have even been the purpose. What's the safest car? The one that doesn't move in that one? Limited local optimization of reducing the number of high speed collisions or something like that?

Yes, Remy.

1:40:28 Speaker D:

On that topic, I think there's Brunberg and Red Field and Kiboshkin talked about an optimal grip on the field of affordance. I didn't see it, I think, but their work was a great inclination for my own work. So they talk about an optimal grip on a field of affordances, and you're always trying to stay in the point where there's like the relevant affordance are open to you, but you stay at the same time open to switching to other affordances, and you're trying to in that process of interaction with your field of affordances, continually minimize your own free energy. But there's risk in that. So there's the idea the example that they give is the boxer who's trying to maintain a certain distance to its opponent, because at that distance, if the boxer is farther, it cannot reach with its punches.

1:41:29 If it's too close, maybe there's less impact and maybe it's more open to being it. So there's like this optimal distance to which the boxer has like, flexible multiple opportunities that the boxer can take. And I think that's what we're always trying to do. We're trying to get to this optimal grip of the field of affordances in which there's multiple affordances that afford energy minimization and that we want to take that. And that's obviously something that can be hard to do.

But through our skillful interaction with the environment, we learn these kinds of gradients. Where should we go in our environment in order to find these optimal grips? And like, you're speaking about car, I guess depending on your skill, you might want a different car to get this optimal grip on the road.

1:42:29 If you're like a fast driver who likes to go really fast, you might want a faster car. But if you go too fast and you're getting an accident.

So depending on our skills, there's different optimal grips on our field of affordance. And something was really afraid to go fast, might go with like, really slow car, and that would be that person's optimal grip on the road. That would be the this car would provide it for this person. So that made me think about that.

1:42:59 Daniel:

So some comments on optimal grip.

Thanks for bringing in yellow at all's work. It's really nice that that was brought in even several years ago into the active inference literature. And if we're imagining tactile grip, actual prehension, if we're not in a gripstrength competition where one might just monotonically prefer more grip, if we were,

1:44:00 Well, for expected and variational free energy there are two terms one is reflecting a divergence minimization and one is keeping the door open with uncertainty about future outcomes. So in that balance is like the divergence minimization of the boxer. But then also there's something about keeping it open and then it makes me wonder about optimal grip with some of these educational and academic ideas. What is the optimal grip in a given context of thermodynamics? Could it be the optimal grip in a easygoing chill qualitative conversation to know that thermodynamics has to do with things like temperature?

And now we're going to talk about something adjacent to it that was just 1 bar on the playground to jump amongst. And so what does optimal grip look and feel like?

1:45:01 And what are the ecologies that support different individuals optimal grip on different concepts so that people can be engaging and interacting in a way that is natural and seamless for them? Yeah Remy, I think there's a case.

1:45:24 Speaker D:

Where you're talking about the tactile grip can be an optimal grip in that sense and I think in communicative context we can also see for instance the case where that we talked about the example of moving furniture together.

There's this optimal grip where okay, you're holding the couch and you can feel it slipping sometimes and you're like oh damn, I must get a better grip. But in that case you have an interactive component and you have a communicative component because you can say when you're feeling your grip slip you can say stop to the other person to okay, the other person can stop moving and then you can get a better grip on the couch. So this aspects is that the idea de Vries to put in the paper when we're talking about generative communication is that there can be an optimal grip from a collective, from an interactive perspective and communication is a way of achieving that of achieving an optimal grip by a group of individuals on the context of their joint action.

1:46:31 So, for example, if I'm moving in a couch with somebody and I feel my grip sleeping, I can say, oh, stop, because it will stop the couch from moving, and then it will help me get a better grip in a literal and a figurative sense on the couch so that we can further advance goal directed action of moving.

1:46:54 Daniel:

Thank you Bleu.

1:46:57 Speaker C:

So something else is an interesting place where we have grip where we don't always think about it is in the mental capacity. So like when you they talk about overthinking. So like, you think something you can underthink, under prepare and then you can also overthink. So there's also this optimal space.

Just the force and the laws of physics make it that way. So just wanted to bring that up.

1:47:49 Daniel:

Thank you. Bleu one note on the couch moving example. It's quickly become our favorite example.

We should definitely do some visuals next time.

It's an interesting example because the communication can be representational and linguistic. Wait, I don't have enough room for my right hand to come through this doorway. It's very transmission view compatible, but also there's a direct continuous time communication through the mechanics of the couch that are synchrony being experienced in real time and mediated through artifacts and through the niche itself. Linguistic communication has a linear, sequential and turntaking aspect. Active listening is a practice that from the point of view of the active listener, whether they speak or not, brings that real time and continuous engagement to the discourse, even if they're listening to a recording or whether they're participating or listening in a conversation.

1:49:06 However, it feels like something really important to unpack as we look towards the linguistic direction, to differentiate settings where, like, through digital stigma, g and note taking, or through physical objects like a rowing team or moving the couch. There's a implication through the environment continuously as opposed to something like a correspondence chess game or a phone call where there's a linear turntaking sedimentation. Even though there may still be a continuous unfolding of experience for the agents. So that is a very rich area to look at.

1:49:48 Speaker B:

Dean yeah.

You're jumping in and saying things that I want to say. So obviously some sort of sympathetic was going on communication wise. What I was going to say is I'm going to build off what you said and what Bleu said. One of the things that we used to always bring to people's attention in terms of their field of affordance is that when you're having to explain something, you have to take your time. You have to slow down.

I was working with younger people. You have to slow down. But also the other part of it is you have to know when to hit the hand up reaction button in the zoom call. You have to time your take for full effect. So you have to know both of those relativities when we're talking about communication because you can show your passion by constantly interrupting another person and actually do yourself a disfavor.

So the first thing was always flow down.

1:50:50 The second thing was always think about when you're putting up your and think about when it's your turn. Allow sometimes for there to be a pregnant pause. I know Daniel's very gifted at this. There's lots and lots of times as a moderator, he could just fill in the space, but he's really, really good at sometimes letting the communication happen when nothing is said.

So I'm going back to what he was asking earlier, is can we signal something by not saying something?

1:51:36 Daniel:

Interesting stuff. Does anyone have any final thoughts in this dot one? Yes, please, Remy.

1:51:46 Speaker D:

Just quickly. The idea that there's like a skill in when to intervene.

Speak too much, speak not enough. It's like dimension what is called pragmatics in linguistics. And there's a really clear example of the notion of an optimal grip gain in terms of distance. There's an appropriate distance to which you must stand to your interlocutor, and that varies in function of culture. So if you're really in some culture, for some persons, they can be like really close to you and you're incomfortable, but for them, it might be their optimal grip in this communicative interaction.

For others, maybe you might be farther, but then if you're too far, then you might hear bad, though less good understanding of what this person is saying. So there's this optimal grip also in the pragmatics of the interaction. Yes, I think that was a good point.

1:52:50 Daniel:

Optimal grip in space and time and meaning many spaces for a conversation. Are you intimately familiar and perturbing and six inches away? Or are you yelling purely strategic, impersonal information from across the field? A lot of different ecologies, a lot of different agents, so a lot of different Communications.

Bleu or Dean if you have any other thoughts otherwise, that brings us to a very nice end of 48 one, and I'm sure it'll be a great discussion to continue next week.

1:53:39 Speaker C:

All right, thanks for providing us with such beefy, juicy stuff to talk about. I really enjoyed the paper and having it here.

1:53:47 Speaker B:

It's great. You completely concur with me. It was a fantastic paper.

And as I said, there's nothing that I find more intriguing when somebody writes something down. Not as providing all the answers, but as opening up all these questions that we've been able to share today. So I'm very happy that you were able to join us.

1:54:12 Daniel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWFM5zrdmG8

First participatory group discussion, with author, on the 2021 paper “Communication as Socially Extended Active Inference: An Ecological Approach to Communicative Behavior” by Tison & Poirier.

Rémi Tison, Daniel Friedman, Dean Tickles, Bleu Knight

00:29

Livestream #048.1.

01:23

Discussion of Communication in an Ecology.

10:55

Oh, no content!

19:23

What is content and context in mathematics?

20:57

Content and context in ecological psychology.

26:25

Philosophy of Ecology and Cognitive Science.

31:23

Is the possibility a Product or a Process?

39:19

On Prereflexive Consciousness.

41:47

The autonomy of the field of affordances.

51:14

Perception of collective and shared affordances.

55:12

Communication as a platform for the possible.

59:01

Cognitive control and the simulation of affordances.

1:03:11

Enactive Inference and Nested Affordances.

1:05:50

Shared action, including shared planning.

1:07:08

Language and the evolution of communication.

1:19:16

Notes on the Information of Communication.

1:27:45

The Transmission of Academic Discourse.

1:31:19

Instructionism and Interactionism in Learning.

1:34:24

In the World of Communication.

1:40:28

Optimal Grip on the Field of Affordance.

1:44:30

What is the optimal grip?

1:47:50

The couch moving example.

1:49:48

How to Talk to People.

1:51:38

The Optimal Grip of Communication.

1:53:39

A Week in the Life of Science.

00:29 Daniel:

All right, welcome everyone. It is September 7, 2022. We're here in ActInf Livestream number 48 Dot One in the second discussion on the “C A

This is a recorded and an archived Livestream, so please provide us with feedback so we can improve our work. All backgrounds and perspectives are welcome and we'll be following video etiquette for live stream head over active inference lab to learn more about getting involved in different learning groups and projects at the institute. Well, we're here in Livestream number 48.1, continuing our discussion on communication, active inference, ecological approaches and so on.

01:36 This is going to be really exciting discussion and we're appreciative of the first author joining us. We'll jump right in with some introductions and then on to the discussion.

So if you're watching live, feel free to write any questions in the live chat. And I know that on our side we have a lot of things to explore and also, of course, looking forward to learning more and seeing where it goes. So I'm Daniel, I'm a researcher in California and I guess the ecosystem of today is chaparral because it's very warm where I am. And so I was thinking about how different ecosystems and ecotones might facilitate different kinds of communication in a regional way. And I'll pass it to Dean.

02:30 Speaker B:

Hey, sonny. I'm Dean. I'm in the Rocky Mountains in Western Canada right now. And what would you be in Fahrenheit? It's about 45 Fahrenheit this morning, but it's going to warm up to about 90.

So yeah, there's a bit of an biology going on around here too. I think it's going to be a really interesting day because I think what we're going to do is take this ecological approach and lens and with the background of everybody here, we're going to really be able to pull up a lot of different interesting things that otherwise we would not pay attention to. If we only got stuck on the transmission piece. And I'll pass it down to Bleu. Hi.

03:16 Speaker C:

I'm Bleu. I am a researcher in sunny, beautiful New Mexico at the other end of the Rocky Mountains from Dean. Literally, if you just go straight down, I'm in the Sangre Christmas and we are recovering here from a torrential summer of rain and I think maybe we're finally getting back to some sun. It's starting to get hot now, finally. So I think that the sun is here to stay.

We still have a hot month, I guess, but the desert ecosystem and the Chihuahua Desert is special and fun and always excites me. And I'm interested too in this paper, in how it more applies broadly the communication as compared to the vassal Parr. And we then apply to animals and also to maybe human animal interactions and what those look like, and maybe not only cooperative communication, but also like, competitive communication.

04:20 And I think extending this work into those avenues is interesting and exciting.

04:27 Daniel:

Awesome.

Thank you. Bleu. So Remy welcome. And please take it away. Feel free to introduce yourself and give any context on the paper.

04:38 Speaker D:

It's a nice day here, too.

The paper was an attempt to devise a view of communication that could be like a starting point for ecological and inactive approaches to language and communication. The problem that we saw is that in most language sciences, like linguistics, in philosophy of language, in mainstream philosophy of language, and in biology of communication, most researchers, most people adopt automatically a view of communication in which communication is essentially transmitting information or transmitting content or an idea to another being.

05:53 So usually, like in linguistic communication, that would be like, I have the belief that it's a sunny day outside. I say it's a sunny day outside. And then by doing this, I'm transmitting to you the belief that it's a sunny day outside.

So that's the basic view of communication, the transmission view, that is more or less adopted by everybody in linguistics and in cognitive science, but a lot of people at least. And that's a view of communication that is problematic from an inactive and ecological perspective because it relies on the notion of content, on the notion of representation, to transmit axel Constant I must have a representation in my head, and then I can transmit it to you so that you can entertain this representation in your head. But as is quite well known, active and ecological approaches to cognition reject the notion of representation, the notion of content, as basic building block of cognition.

07:01 So the transmission view is a problem from an ecological view. And so what we tried to do was to develop a view of communication from which ecological and inactive approaches could start to understand language and communication without having to rely on the notion of content or representation.

So that's like the basic motivation of the paper. That's what we were trying to do. And we thought that active coherence and especially a psychological interpretation could be useful for doing that. And yes, the thing that you mentioned Bleu the aim was to device a view of communication that could be perfectly general, so that could be applied to animal communication, maybe communication between cells ant a more small scale level, and eventually maybe communication between groups at a larger scale.

08:09 So the attempt was to produce a view of communication that is perfectly general and that can be precise along the way, so that we can, for instance, precise the concept of communication, to apply it to generative communication, for instance, which is the kind of communication that is characteristic of human communicative interaction.

And that was treated notably in the cell paper to which you alluded to. So that's the aim of the paper. And so because of its generality, it's a paper that is really, in a way, superficial because it really treats a lot of topics really quickly. But that was like a big road map for a view of communication that could be used by ecological and active researchers. So that was essentially what we try to do in this paper.

09:06 Daniel:

Awesome and just one more follow up question we often ask would be how did you come to use active inference? What about the collaboration or your direction led to the fusion of these approaches? Were you studying communication more broadly and came across active inference or vice versa?

09:29 Speaker D:

Yeah, so earlier in my academic career, so to speak, I was really more in Philadelphia of mind, sort of more of a philosophical background and not really in cognitive science. So that's where I became acquainted with issues about content, about meaning, et cetera.

And then I came at Ukam work with Kia Pouri, which is really more centered in Philadelphia cognitive science and was really interested in predictive processing theories and eventually active inference lab framework because of its link with predictive processing. So coming at you camp with Kia forage I really became acquainted with these ideas, with these framework, and that's where I linked these new frameworks with my earlier interests in language and communication that came from my background in Philadelphia of mine. So that's kind of how it happened.

10:29 And talking with Kia and the community of researchers at Jukam who is really using the predictive processing and active inference framework, that's how it all came together.

10:45 Daniel:

Awesome well, many places to pick up, perhaps Dean first, if you'd like to.

10:55 Speaker B:

Well, okay, I'll start with a question. If we're going to take an enactivism approach to this or we're going to look at what communication is through that philosophical approach and take all that active inference affords in terms of opening up what communication is. Maybe remy could you talk a little bit about how people who want to argue that there is no content? How could we then describe our experiences, the things that we've played out, the things that we're going to play towards?

But mostly what I'm curious about is the things that have been played, because we've got a record of that. We don't have to call it content, but I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of people who live in an activist thinking community, and they come up with they twist a whole bunch of things around, but they really have a hard time coming up with an argument that says, my experiences aren't something something.

12:11 So maybe you could talk to us a little bit about that.

12:15 Speaker D:

Yeah, so that's a good question. I think that one of the answers that I could provide is that from my perspective, there are some people in ecological and active circles who refuse all reference to content.

They see content doesn't exist at all. But that's not my perspective. From my perspective, content is just not at the basic level of cognition. I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Juto and Dayan. These are radical enactivism and they claim that their concept is not like at the fundamental level.

It's something that gets added up once there are a particular kind of social generative practices that can give rise to content. So that's my view. I think that we can describe the basic cognitive functioning of organisms and animals and in many cases humans, without the use of the notion of content, of the notion of representation.

13:25 I think that we can do that. But at some point in our social interactions there are multiple things that can happen that will give rise to content, to representation.

It's something that has to be explained, so to speak. I don't know if I'm clear. So we can, I think, use the notion of content to characterize the kind of experience, the kind of phenomena that you allude to, but this notion must not be taken as granted.

14:34 That's the view that I take. And I think there are some ways to explain how content Atreides on the scene, but it's not something that can be taken as granted in a theory of communication.

And that's what I'm predicting in this paper. It's like in traditional transmission view of communication, people pre suppose that there is content, that there is representation and communication is defined as the transmitting of this content, of this representation. What I'm saying is that representation is not an exploration, something that can be used as this basal explanatory notion. It's something we have to dis describe communication without the use of this notion. And then with various tools of social interaction and particularly social normative practices, we can explain how content can then arise.

So if you want to give more detail on that front but that's my two cent.

15:40 So content exists, it's not just at the basic level of communication.

15:48 Daniel:

Awesome. That reminds me of, and to stay on our philosophy wavelength, the difference between the explanandum and the exploration. So just quoting Wikipedia and explanandum is a sentence describing a phenomena that is to be explained.

And the explanations are the sentences adduced as explanations of that phenomena. And so it's a very interesting difference amongst these theoretical views and framings which I'm sure we'll be able to unpack a lot of implications of that content as a phenomena or descriptive category sign or symbol, we could have many ways of even describing what that is. However, under the transmission view, you're suggesting that content is seen as what is able to explain different phenomena like communication or cooperative communication. No matter how far out you go in the sub discussions, content is doing something to explain.

16:51 Whereas in the radical enactivism approach radical meaning from the root so with and activism at the root.

That doesn't mean that there couldn't be a branch that summarizes and reflects content, but it's something that is explained through inactive. Means rather than something that we're going to put like the cart before the horse and then use the semantic content representation view and the transmission associated with it to then try to explain and enactivism.

17:25 Speaker B:

Dean yeah, I think I'm on the same page as both of you. I take an example. In 2019, I'm walking up the street room St.

Beni and I'm heading to the potisserie and I don't have any firsthand experience with that, but once I arrive there and I taste those chocolate pastries, now all of a sudden I have content. So it wasn't that I had content first, even when I was looking at the map and walking up from UQ A M past all the bars

18:40 But I do think the timing of when we see it as the important thing or the central aspect of what communication is, I don't think it destroys the fact that we still have it.

It's just when does it matter in that continuum piece. So yeah, and by the way, thank you for just reminding me of that trip in Montreal in 2019 before all the heck broke loose with all these viral things. It was a beautiful time.

19:14 Daniel:

I also went to Montreal in 2019.

19:17 Speaker B:

Very cool.

19:21 Speaker C:

Yeah. I'm curious about the difference between or maybe there's no difference or how can we clarify the difference between content and context?

19:40 Daniel:

Yes, great question. What do you think for me?

19:45 Speaker D:

Okay, so content is essentially something that has accuracy conditions. So the idea of content is it's something that can be false or true. It's something that can be or more generally, something that can be satisfied or not satisfied.

So for instance, usually we'll say that our propositional attributes have content. So for instance, when I have a belief, my belief has a content and this content can be true or false force. Instance, if I believe that it's sunny outside, I have the belief that it is sunny outside and the content it is sunny outside, it can be true or false. And if it's sunny outside, then my belief is true. So that's the basic idea of content is something that is attached to our mental states.

It's usually associated with the notion of representation. There are complex debates to be had there.

20:47 But that's the idea of content. It's something that it's like something that has conditions of correction in which it can be correct or incorrect. That's content and context.

I don't know if you mean in general or in the specific way in which we use it in the paper.

21:10 Speaker C:

How do you use it in the Casper hesp?

21:12 Speaker D:

So when two people or more people are performing a joint action, they're doing something together. There are going to be some elements, some events, some objects of the environment that will be relevant, on which some action has to be done in order to advance the joint action. So the context is like this special, temporary structured set of elements on which action has to be taken to progress the joint action. So that's the notion of context that we use in the paper. I don't know if that clarifies well.

22:08 Speaker C:

So it implies the Seth of elements is therefore also content.

22:14 Speaker D:

Is that true in the paper? We don't think that my describing it as a set of elements is a contentful description because I'm talking about it and there's a content to the sentence of me who's saying that there's a set of elements. But the set itself, the thesis that we're pushing forward in the paper is that it can appear in a field of affordance of an organism without it having to represent it. So that's what we are going to in ecological psychology, there's work on the notion of a field of affordance.

So it's like the structured set of affordances to which an organism is sensible. And it's like there are some elements that will drive its action differentially depending on various internal factors.

23:14 And this sensibility of an organism to its environment doesn't have to be characterized in terms of content if we believe the ecological psychologist to develop this notion. So this set of elements appears in a field of affordance and these organisms who are sensible to their field of affordances don't have to entertain a representation of this set of elements. They're just sensible to their field of affordance and that's how they respond to these sets of elements of their environment.

23:53 Speaker C:

Maybe when you talk about content, maybe that is what needs to actually be clarified. Like so content is specifically some kind of semantic representation or semiotic representation. So it's something that is explicit, but like, can you give me an example of what would be an element in like a set of elements. How is that also not like content?

24:20 Speaker D:

Yeah, these are obviously complex questions but typically an affordance is a relation between an element of the environment and and action capacity of an organism and the thesis that is taken by an ecological psychologist, not everybody will agree with that but is that the perception of affordances does not need the mediation of a representation. You can directly be sensible to a certain pattern of energy, for instance in the energy array around you and you respond to this pattern of energy by, for instance, taking the affordance that is specified by this pattern of energy and you don't have it's not necessary to have a representation of the affordance to which you're sensible. It's something that you can directly perceive and that's like a central idea of ecological psychology some people will disagree with that will say that you cannot be sensible to an affordance if you don't represent it.

25:31 So that's obviously something that you can argue for. But there's a lot of ecological psychologists

So in doing that they say that we don't need the notion of content or representation to characterize the way in which an organism is responsive to the affordances of its environment and that's what we presuppose in this paper. But obviously there are agreement to be had there. There are people obviously think that as if an organism is to act on its environment it has to be to have a representation of its environment in order to ant correctly. So that's obviously something that can be defended too.

26:25 Speaker C:

Great, thank you so much, that's super helpful.

Thanks.

26:29 Daniel:

It makes me think of a tug of war game or just two people pulling on a rope. They're engaged in joint action, which is Hohwy action and activism are placed at the center of the account of context one individual pulling the rope. They might be thinking or thinking that they think any number of things. But through the field of affordance is being shaped through the regularities and the arrays of energy that you described in the niche that is going to alter the field of affordances of someone on the other side of the rope and that could be mediated through their appropriate exteroception.

Or maybe the rope is now not graspable but it was graspable previously. None of that requires a symbolic or even necessarily semantic component to be transmitted along with the rope pole.

27:30 Maybe they had a pre play and they said two tugs means this and three means that and that can also reflect planning to communicate. However, in the act of communication as we're exploring, we're putting action and the embodiment in the environment as primacy and then seeing certain types of cognitive agents as being able to develop representation like properties on top of some physical regularities in the niche. Dean.

28:03 Speaker B:

What would you think of this idea? We haven't defined ecology here in this conversation, but if someone like me came along to you and said can we define it as both a process, biology as process and biology as a product, would you push back on that ambiguity to see it two ways? And then, I guess on the general level to Blue's question then can we see it as content and context? This idea, this placeholder of ecology, if we keep it on that general level, can we have our cake and eat it too?

28:53 Speaker D:

Yeah. So biology here really refers to something specific. It's not ecology in general, like in the branch of biology in Philadelphia cognitive science. When we talk about ecological psychology, it's a particular movement that began with the work of Gibson in the it's an approach to psychologists that states that the cognition of animals is a matter of its direct relation with its environment and is a matter of the kind of skills that are exhaust by this animal in this environment. And the central notion of ecological psychology is the notion of affordances.

And affordance is a possibility of action. It's a correlation between an element of the environment and a

30:00 And the thesis of Gibson and all the ecological psychologists that followed after that is that organisms and animals primarily perceive affordances in their environment. They don't perceive objects, they don't perceive events or properties. What they perceive first and foremost is possibilities for action.

And they are pushed and pulled by their environment in various ways and responsive to their environment to take some affordances and don't not take some other affordances. And that's how that's like in a constant interaction with their environment. Organisms will respond to these affordances and do some things and will be attracted by some affordances, will be pushed by some other affordances. And that's how an organism interacts with environment. So that ecology Beren really refers to that body of ideas that came from the work of Gibson in ecological psychology.

31:04 There are obviously links with ecology more broadly as a branch of biology, but it's really specifically this set of ideas linked to ecological psychology and Gibson's work.

31:23 Speaker B:

Do you think that what you just described, the possibility could be for people like yourself, both a product and a process? Is that possibility something that can be categorized two different ways at once?

31:42 Speaker D:

That's a good question. You mean like.

31:47 Speaker B:

Is it category errors to say it's only a process? That would be another way of asking the same questions.

31:54 Speaker D:

I think that cargo psychologist would more prefer the description of the interaction of an organism with its environment in terms of process because the organism is always changing through its interaction with its environment. And obviously the organism is also changing the environment, culture as is described in active inference accounts of niche construction. So there's always an evolving interaction in which the organisms gain skills and the environment is transformed.

So the field of affordance is like never static. So it can never really be described as a product. I don't know if that answers your question.

32:43 Speaker B:

Well, are the products within what you just described? So for example, if I'm an organism, I've had experiences and I can now use those experiences to continue my process.

Are those things that I've experienced, do they just have to stay in the same category as now processed as in past? Or have they solidified because I can't go back and change my history per se. I can build off of it, but those are pretty absolute. Now this sentence that I'm getting out is going to have a record that I can't erase. So are those things products now in the enacting of whatever I've decided I want to focus on in terms of possibility?

Maybe I'll just say something quick. Maybe when you take like a definite time slice of an evolving organism, you can say that at that point there's a product that can be defined. You can say, okay, at that point there's this set of abilities, this set of skills, this Seth of experiences that can be attributed to this animal. So there's a product at that point. But if you take the organism evolution, like in its entirety, there is always changing.

So it's always a process. There's always a process. But if you freeze frame, maybe you can say, okay, at that point there's this and that is a product of the introduction. But I don't know if I answer correctly your question, but that would be my idea.

34:32 Speaker B:

Yeah, you are answering and that's great.

I'm just trying to get in my mind if we're going to talk about relativity and I know that I step into a river and step out and then step into it a second time, I'm not stepping into the same river. So what gives me the affordance to realize that difference is it a product? Is that first time I went in now a product because I can't go back and change it. I can move off of that and see the relative the relative distance or the relative time. But I don't know how we do processing without product.

That's I guess what I'm asking.

35:16 Speaker D:

One.

35:16 Daniel:

Quick thought on that is that product doesn't necessarily mean singular, final static. There are working products that can be versioned which digital files have helped us see. And then also we could say that the past is produced, but also it's reproduced when it's remembered, when it's brought back together and even in the directions you point to towards the end of the paper with what kinds of empirical neurophysiological accounts are helping bolster the ecological claim? The realization that memories are not being accessed as static files but are recreated contextually and relived is an interesting angle.

Yes. Bleu.

36:11 Speaker C:

So the recreation of memories, contextually in dreams is really interesting because it's like the recreation and also recombination in a different context and just before we leave context entirely, I guess I think I have a hard time with all of this because even a field of affordance has content, right? I can go fly a kite if it's windy outside. I have a set of actions that I can choose from and I think because we have to talk about it in a way that's semantic, it's difficult to experience my field of affordance because I'm a human and dot one, that I'm a very verbal human.

So I think that there's like that. But wait, even the field of importance is concept, but I realized that it's the mental representation aspect that is the distinction between content and context.

37:13 And I just want to point to the quantum paper where we had the quantum reference frames and Chris field paper on connectivity like we did on the Livestream I think number 40 and Livestream

It's not possible to have a full contextual alignment here. And it makes me think of in the paper how you were describing like there's this person on one end of the tug of war and then there's another person on the other end of the tug of war and then there's actually the tug of war itself. And I just wonder about so person A has their context, person B has their context. What is the context of the tug of war itself? It's another entity.

Anytime you have this like introduction and this is something that I've said to Daniel before, like you have a relationship with a person, you have a sense of communication with the person.

38:14 That's its own thing, that it has to be loved, protected, nurtured, you have to keep it up, it has to undergo like auto poisons, it has to self ensemble. It's its own entity. And I wonder about modeling in that way. If I model my communication, like there's me and the person and then the interaction or the collective behavior or whatever it may be.

I don't know, I've been thinking about it and yeah, that's all.

38:49 Daniel:

It's like a view from the bottom or inside or however of communication where there's two entities and a partially aligned reference frame and then there's also view where it is just one thing, albeit maybe with partial information encapsulation, but it still becomes one thing. And then is that one thing atomic even though it contains divisions and partitions as well? Remy on that or anywhere you want to go.

39:19 Speaker D:

Yeah, I think your interventions were really, really interesting so far for the first thing that you Sajid. I know that's hard to remove our habits of describing things in terms of content because we have language and we describe things in terms of content.

But it's something that has been remarked, really by phenomenologists. Like Mer, Ponzi and Adegar that our primary contact with the world is not like a description. It's not like a representation. It's not like a reflexive consciousness. It's a prereflexive consciousness.

And in your day to day interaction with your environment, you're not using this kind of languagelike description to experience your environment.

40:20 Like if you're playing a sport and like, for instance, if you're playing soccer and you see like, a path that you can make, you're not reflexively thinking that you could make that pass. It's like a push or a Bull in a tractor field kind of thing. And that's how we experience. And at the second, whereas humans especially we begin to think about our experience, then we cannot help but describe it in terms of content, in terms of representation that we entertain in linguistic means.

But in our prereflexive engagement with the environment, that's the thesis of the phenomenologists and ecological psychology. It's really just a push and a pull from the environment that drives us in different directions. And we don't have this kind of reflexive consciousness, this kind of representation on which we rely to describe and understand it with these linguistic means.

41:23 I think that's really the difficulty that we have of getting to this prereflexive consciousness when we are so used to ant the second that we describe something, we are describing it in terms of content. So it's hard to say, oh, there's no content.

When we talk about it, we are invoking content automatically. So yeah, there's a difficulty there. And

He's working on language too. And I've been really inspired by his work. And he's describing situations where, like, there are two people interacting and these two people have goals that are aligned, but because of the particular dynamics of the interaction, these goals don't come to fruition. For instance, when you're walking in the corridor somewhere and you're facing somebody and both of you want to, like, fluidly, like, past each other, but you're both trying to go on one side and then on one side and you're blocking each other, you're trying to achieve the same goal, which is individually passing past each other.

42:47 But because of a dynamic that Atreides from the interaction, you cannot achieve this goal.

So there's really like this autonomous dynamic at the interaction that is really important. And I don't think that obviously that's something that we wanted to put in the paper because we're talking about interactive dynamical systems. But I don't think that I've succeeded in translating this in the way we think of shared field of affordances because I define shared field of affordance as the subset that is common to both individual Fields of affordance. But I think that neglects this autonomy of the field of affordances that is shared in the interaction. I don't know if I'm being clear, but I define the shared field affordance as a product of the communication of the two individual Fields of affordances.

43:47 But it seems that there's a lack of autonomy in the shell field that I don't know how to account for.

43:56 Daniel:

That makes me think of the ant case where one nest might be able to grab a single seed andy Clark it home. So that would be compatible with a view on communication as shaping the field of affordances because it modifies the capacity for another nest mate to pick up that seed because it's been moved. It doesn't need to have any representational concept, although especially when we're linguistically describing it does. So I definitely want to come back to that.

Then there's this seed grabbing ability which is predicated on a lower level affordance, like the ability to grasp with the mandibles. And that lower level affordance enables true joint action like multiple nest mates working together to drag something bigger home. But dragging something bigger isn't an affordance that even exists at the single nest mate level.

44:56 So there's like shared affordances enjoy action at the level of what we can both do. And then there's also this very interesting higher level view where perhaps novel affordances become accessible.

But then whom or to what or when do these special affordances or maybe nested system affordances come into play and how will we mediate the hand off? Or like the way that those different levels of affordances come into relevance or out of relevance? Bleu?

45:38 Speaker C:

So in terms of that modeling, the field of affordance, it changes through time. And this is why I was thinking about a competition, like in a tug of war between two people, both of them have the affordance to win or there could be a tie, but like, it's a potential opportunity for either one to win, but only one can be the winner. And so then one person winning, like by default makes the other person

46:20 Speaker D:

Yeah, that's true.

And the idea about the cognitive affordances, there's been some interesting work on that and clearly some organisms like ants don't perceive collective affordances. If they perceive something, they perceive their individual affordances. And at the cognitive level there's the taking of this higher level affordances, this collective affordance affordance, but they don't perceive individually probably. I don't think they do perceive individually the affordance. But some organisms, such as humans, I think because we have maybe the progenitor model or something, we are able to perceive some collective affordance because we're sensible to them.

For instance, if I'm moving with a friend, I can perceive that a couch is unmovable by me, but I can perceive it as movable by us. And then I can say like, oh, we could move this couch together because I perceive it as something that can be acted upon not just by me but with somebody else.

47:26 And then I have a exteroception, it appears in my individual field of affordance as a collective affordance. But that's different from the ants who achieve a collective action but without having the perception in their field of affordances of this collective affordance.

47:46 Daniel:

That's awesome.

It makes me think of the human capacity to have counterfactuals and speculative realism on teams and projects like hey everybody here, we could do x. So there's the ability to communication semantically and representationally where needed, plausible narratives or little sub niches. New things can be suggested and arise that are specifically about shared or collective affordances. And then additionally there are special names for when we take individual level affordances that have consequences on other levels of decisionmaking. Like there might be a multisig wallet in cryptography or a voting system in democracy where an individual's affordance is like to pull the lever or to fill in a box or to sign a transaction and then it's being engaged in specifically because there's knowledge.

48:53 If 100 people do this, then this affordance is going to happen. So it seems like there's many cases where we do our mandible closing the kind of lower level individual task. Also with an explicit knowledge and a communicated knowledge around how someone's individual actions will influence group outcomes, that could be like weekly emergent, like merely summating the affordances taken by individuals as well as strongly emergent or more strongly emergent in the sense that there's nothing different about anyone's pulling lever and voting. But there are phase transitions and dynamics that can be like top down. Dean.

49:49 Speaker B:

Yes. So when we have these experiences and they are kind of absolute in the sense that they've happened, they've occurred and whether we can recall them or not, they seem to have some kind of an effect on this relativity piece and the relationship piece. I don't think it matters whether we see Newton on one side and then Chris Fields and Einstein on the other. The bottom line is that to what Daniel was

So how do we move from the absolutes, the modeling piece to the process piece, the things that are out there that have not happened yet that are still in that possibility category. And now we're going to use communication not just to narrow down to the workbench, the biology which Daniel and I are fast friends except when it comes to the specifics of ontology, the generalities of that and the potential and possibility of that.

51:05 Maybe you can talk to us a little bit about that from the ecological lens.

51:11 Speaker D:

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think the one interesting thing about collective and shared affordances is I think they are learned in the same way that we learned individual affordances.

So for instance, how do we learn how do we learn to perceive an affordance? We learn to perceive an affordance when we gain a skill. When we gain a particular skill we then can perceive in the environment the situations where we can apply the skill. So for instance, when we're really young, I guess we can maybe crawl a little bit so we know where surfaces can be crawled upon and we can grab things. So we perceive where things can be grabbed.

And so we start from this like basic skills and then we explore environment. We do some things that we're gaining some abilities and when we do that probably a little bit bio and errors but we begin to perceive some higher level affordances because we can do some more complex things and so our field of affordance depends and becomes more complex as our set of skills becomes more complex.

52:31 But I think that interacting with others, with others so sorry for my accent, it's not really good. I didn't want to say interacting with the animal others.

So when we interact with others we are also learning to do some particular things. For instance, if I try to pick something up alone I might not be strong enough to do it. So I don't have the skills, so I don't perceive there for them. But if in some cases I pick something up and I see something, somebody else picking it up with me and we succeed in lifting it and then I have gained the ability to see that with somebody else I can lift the stick. But it's not a different kind of learning in that case from the kind of learning that I apply when I'm learning individual skills.

It's just that interacting with your environment you acquire skills sometimes with somebody else, sometimes not and you understand how you can apply these skills in your environment and then you navigate your field affordances accordingly.

53:45 So how you perceive a possibility is about how you have learned to do some things in the past and then because of this learning you perceive situations as affording. These kinds of actions, they can be individual but in communication they are usually about what others can do and what we can do with others. And that's how you perceive the possibilities that can be brought upon, that can be done with the person with which you're interacting. I don't know if that Heins, but that's how I see it.

54:19 Speaker B:

From a modeling standpoint, if you move away from the constraints and you look at the emancipation and the freedom piece, it obviously becomes combinatorially explosive very quickly because it can go off in many directions. But as of, for example, as Daniel alluded to when we started today's Livestream,

I was wondering what you Beren what you're thinking is around that in terms of communication as a platform for the possible.

55:22 Speaker D:

Yes. So the idea of communication is that the role it plays in interaction is a constraint. It's a constraint on the set of possible action that can be achieved. So the idea is that what communication achieves it helps to limit the scope of affordance that will be salient at a given moment. It's like you will center like the shared field of affordance around a certain set of certain affordances and this will limit, this will restrict the set of affordance that will be considered or that can be acted upon by the individual participants.

So that's the role that it plays. I don't know if that helps, but that's how communication works I think in interaction. What it does in dynamics systems terms, the idea was that it helped to create interpersonal synergies in order to active the joint goals of the introduction.

56:27 That was the suggestion in the paper. So for instance, two people being together in a room, they can do a lot of things there's like allostat infinite set of affordances that are open to them.

But if one of the people in the room goes to the couch and say like couch or manifestly Atreides to list it, then what is conveyed? To take the transmission view, idiom what is conveyed or what the effect that it has. It will augment the affordance of taking the couch, and then it will restrict the set of affordances that are open in the shared field. And then the other person will say, okay, that's what we're doing now. And they're going to take the couch together and lift it and bring it.

That's the role of communication is there's an old set of affordances open at any moment and what communication does is it restricts and it constrains the set of affordances in order to better achieve the joint goals of the interaction.

57:39 That's what we try to do in the paper. To understand coercive communication you touched on.

57:47 Speaker B:

An important difference though between is and if. So what is does actually put pretty strong, what do we call them, guardrails constraints.

But if I ask what if I haven't put a constraint on something? I've looked now at the counterfactual and the possible and I haven't said that the first person that answers back to me is going to necessarily be now the new constraint. The whole point of if is the possible right and it is the freeing up and it's the whiteboard moment and we know all of this. So again, I understand in the context of this paper what is part of it is in terms of joint action. But is there a place in your research here for the if within the same arguments that you I believe that there is, but you didn't speak as clearly to them as you did to the is parts, the constrained parts?

58:50 Speaker D:

It's like a fine line to tread. So there's this notion of a implication of an affordance field. Some sufficiently cognitively complex organisms such as humans and probably some primates can produce a simulation of an affordance that will enter in this hierarchical affordance competition. So you can activate an affordance that is not immediately present in order to affect your current field of affordance to, for instance, go towards this distribution of affordability that's based on the work of Paul Chisel, which is at Montreal and his work on affordance competition.

1:00:02 And he argues that a lot of phenomena linked to cognitive control, such as executive function and these kind of things and working memory can be understood as these effects of affordance at higher entorhinal levels that will constrain the lower levels of the field of affordances in order, for instance, to act accordingly to this higher level affordance.

So the example that chief gives is, for instance, suppose that there's a monkey on a branch that sees a little berry just beside it. So there's the affordance of eating the berry. But suppose that there's an apple which is a bigger fruit, a bigger price further down on the branch and the monkey has an understanding that there's this apple further there with this implication of the affordance of eating this apple at a higher level.

1:01:05 So like if I do that, if I go there, I will get this apple. This simulation of an affordance at a higher level will constrain, will diminish the salience of this immediate solicitation and it will help him to ignore the immediate theory and it will continue on the branch in order to get to the bigger to the apple.

So there's the basic idea of how the simulation of affordances can play a cognitive control role in order to constrain our behavior according to further goals like in future, future situations. So that's the idea on which we speak about it really, really quickly in the paper because it's already a really big paper. But that's an important point and that's the key to understanding the communication about future and counterfactuals situation. We talked about it in the last section, it's the displacement or the absent reference discussion.

1:02:10 So how can we talk about things that are not immediately present in a special temporal sense.

And the idea is that we can activate shared simulations of affordances. So I can speak about an affordance that is not immediately present, but it can affect our shared field of affordance and it can drive our behavior towards this affordance, for instance, even if it's not immediately present. But yes, this poses the question of are these simulations of affordance representation? I'm on the fence on this question, but if they are, they are probably like action, action oriented representation maybe would be acceptable to an activist and ecological psychologist. Sorry for my really long answer.

That's something that I've really thought about a lot.

1:03:02 Speaker B:

Nice.

1:03:03 Speaker D:

1:03:04 Daniel:

Do you ant to add anything or there's a few ways to go.

1:03:09 Speaker C:

I'm good.

Go ahead and take it away.

1:03:11 Daniel:

All right. Well, one interesting connection with active inference you mentioned there's nested affordances, including ones that include that are plausible. So that reminded me a lot of the attention and metacognition as mental action which we explore in live stream 25 with Santhed Smith at All's paper where the same way that at the kernel layer of the partially observable Markov decision process or however we're doing active modeling at the most basal or kernel layer. Those PiS, those policy selections, and those e's, those affordances have to do with the level of affordance that is embodied, like the actual actions that the eyes are taking in the ocular motorcase or the actual direction that's taken left or right in a team.

1:04:12 A's example. And then nested modeling is using an analogous graphical structure where policies of nested levels reflect attention being paid to various lower levels of that hierarchical architectures. So there could be one lever that can go left and right and one that can go up and down, and then there's a higher level decision like which of these two levers should I be paying attention to and how aware am I of which lever I'm paying attention to and so on. So I think the paper itself does not present any formalisms, but there's extensive linking to work in active inference and also to really resonate ideas that are in a non active inference lab foraging that are immediately compatible, like nested levels of affordances.

1:05:21 The distinction between the primacy of the bodily affordances but also for certain cognitive systems, the existence of what appear to be cognitive affordance and the desire to model those jointly, perhaps without taking on strong or specific baggage around how we are then constrained to think about the bodily or the cognitive aspects of that modeling.

Bleu and then one other thought was on like, shared action, including shared planning. So planning to act together and about how event or activity planning in the future is like an activity that one person can do or groups can do. But it's about preparing a context so that a process can occur.

1:06:24 And sometimes all that's needed is to send the calendar event invite. Other times, there might need to be a lot of work to be done before the event itself.

However, what is the transmission view on planning that might be able to describe? And I think the paper does an excellent job of saying that the transmission view is not refuted by the ecological and inactive angle. You said no transmission, no communication. No communication. It's like it's an enabling aspect of this action prediction.

And this focus here are some other areas that we had written down from before.

One I'm really curious to follow up on is about, like, language and maybe the role of how we're talking about these issues.

Remyfirst deadlow.

1:08:13 Speaker D:

Okay, yeah. I think that's hard to talk about academic subjects like this without having an explicitly transmission view, like appearance of communication, because these kind of interactions are so far from the basic interactive activities that were, like, the context of the evolution of communication, which is what I'm trying to explain here. It's not like, imagine a tribe somewhere in the police station and they're not trying to explain academic subjects to each other. They're trying to do things, concrete things together. And that's really the context of where communication evolves and what purpose it served.

1:09:14 But I think that it's hard to envision an academic discussion such as the one we're having now that would be like that would be more evidence towards the ecological view than for the transmission view. I don't know if that's fair, but clearly, like moving a couch together is a better instance of the communication that takes place in this joint activity is probably a better example of our view than speaking together about active and friends and communication because this is really a specific and really highly complex form of social activity that is more readily described. For instance, in terms of the transmission view, I think.

1:10:05 Daniel:

Yeah, nice. A lot to say there Bleu.

1:10:09 Speaker C:

So I think all of those things, like, even silent films are also representations, right? So whether it's a communication with communication or even pointing to the moon would be like, well, maybe that would be different. I don't know.

I like this idea of communication as an action that we take, and I'm not leaving information transmission behind in the dirt. I don't think it needs to go there. But I do think that all actions are in some way some kind of information transmission.

Remy, you studied a theory of mine, so I assume you're familiar with integrated information theory and the emergence properties that information can help us represent.

Eating food, like, tells the environment that you're hungry and takes away the food.

1:11:14 And so there's always some level of informational exchange, even if it's just trivial information exchange, even if it's not meaningful, it doesn't create some bigger emergence thing. Right.

1:11:29 Daniel:

Thanks, Bleu Dean.

1:11:35 Speaker B:

It's done. It's a product, we can resubmit it or reflect on it or whatever, but it's there, it's now historical. And so that transition from process to product, I think, is something the manipulation by itself doesn't explain.

1:12:41 We have to kind of delinquenk and see the sort of timelessness aspect of this. Karl talks about deep temporal models and so I'm not sure how communication manipulation, symbolic manipulation gets explained in these deep term senses.

And I'm not just talking about chiseling it into the stones, the tablets. Right. Like there's got to be another piece to this that you've looked into, Remy, and obviously much deeper than I am. What is your sense of that? Once we get past the manipulation processing and start seeing the products pile up.

1:13:30 Speaker D:

Yes, it's hard to answer this question, but that's true of everything that is something that happens at some point, it's there and you can't change it. So any event communicative or not, or like a rock that falls or something that has that property too, once it happened, it's something to which we can go back. And I don't know if that's in the same sense, if you talk, you say something. This is something that has happened and it's now a product and something to which you can allude to. It has influenced your cognitive system.

And then I struggled to see what's the question exactly.

1:14:34 Speaker B:

One of the things that you pointed to right at the very start of your paper was these symbols that have been manipulated and now set down in this paper is not the end, it's the start of something. This product, this paper should be the start of a dialogue or a trialog or in this case, a quadrilog. And it has become something. Right. So it's the back and forth part that I find really interesting.

And it's something you spoke to very clearly at the very start of your paper. You didn't say, okay, so if we get stuck in the transmission view when I stopped talking, that's it, that's over. And now we're going to start something else. No, you basically said there's a continuum aspect to this. It isn't strictly episodic, that we have to look at something more than just what Remy says, which I think is a brilliant way to start a paper and an even better way to start a conversation.

1:15:34 There is a product piece to this, and there's a process piece to this. You put something down, and a child will start manipulating it, and then they'll start manipulating the symbology that they're applying or affiliating or associating with that. So, again, you've looked at that far deeper than I have, obviously. Cue. Listen to how I ramble.

Right? But I wondered, how do you take that transition piece now and hold it up to other people who maybe take an activist poster or take more of an instrumentalist approach. Right, because the bottom

1:16:20 Speaker D:

Yeah, I think that with communication, there's a sedimentation.

Dipole talks about this too. Like, the symbol that we use, the words that we speak.

There's also talk about first order languaging and second order languaging. So first order languaging is like the flow, the dynamics, where every interaction is new. Everything is always, like, on the fly, and there's always a transformation of the linguistic forms that we use. And the second order languaging is like the abstraction where we can say, oh, that's the same word that has been used. That's the same sentence, that's the same meaning.

And this second order languaging is like something that's added up, and that's an abstraction. That's something traditional. Linguistic chaos really focused on this second order in languaging, which is, like, the product of language, which is like, okay, the language that we speak is a set of sentences, a set of words, and that's something that is identified at the level of the second order languaging.

1:17:29 But when we're speaking, when we're talking, it's not at this level that we're doing it when we're acting, it's always new. We're always reconfiguring.

We're always transforming. And it's only when we abstract from this, like, basic interaction, some patterns that we see, okay, at the second order, at the second level, there is a word, there's a syntax, there's some rules that are followed, but it's not the real phenomenon of language is at the first order. And that's the so maybe that's a way to see, like, the real activity, is read, a process. But if we abstract, if we look back on this process and we analyze it and we abstract some parts of it, then we can see these forms emerging, these languages, these words that are used repetitively, and then we can have, like, a product of language. But in truth, language is always a process.

And that's the shift, the biological shift of not talking about language, but languaging, which is.

1:18:33 Something that an activist working on language tried to do that really brings forward this notion of language is always an activity, always a process, and not like a set of words, a set of symbols that are used. And these analysis in terms of repeatable symbols is something that we get when we analyze it like after the fact and we see these patterns that are used that we get the second order. But when we're doing it and at the fundamental level, it's really just a process of continual interaction. So that's maybe something to think about.

And there's something I want to say really quickly about what Bleu said about the information and the way in which information is always present. And that's true. That's what I allude to at the end of the paper when I cite Brian's terms, when I say, yeah, there's always information transmission just moving in my environment, there's information that's transmitted.

1:19:38 But yeah, that's exactly the point. And the idea is that content is not information.

Information is everywhere. Everywhere, always. When we, when anything happens in the environment, in the universe, there's information that is created as it transmitted. But the idea is that information understood in in this these terms and uncertainty reduction notion of information is not sufficient to explain communication because there's information always everywhere. That's not the point that people, all the transmission view think that they can rely on this notion of information to explain communication, but it's not a strong enough notion of information.

1:20:43 And communication is not everywhere. It's a property of certain behaviors that we have to be more specific to analyze.

1:20:52 Daniel:

Thank you, Bleu.

1:20:55 Speaker C:

So the information has to have context, right? It has to have relevance for the communication, for the collective action, for the collaboration or something in order for communication that contextual, I don't know, imposition needs to exist, I think.

1:21:17 Daniel:

Yeah, nice. So just a few notes.

I really like this dimension of communication. It's a really rich, like riverbed or rock formation natural analogy that's very concordant with ecological perspective to reflect how the products of communication are indeed sequentially layered. The pen marks on the page can't be erased. We can't undo what was said, we can't unrecord, we can't untransact on the blockchain all these different aspects and even including the scientific literature being appended to continually. So there's a sedimented aspect, yet also there is something that is a process like the river that is depositing the sediment.

And then that made me think about how sometimes communication is descriptive around what was or is.

1:22:18 And this may map on to the variational free energy inference, which is kind of like now casting or even retrocasting. But once we enter into action and anticipatory or prospective informing and communicating, looking forward to reduce uncertainty about action selection is vital for systems to persist and thrive. However, as we've explored in many discussions, sometimes from a really technical angle, the introduction of action into model selection and just modeling in general introduces several complexities how the space of possible actions is enumerated and scanned over. It's a simpler and a different question to do purely receptive inference on something about the past, but to inject one into the present and embody that presencing requires one to act amidst uncertainty about what the future of the generative process will be and the consequences of action, which are either slightly or almost entirely unknown.

1:23:39 So the introduction of action puts us into that realm of expected free energy and highlights all these really interesting dynamics and how the future is not the past, but it becomes that way. Like it gets sedimented, but this is the pre sedimentation. There are some dust molecules that are right next to each other in the river. One of them is going to sediment, the other one's going to go out to the Pacific Ocean. It may not even be clear in that river which way the different particles are going to go.

And so that's like where all the complexity and turbulence can be happening. And so it's a very rich distinction and something to really bring back about how the past is sedimented. But there's an

1:24:42 Speaker B:

Dean yeah, Daniel, I don't know if you're indirectly referring back to the 47 series of the live stream, but there was what we talked about was that people who have looked through an enactivism lens really make fantastic arguments about let's focus on process, let's focus on the process. Apologies.

If you're talking about people who work in the instrumentalist, hopefully that will get answered. If you're talking about people working through the instrumentalist lens, they really want to talk about product, they really want to say this is a tool. And they argue fantastically for that. And I think what we tried to do in the 47 was say, you're both right, you both have fantastic arguments. As an agent who's trying to communicate.

Why would we stay one if we're active infers why if we're active inference first and foremost.

1:25:43 If we're always trying to scan and survey that field of affordances, why would we drop one for the other unless that was necessary? Even part of affordance, the ability to option and be able to recognize the tool product and recognize the action in that moment carrying out that data thread, which we can now act further on, as Daniel said downstream. Right. So again, I don't think anybody would argue that enactivism and that ecological approach is hugely important in order to be able to generate those affordances.

But maybe there are still people who want to argue, no, if you just bring your tool kit, all of your problems will suddenly dissolve. Or if you just walk into the room, you'll know how to talk to all of these people without really developing that sense of, okay, so as you said, first order and second order communication, right?

1:26:52 You just walked into the room, and then you reflect later on so that the next time you walk into a room, maybe you come at it a little differently each time, right? So again, Daniel, I don't know if you were consciously or subconsciously referring back to the last Livestream set, but that's essentially where I'm kind of at. Well, I've been there for a bit now, but I wonder how you can argue that can only be one if we're talking about affordances.

If we're not talking about affordances, fine, it can be one. But if we're talking about affordances and we're optioning out, how can it be less than two?

1:27:36 Daniel:

The menu is not diminished by selecting what you want for that meal. You don't rip the rest of the menu out. And then also, Remy, one just insight, I've never heard it phrased this way, but it's so interesting and hopefully gives many people, including us, some directions, is you said it's hard to discuss academic subjects without the transmission view.

And that's just such a fundamental point. One could take a sort of sociological critique of academic discourse and, well, the practices and the networks of academics and the genres that they write in the venues and the paywalls and all of these different biological features structure academic discourse to be such in such a way that can feel lifted from our first order experience.

1:28:38 And this actually takes an even more fundamental angle, which is, yes, those sociological features may be what is explained, but fundamentally on that topic or anything, what is it about this

1:29:24 Speaker D:

I think that not just the academic discussions, but all our conceptions of education and learning are influenced by this transmission view also because the traditional views of education is the notion that you transmit a certain knowledge, a certain content to the student. You're the teacher, and you have this content and you're giving it to the that's like the traditional view of education. And there's been pushback in recent years in Philadelphia education and trying to understand education and apply more participative methods of learning that go against that. But really the view of education as transmitting knowledge, I think is really closely connected to this transmission view of communication. And I think that's not particularly good view of applying ecological practices I think that's really limited and they haven't waited for our paper in 2021 to do that.

1:30:38 But there's been in recent years a lot of work in field of field education and trying to push back against this transmission view of education and trying to put like having classrooms that are more interactive and in which there's action planning from the students and they're just not just receiving knowledge, but they're gaining skills by ActInf in a learning environment in which they're agents and not just patients. So I think that's something that's also useful to discuss.

1:31:19 Daniel:

Yes, we had some great times discussing instructionism and interactionism in the context of skillful performance and motor commands and the discussion was our descending motor commands representational? Are they instructions to be carried out or are they interactions that are being engaged in that might not necessarily taking a representationalist view? And in the same spirit and strength of the active inference framework that we can talk about patterns across systems, here is instructionism and interactionism in a very natural setting of the ecological experience of learning and one can take various critiques or angles on like tabula rasa or blank slate.

We don't need to endorse the view. However, what it implies quite directly is that there's a canvas and things are added sedimented on the canvas and one can say that some writing is on the canvas or it's a different shape or those are specifying the metaphor.

1:32:34 But fundamentally the knowledge accretion model of education, the opt in model as well as the ignorance destructive model of education, which is a kind of counterpoint to we're going to add good knowledge and then the shadow of that is we're going to destroy bad knowledge and unlearn both of those are like working in the riverbed. Are we going to settle it this way or let's modify these sediments? It's still seeing the product of education, which is a totally reasonable focus for industries and sectors that are focused on the products of education.

The products of education for the student, the certificate and the social cognition and status thereof, or just the outcomes of education for the system like amount of people with a certain professional training and what is the river that is sedimenting or desedimenting that can get dropped?

1:33:44 And that's the active turn in education learning by doing as if even a lecture is doing something. You're looking, you're hearing, touching. So it is quite an exciting area to explore how

But how do you communicate, differentiate with what you know and have done in philosophy and science of communication? Remy.

1:34:42 Speaker D:

I think I'm really bad at applying my own theory of communication. I think I give a class, Ant Ukam, and I always like I'm angry at myself because I really just automatically applies this really classical way of transmitting knowledge. And I'm always regretting myself because I don't apply enough. I think my own ideas about communication, but I think I should do more to provide better evidence for my own theory of communication.

1:35:27 Daniel:

It's funny. I'm sure it'll be a lifelong process for all of us because we have priors that are templated on the forms that we know that's what was and what is and what maybe. And then there's that expected free energy like active communication perspective. And are we going to select only from yesterday's menu or can new dishes and new approaches be added in that we may want to select from? Are there new modalities or approaches to communication in educational settings or otherwise that are now authorized or enabled by this perspective?

I'm sure we'll continue to discuss it, but let's just say this paper becomes a fundamental reading for a communication department or for and early life learning group like a public school.

1:36:46 What is different in the short term with the structural constraints and opportunities that exist with someone thinking and acting differently and then over slower timescales, the coevolution of those individual affordances, cognitive and bodily affordances, and the kinds of systemic attention to the education architecture? Dean, I know you'll have a thought on that.

1:37:21 Speaker B:

Part of what you Beren speaking to is simply asking, as Remy did at the beginning of his paper, and then what happens? But then not racing to provide the answers, it's essentially opening up the space. And then what happens might mean that you move out of the classroom and the classroom, migrates to the lookout on Mount Royal or you simply don't intervene. You kind of let the ecology work itself through. Now, that can be very scary at first because of course you're supposed to be the one hurting the cats.

But if you let the herd piece of it off and see what cats do when allowed to sort of free think I don't know that it provides the absolute specific answer, but it will provide you that joint action opportunity if you're really, truly looking for affordance as opposed to specifics.

1:38:30 And again, I think even in an academic setting, I don't think it's too far of a stretch to say affordances matter and we would like to see if people can exercise those things. We just want to get too crazy, right?

1:38:51 Daniel:

And so, again, it's natural to see where in the derisking imperative, we derisk everything.

1:39:59 And that introduces, like, secondorder risks, and it closes the door on what may have even been the purpose. What's the safest car? The one that doesn't move in that one? Limited local optimization of reducing the number of high speed collisions or something like that?

Yes, Remy.

1:40:28 Speaker D:

On that topic, I think there's Brunberg and Red Field and Kiboshkin talked about an optimal grip on the field of affordance. I didn't see it, I think, but their work was a great inclination for my own work. So they talk about an optimal grip on a field of affordances, and you're always trying to stay in the point where there's like the relevant affordance are open to you, but you stay at the same time open to switching to other affordances, and you're trying to in that process of interaction with your field of affordances, continually minimize your own free energy. But there's risk in that. So there's the idea the example that they give is the boxer who's trying to maintain a certain distance to its opponent, because at that distance, if the boxer is farther, it cannot reach with its punches.

1:41:29 If it's too close, maybe there's less impact and maybe it's more open to being it. So there's like this optimal distance to which the boxer has like, flexible multiple opportunities that the boxer can take. And I think that's what we're always trying to do. We're trying to get to this optimal grip of the field of affordances in which there's multiple affordances that afford energy minimization and that we want to take that. And that's obviously something that can be hard to do.

But through our skillful interaction with the environment, we learn these kinds of gradients. Where should we go in our environment in order to find these optimal grips? And like, you're speaking about car, I guess depending on your skill, you might want a different car to get this optimal grip on the road.

1:42:29 If you're like a fast driver who likes to go really fast, you might want a faster car. But if you go too fast and you're getting an accident.

So depending on our skills, there's different optimal grips on our field of affordance. And something was really afraid to go fast, might go with like, really slow car, and that would be that person's optimal grip on the road. That would be the this car would provide it for this person. So that made me think about that.

1:42:59 Daniel:

So some comments on optimal grip.

Thanks for bringing in yellow at all's work. It's really nice that that was brought in even several years ago into the active inference literature. And if we're imagining tactile grip, actual prehension, if we're not in a gripstrength competition where one might just monotonically prefer more grip, if we were, like, on a playground and we're going to be swinging amongst bars, then the optimal grip has to satisfy

1:44:00 Well, for expected and variational free energy there are two terms one is reflecting a divergence minimization and one is keeping the door open with uncertainty about future outcomes. So in that balance is like the divergence minimization of the boxer. But then also there's something about keeping it open and then it makes me wonder about optimal grip with some of these educational and academic ideas. What is the optimal grip in a given context of thermodynamics? Could it be the optimal grip in a easygoing chill qualitative conversation to know that thermodynamics has to do with things like temperature?

And now we're going to talk about something adjacent to it that was just 1 bar on the playground to jump amongst. And so what does optimal grip look and feel like?

1:45:01 And what are the ecologies that support different individuals optimal grip on different concepts so that people can be engaging and interacting in a way that is natural and seamless for them? Yeah Remy, I think there's a case.

1:45:24 Speaker D:

Where you're talking about the tactile grip can be an optimal grip in that sense and I think in communicative context we can also see for instance the case where that we talked about the example of moving furniture together.

There's this optimal grip where okay, you're holding the couch and you can feel it slipping sometimes and you're like oh damn, I must get a better grip. But in that case you have an interactive component and you have a communicative component because you can say when you're feeling your grip slip you can say stop to the other person to okay, the other person can stop moving and then you can get a better grip on the couch. So this aspects is that the idea de Vries to put in the paper when we're talking about generative communication is that there can be an optimal grip from a collective, from an interactive perspective and communication is a way of achieving that of achieving an optimal grip by a group of individuals on the context of their joint action.

1:46:31 So, for example, if I'm moving in a couch with somebody and I feel my grip sleeping, I can say, oh, stop, because it will stop the couch from moving, and then it will help me get a better grip in a literal and a figurative sense on the couch so that we can further advance goal directed action of moving.

1:46:54 Daniel:

Thank you Bleu.

1:46:57 Speaker C:

So something else is an interesting place where we have grip where we don't always think about it is in the mental capacity. So like when you they talk about overthinking. So like, you think something you can underthink, under prepare and then you can also overthink. So there's also this optimal space.

And just as a practitioner of meditation for a long time, when you're meditating on something, it's the

Just the force and the laws of physics make it that way. So just wanted to bring that up.

1:47:49 Daniel:

Thank you. Bleu one note on the couch moving example. It's quickly become our favorite example.

We should definitely do some visuals next time.

It's an interesting example because the communication can be representational and linguistic. Wait, I don't have enough room for my right hand to come through this doorway. It's very transmission view compatible, but also there's a direct continuous time communication through the mechanics of the couch that are synchrony being experienced in real time and mediated through artifacts and through the niche itself. Linguistic communication has a linear, sequential and turntaking aspect. Active listening is a practice that from the point of view of the active listener, whether they speak or not, brings that real time and continuous engagement to the discourse, even if they're listening to a recording or whether they're participating or listening in a conversation.

1:49:06 However, it feels like something really important to unpack as we look towards the linguistic direction, to differentiate settings where, like, through digital stigma, g and note taking, or through physical objects like a rowing team or moving the couch. There's a implication through the environment continuously as opposed to something like a correspondence chess game or a phone call where there's a linear turntaking sedimentation. Even though there may still be a continuous unfolding of experience for the agents. So that is a very rich area to look at.

1:49:48 Speaker B:

Dean yeah.

You're jumping in and saying things that I want to say. So obviously some sort of sympathetic was going on communication wise. What I was going to say is I'm going to build off what you said and what Bleu said. One of the things that we used to always bring to people's attention in terms of their field of affordance is that when you're having to explain something, you have to take your time. You have to slow down.

I was working with younger people. You have to slow down. But also the other part of it is you have to know when to hit the hand up reaction button in the zoom call. You have to time your take for full effect. So you have to know both of those relativities when we're talking about communication because you can show your passion by constantly interrupting another person and actually do yourself a disfavor.

So the first thing was always flow down.

1:50:50 The second thing was always think about when you're putting up your and think about when it's your turn. Allow sometimes for there to be a pregnant pause. I know Daniel's very gifted at this. There's lots and lots of times as a moderator, he could just fill in the space, but he's really, really good at sometimes letting the communication happen when nothing is said.

So I'm going back to what he was asking earlier, is can we signal something by not saying something? And I didn't jump in then, but I was kind of hoping to be able to explain that before we have to sign off

1:51:36 Daniel:

Interesting stuff. Does anyone have any final thoughts in this dot one? Yes, please, Remy.

1:51:46 Speaker D:

Just quickly. The idea that there's like a skill in when to intervene.

Speak too much, speak not enough. It's like dimension what is called pragmatics in linguistics. And there's a really clear example of the notion of an optimal grip gain in terms of distance. There's an appropriate distance to which you must stand to your interlocutor, and that varies in function of culture. So if you're really in some culture, for some persons, they can be like really close to you and you're incomfortable, but for them, it might be their optimal grip in this communicative interaction.

For others, maybe you might be farther, but then if you're too far, then you might hear bad, though less good understanding of what this person is saying. So there's this optimal grip also in the pragmatics of the interaction. Yes, I think that was a good point.

1:52:50 Daniel:

Optimal grip in space and time and meaning many spaces for a conversation. Are you intimately familiar and perturbing and six inches away? Or are you yelling purely strategic, impersonal information from across the field? A lot of different ecologies, a lot of different agents, so a lot of different Communications.

Bleu or Dean if you have any other thoughts otherwise, that brings us to a very nice end of 48 one, and I'm sure it'll be a great discussion to continue next week.

1:53:39 Bleu:

All right, thanks for providing us with such beefy, juicy stuff to talk about. I really enjoyed the paper and having it here.

1:53:47 Dean:

It's great. C

And as I said, there's nothing that I find more intriguing when somebody writes something down. Not as providing all the answers, but as opening up all these questions that we've been able to share today. So I'm very happy that you were able to join us.

1:54:12 Daniel:

All right. Thank you all. See you next week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIIyYu2C-SI

Second participatory group discussion, with author, on “Communication as Socially Extended Active Inference: An Ecological Approach to Communicative Behavior” by Tison & Poirier.

Rémi Tison, Daniel Friedman, Dean Tickles, Bleu Knight

00:24

Livestream #048.2.

03:18

Active Inference and language.

04:56

Accounting language on the ecological view.

19:01

Initiative and the imperative in Communication.

25:42

The role of mimicry in human social life.

31:17

The Of of Communication and Language.

33:09

Does Communication Involve Self-Production?

34:54

The Interpersonal Monologue.

38:22

Internal monologue in language.

43:36

Cute Story About Learning to Talk.

46:45

Speech and Reading.

50:05

Inference, Sound and the Two Ears.

1:01:49

The Transmission and Compositionality of Speech.

1:06:14

Evolution and the ecological approach to communication.

1:12:00

The Influence and Control of Communication

1:25:06

Ideas of Communication and Participation.

1:37:44

The Plan vs the Percolation.

1:42:54

Active Inference: The Plurality of Communication.

1:49:12

A Final Thought.

1:51:00

Active Inference as a language of affordances.

00:24 Daniel:

Hello.

00:25 Speaker B:

Welcome. It is September 14, 2022 and we're in active Livestream number 48 dot two. Welcome to the active inference institute. We're a participatory online institute that is communicating, learning and practicing applied active inference.

01:26 And last week in 48 one with the very same fellows in the conversation, we had some explorations into different aspects of the paper.

Perhaps we can each say hello again and something, if we want to, that we remembered from last week or that we'd like to explore today and then we can just be right in it. So I'm Daniel, I'm in California and I'm interested to look towards the latter half the back nine of the paper and see where we go, which is kind of what we do in dot two two S usually. And I just have a feeling that the exit from the slide on this 1 may put our communication and situatedness in a different place than where we were before.

02:29 And I'll pass it to Bleu.

02:36 Speaker C:

Hi. I'm Bleu.

02:43 Speaker B:

I heard the initial part and then lost it. Bleu?

02:48 Daniel:

Yes.

02:48 Speaker C:

Can you hear me now?

02:49 Daniel:

Yes.

02:49 Speaker C:

How about that? I am Bleu and I'm a researcher in New Mexico and I am excited to dig back into this paper.

I think we left a lot of things to wonder about last week and yeah, excited to get to maybe more into the meat of the paper itself as opposed to just discussing ancestral ideas. And I'll pass to Dean.

03:17 Speaker D:

Thanks, Bleu. I'm Dean. I'm here in Calgary.

I'm interested in seeing whether or not the big road map that I think that this paper provides also could be explained as a big score, as in a kind of a musical analogy, because I'm really interested in the interplay or the interaction between orchestration and arrangements. Yesterday there was a math stream that where our guest was really good at sort of describing the arrangement part of what's going on,

04:11 Daniel:

Hi, I'm a researcher at UCAM in Control and I'm the author of the paper and I'm looking forward to discussing the paper more in detail and maybe go towards the later parts of the paper and maybe talk a bit about language and linguistic communication, which is a big piece that is looming behind the paper, but it's not really that much discussed in it. But I think that's what any account of communication aims to go towards. So I hope we'll have the chance to discuss it a little bit.

04:56 Speaker B:

Let's go to language, it's what we're using, among other modalities, but we are using language and so that sounds like a great place to start. So what was in the paper regarding language and what was not in the paper regarding language?

05:24 Daniel:

Yes. So the idea was to open a window at the end of the paper towards the language. So we talk a bit about conventional force of communication and we know that most people believe that language is conventional. So de vries to tie the ideas that we put forward in the paper with work by Hamsted in a paper of 2016 about conventional affordances. So we tried to say that the conventional nature of the language comes from the conventional affordances that are generated in the communication interaction.

So that's a way to point toward language in our account and we talked a bit about ants of different types of acts of language so informative or declarative and interrogative imperative.

06:31 So these kinds of distinctions, we try to account for them in our framework. So these are various parts of what we consider to be language that de vries to treat in the paper. But there's a lot of things that we couldn't discuss, obviously, because it was like in a small section and at the end we cannot explain all of language, even in a paper or in a book. So in a small section, that would be obviously way too ambitious.

07:05 Speaker B:

What are we looking to explain? Or what is needed for language to be encompassed or at home or native to the ecological view rather than the transmission view, or in addition to the transmission view?

Removers $10 yeah, a point that is.

07:31 Daniel:

Interesting is that the transmission view comes with a preciposition about what has to be explained by a theory of language. It comes with the idea that we have to account for the meaning of the expressions that are used first. So we have to understand what are the meanings of the words that we use and how these meanings are encoded in the brain, in the heads of the speakers of a language. But that's misleading from the point of view that we adopt in the paper.

08:39 But if we do away with these contents, it's kind of open the question of how do we account for language, it becomes kind of open in a new way and I don't really know exactly what we have to account for in order to account for language because it kind of changes our view of what language is. So I think there's a lot of open space in this question of how do we account for language if we do away with the transmission view.

09:17 Speaker B:

Or Bleu.

09:22 Speaker D:

Brett got Bleu.

09:28 Speaker C:

So I just was looking back over the paper. I think it might be useful to maybe delineate the specific types of language interrogative versus imperative and like the specificities underlying each one of those. Right now, that would be maybe a good place to just dive into the meat of the paper.

09:56 Speaker B:

How can we see these different types of speech, speech ants as shaping the field of affordances what is being done ecologically with these different speech behavior as opposed to the enabling aspect of the transmission view? I think they're fairly clear within the transmission view what these statements are about. And as you pointed out, it's almost like hard to escape viewing what these speech behavior are by the content. Like, if not their content, quite literally, then what would they be about? Even talking about what they're about but informative would be sharing a proposition or reducing someone's uncertainty about the state of something in the world I'm feeling this way or that weighs this Dutch and so on, or other statements because indeed they're defined by the content and their structure.

11:00 So, ecological, Remy, what might these types of speech behaviors be doing?

11:09 Daniel:

Yeah, these types of active language are well accounted for in the transmission view, but there are some questions that remain about the imperative form of communication because it's not clear that generative communication can be understood as a form of transmission of content. Because we have the feeling that when we comment something or we request something, we are not transmitting information or we are not aiming at changing the mental states of the person that we are talking to. We are aiming at making them do something in the world directly. So there's kind of a mismatch there, it seems.

Obviously the people in the transmission view will have an answer. They will say that when I have, for instance, the desire or the intention that something is the case, then an imperative act of communication is my transmitting this intention or this desire to the person who then has this desire or this intention

12:28 But I'm not sure obviously you can Dean in the details, but I'm not sure that's exactly what we want to do when we state when we produce an generative active language. Obviously we won't. We just don't just ant that the person has the attention of doing something.

We want the thing done in the world. So I believe that the imperative kind of communication is not really well accounted for in the transmission view. And what's interesting is that in a way the imperative form of communication is like the basic form of communication in our framework because what communication is acting through the behavior of somebody else by affecting its field of affordance. So we can go back to like the forms of animal communication that we described earlier in the paper and these can all be considered to be imperative forms of protoimperative forms of communication.

13:29 So that's like the starting point and we achieve these acts on the behavior of somebody else by altering their field of affordances to make them do something.

But how do we account for informative act of communication? And an idea that we put forward in the paper is that the kind of acts of communication that we consider to be informative will be ants that aim to construct or alter a shared field of affordance in a way that is more durable than just an immediate imperative act of language. So what we are doing, we are changing the layout of the context that we take to be relevant to our joint action. And these changing of affordances do not have to be immediately acted upon. I can say, oh, there's something in the context that's relevant.

It does not necessarily call for action immediately, but it's something that is like in the background of our context of action.

14:35 And so it changes the shared field of affordance, but it's not directly soliciting an action from the interlocutor as would be the case for the Generative active language. So in a way it's like as if in the beginning an informative active language is like a longterm imperative or a dispositional imperative. We put something in the context, we say oh, that's relevant, we can act on it at some point, but it's not necessarily immediately to be acted upon. So that's how we can like put the idea that okay, we can change our concept of action, what we take to be relevant in the context of action and we can come back to it later when it's relevant and act on it, but it's not something that is to be acted upon immediately.

The difference between imperative and informative begins to be discerned there where an imperative is like I'm saying that this affordance should be acted upon immediately and informative is like I'm putting this in the context, it changes the layout of affordances.

15:46 For instance.

I don't know how to come up with an example, but if I inform you of something, I'm changing the layout of the affordance that we take for granted in the context of our interaction. And it changes in the long term, the interaction and it can drive the interaction in various ways, but it's not something to be acted directly, immediately. So that's the basic distinction and that's like the beginning of a distinction between informative and imperative and I can say a few words about interrogative too. So as we said, communication is typically acting through the behavior of somebody else by altering its field of affordance and interrogative. It's interesting because it's exactly the distinctions between imperative and interrogative is really similar to the distinctions between pragmatic value and epistemic value.

16:50 Active Inference Lab so for instance, when we produce an action that aims to maximize

17:51 So instead of, for instance, by myself exploring the niche, exploring the field of affordance, I can produce this act that will make the other person this close to me an element of the field of affordance that can then reduce my uncertainty about what is the context of our action.

So that's really the distinction between imperative and interrogative is really to be understood along the line of the distinction between pragmatic value and epistemic value. So that's a beginning to and introduction to these distinctions in the types of active language.

18:30 Speaker C:

You totally read my mind there about what I wanted to elaborate on even though my question was very poorly framed. Yeah, I think that that's very useful for especially in the goal directed aspect of imperative versus interrogative or informative, like how they interact with our maybe we don't have a joint goal versus we do have a joint goal or the goal is to develop some shared state of a shared mental state. So that was really helpful. Thank you.

19:03 Speaker B:

Another note is that the informative behavior is like the base class of the transmission view because it seems to be like it's updating one on the details.

If I'm saying there is a gallon of milk in the fridge, truly what else could be conveyed other than the content? So it seems like the most natural and then there are specific kinds of content like sharing the content that you have a question or sharing the content that you would like somebody to act. And so in that way, as you described, many forms of speech behavior are well accounted for in the transmission view and that accounting is actually kind of a callback to that math stream for with David Spivek about accounting systems. So these are like accounting models. And then you highlighted that the imperative in the inactive and ecological view on communication that the imperative is perhaps the basic form of communication and that can be seen developmentally through a child and the kinds of Communications that they might engage in, as well as from an evolutionary perspective, with the kinds of audio or chemical or physical stigma g and marks that different kinds of creatures use to communicate within and across species.

20:31 So those are action oriented Communications as we can then say all action oriented communication or all communication we can say is action oriented in and computer way. So the imperative becomes the base class shaping the field of affordances, if that's what the ecological view on communication is, is going to be most natural with kinds of expressions that we can say are imperative. And then informative updates are like one step removed from direct action requests. So saying turn the handle to the left is an imperative. If you said I'm going to inform you about two things, the handle can

Those are breaking down a capacity for action into sequential or modular or recomposable statements.

21:32 But those statements are like hiding the consequences of action. And so in that way we can have an action oriented view of communication and then see different kinds of other behavior as like modified or truncated or censored or hidden action modification. And that may or may not entail needing to even explain how meaning is represented, transmitted or received.

Yes, Remy.

22:12 Daniel:

That'S exactly it. So that's really the idea explained very well. And another example that we often use with Pierre is the joint action of cooking a meal with various people. So like an example we used in the last discussion, the example of moving a couch.

So another example may be to change a bit our intuitions about communication. So we're people cooking a meal together, we can suppose that some people suppose that we're in the kitchen of one of the person and the other doesn't know exactly where all the things are. And so the person could say there's flower in the cupboard or in the pantry and saying that that's an informative active language. But that might be a hidden imperative insofar as at some point in the interaction in the cooking of the meal, the flour might be needed. And at this point this alteration of the field of affordance, the disappearance of the flow as an affordance in the context might drive the action of the person when the flower is needed, at a certain point the person will have this affordance in its field and will go to seek it if it's necessary at that point.

23:26 So the informative is, as I said, something like a dispositional or long term imperative, something of a hidden imperative that can drive behavior in the long term. So it's like at the beginning this distinctions is more a distinction of like is this affordance to be acted upon immediately by you or is it posed in the context and can alter the dynamics without being directly acted upon immediately. So that's how the basic distinction is drawn and yeah, I think that's how we try to account for informative without describing it as transmitting a content or an information. So that's the idea and I think that you exploration it very well in your explanation.

24:26 Speaker B:

Okay, yeah it's very interesting.

It's just another coherence of centering action. So many things that the pragmatic turn pragmatism earlier than the so called pragmatic turn in the neurosciences and all of the developments in cognitive science. In many cases, it's been like an information or an coherence view yielding to an action view and that's just played out differently on different frontiers. And it field like, in a way, language is like the stronghold of information views because it's like so amenable to syntactic and discourse analysis and compositionality and all these features that we see in forward model and in computer systems that it feels like, oh, maybe all the funny stuff that people do and say, we'll figure that one out too.

25:36 Bleu and then Dean.

25:42 Speaker C:

So I just wonder about mimicry which is something that we see like in the animal kingdom a lot and

I just don't know how to in the terms of teaching and learning and like shared goal directedness, what is maybe the role of mimicry and Hohwy? Does that like what is the effect on the field of affordances? Does it just open up? Do you see someone do something and then your field of affordance opens to that is also possible for me or does that not have maybe like a semantic analog? I don't know.

26:36 Daniel:

Yeah, that's a really good question and often people who adopt the transmission view will adopt the view that the main driver of the evolution of language in human societies was the transmitting of knowledge and of skills for instance, and of various types of activities. So that's like a clear examples where it seems that the transmission view has a story to say if we take for granted that imitating somebody or learning something to somebody is in effect transmitting a knowledge or a certain kind of external states or cognitive state so that there's clearly something interesting there for the transmission view. But I think that an alternative possible analysis. You just heard ant it is the idea that when you're interacting with somebody and specifically with somebody of your own species seeing this person do something can open new affordances for yourself.

27:51 For instance, if I see somebody that looks like me do something I have learned that when there's somebody that looks like me does something, usually maybe with a little bit of effort I can do it too.

So somebody doing something is a way of opening opening up new affordance for me and trying to active it. So in many cases mimicry will not necessarily be communicative. That is because an organism can do something without having no is not communicating nothing to anybody. But it happens that somebody else watches it and imitates it. So in that case there's not necessarily communication, but in cases where there is communication involved, I think we can analyze in this analyze it just as you said.

That is saying that the action of the organism opens up a new affordance for the person who's watching it doing it. And usually in cases of explicit skill learning, for instance, the experts will do the thing more deliberately, more slowly, more explicitly to show what are the relevance coherent that has to be made in order to active.

29:05 So that's like making more salient the kind of movement that has to be made to succeed in performing the skill. So I think that's a way that we can understand this kind of skill learning and transformation of the affordances that are available to the person that's receiving the communication. That's how I think I would analyze it.

29:33 Speaker B:

One simple example kind of building on this, making certain actions deliberate then Dean interested for your thoughts? Even showing something deliberately verbally calling attention or just the position of the body for a physical skill it shapes the field of affordances specifically where somebody can look. So if you're like, okay, I'm going to swing the bat and then now I'm going to show you what my hand this isn't usually how I do it but I'm going to show you how I was holding it at that time. You have shaped their field of ocular motor affordances and that is what enables their generative models to update. And

Like here's what you do if your hand is slippery but by bodily posture, including vocal box bodily posture, we can have an integrated account of mimicry skill transfer.

30:45 Again, transfer is playing way too strongly into a transmission view but skill resonance or something similar that helps recognize the cognitive entities learning process. Dean.

31:04 Speaker D:

Okay, well, I want to take what you're saying, but I'm going to put a little bit of a weird flex on it because I want to try to combine blue's Pin and Remy's Pin and Daniel's Pin into one kind of question that comes back to the paper. So like the last five minutes of the conversation has been focused on the ant of and as typing when it pertains to language and communication. And Bleu bringing mimicry in is a form of as versus a lot of the emphasis in the paper which is on the of of communication and language. So here's my question. I went back and read the paper again and I caught myself asking what do I hear when I'm reading something or I'm listening to someone?

What do I hear as both the processor and the producer, as we mentioned off camera? An arranger of something being signaled, which I'm picking up on and decoding.

32:09 So rather than just leave it there, I'll park that for a second because I think that's the nut of what I want to ask as a processor and a producer, as an arranger. I can hear things in mono, I can hear things in stereo. I can even hear things if I go to my Apple Music in spatial audio.

So that is a field of affordance question as opposed to a source of affordance question. And if I only limit myself to the source, I'm going to be asking only of type questions, right? So if I want to stay in the as of if I wanted people to hold up two things at once at a minimum the stereo or the spatial, that's when I get into the ecological, even if it's specific ecological because I'm not collapsing down to a single force as my point of contact. Which then leads me to ask the fact that communication can be formed as and of types, meaning mono, stereospatial, mimicry, interrogation, the fact that it can be broken out into those things, does that introduce selfproduction into the selfprocessing in your paper?

33:34 Because I know there's a heavy emphasis on the of on the processing, but I wonder if you keep the as when Bleu brings it up or when Daniel brings it up, if we're keeping it on that even a specific ecological level, are we not?

When we hear something producers as well.

34:04 Speaker B:

What are we producing?

34:07 Speaker D:

I have no idea. But I know I hear something even when I read what you're typing, not just hearing the tap and you tap, I'm hearing something. We are prodoed we are producing like it's changing. I'm hearing that, not reading that.

So if I incorporate that, what am I doing? And I'm not the expert on communication, so wonder what the expert could tell me about.

That'S a good question.

Yeah. I'm not sure what to say about that.

34:50 Speaker B:

First and then we'll continue.

34:54 Speaker C:

So I wonder if what you're hearing, Dean, has anything to do with the internal monologue.

35:01 Speaker D:

Right?

35:01 Speaker C:

So, like, as you are reading something, then you are also hearing something. Right? And so it's like there's this internal I mean, I'm a talker person and so I have a strong internal monologue, like all the time running, even getting ready in the morning, okay, I need to get my shoes and get my purse and the keys and I have to pack my lunch. Like all these things, right? Like that happen.

So I'm constantly hearing that as if I'm saying it maybe to myself even though I'm not speaking. But I wonder what I definitely am a producer of whatever I'm reading. I reproduce it. I reproduce it though, right? So I reproduce it in my own mind, my own internal monologue.

But I wonder, like, I know not everyone has this internal monologue. So what is it then? The same for the people that don't perhaps have this internal monologue. I mean, maybe they carry around a picture of all the things that they need to get ready in the morning.

35:58 Speaker D:

Justine yeah, and I think you bring up a good point. Bleu is it a monologue? Is it a stereo log? Is it a quadrophonic log for some people? I mean, there was an availability way back when, maybe even before some of you were born, there was quadraphonic sound.

I remember the foo album in quadrophonic sound. And like, to my simple ears, I didn't understand what that even meant. Just because they were able to break it out into four parts didn't change what I was both producing and processing. So force the fact that we can type it, like not type it up, but literally turn it into types, is the part where I don't really have the background to be able to explain how that ability, that field of affordance, as opposed to examining this as a single source of affordance, changes the communication gain.

37:02 Because it certainly does speak to mimicry and what we can and cannot pick up.

It certainly speaks to Daniel's point about what happens when layers appear and disappear because we narrow down what we're picking up on versus have both of our ears working, even though we think it's our eyes that are doing all this encoding. Right? So, again, I'm not trying to ask the impossible question. I'm just curious in the sense of producer and processor and what that arrangement is independent upon. What?

Because Daniel brought it up in the last Livestream, circumstances matter. But as a hero, I wonder if

38:18 Speaker B:

Thank you.

38:22 Daniel:

Yeah, I think the discussion about internal monologue is really interesting. There's a lot of things that you said that are really interesting. But I want to go back to the idea of the monologue. And there are some people who believe that, like Chomsky, who believe that language is not even for communication, it's about structuring thought. And so there are people who believe that the language is first and foremost something that is a property of the structure of our thoughts and not a property of systems of communication.

There's this idea that, like, the inner monologue comes first and then comes the communication of this inner monologue in communication. So we have this basically that is once more coherent in the transmission view.

39:23 That we have our train of thought, we have the inner speech that we have in our head and then we translate this inner speech in over speech that is then taken by somebody else. And I think that this is the the priority wrong between computer speech and inner speech. And there's been a lot of work in philosophy by notably Wilfried Sellers and by others in psychology like Vigotsky who say that the first form of speech is over speech that is then internalized, that becomes inner.

But first in the beginning there's only over speech. A child that learns language does not have an inner speech, there's only outer speech that is expressed directly. The child speaks the child do things with his words in its environment and does goal directed automatically and the corresponding inner monologue in Heins head and there's a process that's really interesting I think that is where we see that beginning to happen where the child speaks to itself alone when there's nobody else around.

40:42 And so there's this transition where language is used in communicative interaction. And at some point, the child used language alone.

And there's a question of why does it do? And I think that our view of communication is really interestingly linked with use of inner monologue as self queueing or self regulation. And so the child can author, regulate it's still above or Daniel when it's alone, when there's nobody else around. And in time, for instance, this outer monologue, but alone monologue becomes overt because the child learns to not necessarily produce the sound that correspond to the producing of these ants. And there's this integration, there's this internalization of computer discourse that becomes inner discourse.

And there's a lot of cute anecdotes about that. My nephew.

41:44 I have a nephew, the son of my sister. And he's like when he's about to go to sleep, he's in his bed. And every night is like, we are saying, the events that happened in the day.

And he's saying, like, the comments, the rules, the norms that he heard in the day. Oh, I don't have to do that. I must do that. And so it's like we are saying what happened in the day? So this outer monologue when he's alone in his bed is like the beginning of inner thoughts.

We're seeing his thoughts out in the open and at some point this outer monologue will become

43:00 And I'm not perfectly sure it's certainly accuracy we should verify it, but I believe that's true.

It seems that I heard that. So it seems that first there's the outer monologue, the outer dialogue, and then there's the outer monologue, and then there's the inner monologue that comes after that. And I think that's more the true direction of priority between inner monologue and outer monologue.

43:36 Speaker C:

So I just have a cute anecdote about learning learning to talk. So I have two kids, and they're super different. My son did as your nephew did. Remy, like, it would be in his crib, talking to himself, talking to his stuffed animals and kind of recreating events in a similar way. He also babbled a lot.

Like, a lot, like, just saying nothing from the time he was tiny and has an incredible vocabulary. I mean, now he's six, but people are like, wow, how old is this kid? I mean, he's reading at three and just is like, very, very verbal. And my daughter is super different. So she did not really babble, but she signed like crazy.

And they both went to the same school. They both teach them the same signs, like, to have milk and cracker and cheese and bathroom and all the things they both went to the same daycare, same niche environment. And she picked up the signing much more than my son ever did. He's maybe one or two signs. She's like 20.

44:36 Like, I had to go learn the signs. And before she could sign, she would just, like, stand in the kitchen and scream, like just unable to communication whatever it was that she wanted. And it's so odd. They're just like two totally different kids. But when she was learning Chinese, I had a parent teacher conference with the team, and they've both been learning Chinese.

Now they're in private school. They've been learning for like eight years. So when she was first starting to learn, she wouldn't speak in class. And the teacher and I had a conference, and the teacher said, like, I am concerned about your daughter. She doesn't participate in class.

She doesn't have to take Chinese. It's not mandatory. If you wanted to put her in a different class and she could have a silent reading period. And I was like, oh. So it occurred to me, and I knew that she and because she didn't babble and like, somebody handed her a lollipop, she was like, two.

And I said, say thank you. And she did the sign for it. But I mean, she really did not speak, like, would not form clear words unless she knew she could say them perfectly. And so I sent her to tutoring with the Chinese tutor, like, just twice, three times.

45:39 And then it began.

So she was like, listening. Can I repeat this? Can I engage with this word correctly? And she just was much more careful in that. But both kids, as soon as they could talk in their sleep, like crazy.

Anyway, there's my cute story.

45:57 Speaker B:

Nice stories. The development of the self cueing and selfspeaking is very interesting. Even earlier on in

Like it's noneaudible speech, but actually in various ways it still is embodied. And then this question of reading perhaps is another area where we're talking about in this language area. What is similar or different with listening to speech, participating in speech audibly?

47:05 Is it different if it's red or braille? How does the modality and the Bayesian inference, some of these things?

47:15 Daniel:

Dean.

47:19 Speaker D:

Again, I think the proportions of two ears to one mouth is something that we need to kind of really hold on to in this idea of single force and monologue versus what potentially is a stereo log in the field of affordance as opposed to a single source.

I don't know what advantages are given by having an ability to hear in stereo, but they must be better than having a single ear or a single reception site. And yet we don't have two mouths. So again, I think it's understandable why from a transmission point of view, the deliverer standpoint, we always collapse back to a force, a single source. But if we flip that and now think about it from the receiving standpoint, how does that change our sense of what communication is?

48:22 Because it doesn't change if I cover one of my ears or if I have an earbud in and it Lancelot.

And yet something fundamentally must chang Kim terms of communication and the joint action, even if it's monologue in my own head versus dialogue or trialog or quadrilog. Now, again, I haven't done any research to try to figure out what other people have done in terms of looking at that. But to your point though, Renee, in terms of let's get, let's even get past transmission, we're getting trying to get past the idea of what is being delivered and try to gain deeper appreciation of what is being heard. So Bleu, I'll tell you a little story. I have a Lucas son.

He's in his thirty s now, but he's actually, as he's gotten smarter and wiser, speaks less, like occasionally he gets out of developing word sounds that could serve an entire community.

49:24 And I find that really fascinating. I don't have to comment on it, it's just you notice that as people know more, they maybe they sign more, maybe they find other ways to make their point. And it goes back to that timing or take thing.

49:46 Speaker B:

Great. There's so many coherence, like the true way is the one that can't be spoken of, or those who do, do, and those who can't teach all these kinds of funny poking fun at different architectures. And so on and how that's related to wisdom. The two ears and one mouth, which you've been referencing throughout the conversations, and the quadrophonic, sound quadrophenia. I'm sure it was amazing.

It is true that the enrichment and the spatial nature of heard soundscapes is like something that can't be turned off, like the receiver. All of our receiving is bilateral visual nostrils and smell proprioceptive is

50:51 But the mouth, as our action states, needs generative cohesion. Perhaps just just to so story. But I don't know of any cases where there are now there are some bodily sounds that are bilateral, like perhaps the vibration of a cricket.

So it's not that, like sound production can't be bilateral. It's just that wherever sound production is localized on the sender, when we highlight content in its transmission, where does that account begin? Well, it has to begin with the content and the representation in the sender. And then you could ask whether it was fully or partially or deceptively recognized by the recipients. Potentially when we center the recipient's action, but even calling them a recipient kind of puts them onto a back foot.

51:58 We're just centering the agent engagement ecologically and they're interfacing with Fields of affordance. Then we do see that stereophonic enrichments of everything. And no matter how narrow or how many Shannon bits or Kolmagorov bits, it doesn't really matter because it's going to be unpacked in a generative model that brings in aspects that aren't and don't need to be in the signal and hence aren't or don't need to be in our account of the signaling.

52:45 Speaker D:

Just think, I'm trying to bring back the coherence into the active inference here, because the active part is definitely the transmission piece. Thank you for reinforcing that.

But I do wonder, when we do bring the inference back, why are our sensing affordance? Are those bilateral forms? There must be some advantage to that. And so is it, as Bleu pointed out, because of Ads, not just the heavy emphasis on the of what was the product of my transmission? How am I pulling in this communication?

And what advantages are there to not getting strung out or hung up on the mono log, the single source?

53:38 Speaker B:

One thing that makes me think about is in caricature disinfo representations of bug vision, insect vision. It will look like they're seeing many separate cells, whereas if one were just to take a breath and think about their own visual experience, we don't see two Fields of view. So it's like not really making sense why an insect would see multiple. So the visual field, because there's quote objects out there, we have all of these different ways that we can talk about how we know that we're experiencing and integrated generative model like the blind spot.

The differences in visual acuity, in the peripheral vision, color vision in the periphery ocular motor, circades and the way that attention is suppressed during circading so that it's not causing us nausea. All these features are really important and they point beyond a photon transmission view of vision into this generative stereophonic vision.

54:42 And then in the audio setting, having multiple oral orphoses and also even covering them up like there's still transduction through the skull and so on. We are also seeking to flesh out a generative models of sounds in our environment. So if we cover our ears, that proprioception will help us understand that even if something sounds kind of quiet, we can recognize that it's still a loud noise.

Or if we have one ear in a pillow, we could recognize that something is happening even though if it is being heard differently on both sides.

So having multiple sensors is very compatible with a unified generative models experience because it

55:48 If you have one midline thermometer then that's your point estimate for temperature or you could have like a gaussian blur. I'm just less confident about the temperature further from my one central sensor but maybe it's a tight gaussian, maybe it's very broad, but this is the best estimate. Why would I have any other estimate censored anywhere else when you have two? Thermometers now there's the generative modeling question about whether it's going to be a gaussian with a peak in the middle or whether you're going to have a peak more on one side and have it just go through the other, depending on those sensor readings.

But at that point, you're ending up with some distributions which, if we think of that distribution as like, what is experienced as maybe the product of the sensing process that distinctions. Enrichment is of a different type and yet of a different simplicity than any number of sensor readings in terms of what their raw information are.

56:57 So it seems very relevant this two ears, one mouth, not just for listening twice as much as we speak but for listening twice as active as we speak or something like that.

What do you think about census, Remy?

57:20 Daniel:

Yeah, I think that you explained it well.

I think it's useful, as you said, to have multiple sensory channels that can be active, because I think that's an argument from how we in its book in 2013 book and Predictive Mind, I think he says that if you have a tribunal and you're trying to establish, for instance, the culpability of a convict, you hope that you have multiple independent sources of information. Because if these sources of information are influenced each other, you have a less reliable Hohwy. Do we say? I forget the word in English? I forgot the word.

But you have less reliable information about the case.

58:30 So like it's useful from a reliability standpoint to have multiple independent source of information. So that may be an explanation of why we have an explanation of the relative modularity of exteroception. So we know that there are great limits to that modularity. But there is a certain degree of independent in the different sensory modalities that we have.

So about the two years, obviously. I think maybe if our auditory sensory system was only devised to communication interaction, maybe it would be okay to just have one here, one Beren because we know who's talking to us and so we can direct our sensory apparatus toward this communicative signal.

59:30 But because we use our ears not just to assume to a communicative interaction, but also to know what's in our surroundings, it's clearly more useful to have a great reception from information or anywhere around us. So maybe if the action was only about communication, it would be okay to have just one year. But because we want to know as precisely what's happening there and at the same time know what's happening there, maybe it chaos.

Been more useful to have these two years on both sides. So maybe there's something about that. Yeah.

1:00:08 Speaker B:

One short note, then, Dean, is there are also animals with anatomy so that they can direct their ears, which is seemingly very analogous to the ocular motor ciccading. It's like an audio succade and just the

But we have opted for a strategy with fixed ear positioning, but a mobile neck, which also makes cicade. So that's kind of our low speed audio ciccading. Dean yeah.

1:00:43 Speaker D:

I think the only advantage I see to having 2 miles is that I could eat the French fries and drink the milkshake at the same time. And I don't know what that would be like just overpowering.

But what I think is interesting is in the dot, one Bleu brought up the idea of how do we make sure that there's a difference between content and context? And I think whether it's two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, whatever, there must be some advantage to the form. Because, as I said, even if you cover one of those intakes, it's not just a redundancy issue, it's a recursion issue. It creates that ability to see context, hear context and smell context. I don't believe we would have those things.

And as I said, I think I'd get overwhelmed with context of having both French free and milkshake. It would just blow me up.

1:01:44 That's just a little selfish. Do not give people 2 miles. It COVID be overpowering.

1:01:49 Speaker B:

One aspect might return us to the question of compositionality. It seems like visual composition and temporal composition in music and in heard speech as speaking in terms of generative models have highly factorizable or sparsely connected generative model models famously connected to, like the where and the what streams in visual neuroanatomy.

And that's been explored in some active inference papers with awareness. And what this as being factorizable in a generative model because it really is the case that different wares can host different what's. And so it makes sense to, like, have those two totally separate taste and smell which are more midlined, though there are two nostrils I'm not totally sure on whether there's like, you know, one or two smell chambers or anything.

1:02:55 Composition of chemical bouquets seems quite different like two paintings that you like next to each other or two songs in succession that you like or it's a little bit different than two smells or tastes sequentially or composed.

And so maybe these more sometimes called basal sensory or cognitive features are less effable. And this kind of relates to a cognitive stack where verbal and symbolic communication is like the tip of the iceberg, supported by biological processes that are differently or less effable and at first only pointed towards, like through metaphors.

1:04:01 And speech, butterflies in my stomach and so on. But then ultimately entirely inexpressible. Maybe with some stop in between.

Like being able to express through the body, like what it's like to do a certain bodily position or have a certain experience or be in a certain physiological state. And this kind of casts a light on the transmission view complementing the ecological view. The Transmission View is like downpropagating symbolic communication and seeking for that to apply all the way on down whereas a more bottom up and arguably eco evo divo informed perspective is grounded in the ecological setting and then allows for the crystallization of symbolic processes including communication symbolic processes which?

Like we talked about semiosis and biosemiosis in Live Stream 47. So will we see verbal communication and behavior as something that is enabled with analogy but not the same as cellular transduction? Or are we going to seek a cellular transduction explanation based on verbal behavior?

1:06:09 Let's return to some of our topics.

All right. Few areas to go Bleu. Any thoughts? Just anywhere you want.

1:06:20 Speaker C:

Yeah, so I just wanted to follow up on what you said and I just think that the beauty of the ecological approach to understanding communication is that communication between cells, be it semiotic representation or other ends between animals, maybe with gestures, maybe interspecies communication.

Like, you know, you tell your cat come here and the cat comes or dog or whatever. So I think that the ability to model systems like all systems is very important if the transmission view is not capable of representing all of the situations from cell to cell communication to human to dog communication. And all along the line I think that maybe in the way that the FEP active inference lab is scale free and, like doesn't have I mean, it's across any hierarchical temporal cognitive scale.

1:07:21 I think that the way that we view communication also needs to be broadly applicable.

1:07:32 Speaker B:

Yes.

1:07:35 Daniel:

That'S the aim. But clearly some people will say that sophisticated linguistic communication cannot be accounted for in terms of ecological communication because, as Daniel said, the symbolic communication characteristic of language seems to be too removed from the kind of basic interaction described by the ecological approach. So there's a lot of work to be done still to really explain the high level linguistic interactions that we have in terms of ecological and active communication. But yeah, there's another example of communication. As you said, we can account to maybe for communicative interaction between cells, but there's also there's Beren work on communication between plants and how plants perceive their environment in terms of affordances.

1:08:41 There's been work on that. And so I think it's just to say that there's another way in which we can develop the ecological approach. It seems that organism that behaves any organism will have a field of affordance. And it seems that if it wants to act on other organisms in this environment, it will act in affecting a field of affordance. And it looks like the kind of communication that played between trees, for instance, which alerts each other about, for instance, the Atreides in the forest or sources of useful resources in the ground.

So these kinds of modifications of I don't know exactly the mechanisms by which these communication take place, but we can also see them as modifications of the field of affordances of trees.

But I think that we can say that they probably have something as like a field of affordance. And it seems that they can communication with each other via these modifications of their field of affordance without us having to say that they are transmitting content, which would be really weird from the standpoint of a plant.

1:10:51 Speaker B:

Thank you. Bleu.

1:10:55 Speaker C:

If you haven't seen the plant robot created by the MIT Media Lab, check it out because the plant, they connected it to a set of wheels and a motor and literally will wheel itself back and forth from window to window like searching for sunlight. When you modify the field of affordance of a plant, it will take advantage of those affordance for movement or any other kind of thing. And as to the complexity of linguistic communication, okay, but also the complexity of cellular communication, especially in developmental biology and all of the growth factors and signaling cue. And I mean, it's highly complex and the recombinatorial aspect is also incredibly crazy. It would take a lot to convince me that linguistic communication is more sophisticated or more advanced than biological communication in a developing organism.

I'm not sold on that.

1:11:57 Speaker B:

Thanks. Dean.

1:12:00 Speaker D:

Can you help me understand a little bit more about the influence piece in the joint action? If I'm in Madrid, a lot of people who are trying to get my attention I don't speak Spanish very well, just barely get by. And so a lot of times things are spoken to me and there seems to be a break in terms of the amount of sensing I get.

And so that joint action. Could you maybe especially in the light of that earlier conversation part where you talked about young kids it appears they're talking to themselves but they're talking to the world and maybe they're not influencing the world that they would like to could you maybe talk about that sort of sensing side of that joint action?

1:12:53 Daniel:

I think that's what kids that talk alone are doing. They learn to talk by talking to each other and affecting other persons. But when they learn to talk to each other, what they're doing, they're influencing themselves.

The question of different languages when you're in another country and you're spoken to and you're not understanding correctly but you pick up some parts of what's said.

1:13:58 So I think that the learning of a language is often understood as learning a code. So learning a set of associations between meanings and between forms that can be either written or spoken. But I think that in the approach that we are advancing here learning a language is really more like learning a skill. So you're learning to speak and learning to understand and interact correctly in a given language as you're learning to do anything else.

You're learning to play a game, you're learning to play hockey or play soccer or whatever is the same kind of learning and you're learning to interact in that kind of game. And probably there's a similarity between various languages because there's a similarity.

1:15:11 I could talk about vidgenstein once again but like various languages resemble each other because they have this family resemblance. So because you have this familiarity with speaking in a language even when you're in another place where you don't understand the language you have a basic grasp of some of the structures of the game that is being played. And so from the context you can understand some of the things that are said, understand some of the things that are expected of you because you have this grasp of what kind of game is played. When we speak a language and so even if you're in another country, when you don't speak the language from the concept in which you find yourself, you may be able to piece some things together. Obviously, if you're like, just in a place with absolutely no context, you're in a white room, completely empty and somebody's talking to you, you have no context.

Probably you won't understand anything.

1:16:13 But if you're in a context where you can understand that there's some goals that are in place and some people around you are trying to achieve some goals, you can apply your understanding of the game that you play in your own language to this new language. And so you can get some things you can understand some things about what you have to do and how you should behave and how you can respond. But I think that's a better way of understanding the kind of limited understanding that you have in this kind of interactions rather than in you having a code of your language and then you try to apply this code. In this view, I think that the idea of learning a skill, learning how to play a game is a better analogy to understanding how you come to learn a language and how you come to apply this knowledge in other concepts where the language that is spoken is not the thing that you're mastering.

1:17:12 Speaker D:

Does that kind of confirm that it couldn't be content first, that it would have to be context bound?

1:17:22 Daniel:

Yeah, in my view, the context is a central element in any communication interaction, in any cooperative communicative interaction. I think in the context, what I call the concept in the paper appears as a shared field of affordance. So that's the affordance that are present in the environment

So yeah, when you come to speak with somebody, you're almost never like in a absolutely context free place, you're always in a restaurant, I don't know, in the bus, at the grocery store, you're somewhere and there's this basic set of affordances that are shared that you understand that you can do this, you cannot do that.

1:18:27 And this set of constraints offered by this shared field of affordance really drives and constrains how the communicative interaction will unfold. So I think that even if you're in another country, often the context will be hard to pick up. But sometimes there will be shared context that you can get a graph on and that you can lead to sorry, I'm losing my words that can lead to an interaction that is optimal.

1:19:04 Speaker B:

I brought it in the physical Rosetta Stone as a special case of low context, asynchronous communication. One can imagine there would be a million different contexts by which the analysis of the stone could have been accelerated, such as a person. Reading any of them, the rules or descriptions being enacted or a labeled image or any number of concepts that we would use to interpret and act upon the text that we read. In this setting where we were historically removed from the creation, then there still was residual context and it turned out that that was enough to interpret the symbolic materials. But this is not like the base communication case that we then need to see all communication and all learning and education of languages and active inference ontology as being like a Rosetta Stone.

1:20:12 The definitions of words are not codes to crack. They're like inside jokes or ways of communicating on a sports team that have to do with the context of a setting and asynchronous modifications in the environment, especially symbolic synchrony modifications which are relatively new, potentially existing in their Modern form for several hundreds to several thousands of years depending on how we think about it. Symbolic asynchronous modification is a low context communication, whereas even the interpretance of synchrony symbolic communication still uses and embodies their context in the perception. So we know that we have stereophonic communication just because we're stereophonic, even if we are getting just a Morse code symbol.

1:21:17 But it is a noncontroversial here.

But interestingly, it sounds like elsewhere that we would want to think about communication broadly as being action oriented and embedded rather than kind of like reverse engineered from the kinds of artifacts that we have today with quite literally computer Coda and other kinds of Turing computers and so on.

1:21:53 Daniel:

Okay, I think that you have to explain the ideas that I'm trying to Conway really better than me. I'm not really fluent in English, so thank you for explaining better than me the Dean that I'm trying to say.

1:22:12 Speaker B:

Thank you, I appreciate it. And you wrote the paper and so it's unsurprising, it seems novel and I couldn't say it in any other way.

1:22:24 Speaker C:

Even when you speak English, Daniel can still speak better than you.

Communication more effectively. The ideas that you're trying to convey, even when English is your first language.

1:22:34 Speaker B:

Well, context is nonfungible. So I don't think that there can be a best or a final communication. It's just like a best or a final species or state for an ecosystem to be in.

And I guess in the last 25 minutes or however now that our ecosystem has been modified, however it has been in these conversations and through reading and opening up threads, how will it shape our field of affordances and how will we stream and play differently?

1:23:21 Speaker D:

Dean so I'm curious from all three of you, I have a strategy. If you want to get past monologue, what do you do? How many times do you play? Playing, play.

So as an example of like a real pertinent one right now, the way that the live streams have been set up, I've always been sort of a pre belief, an introduction with the authors or a play and then a play, a debrief piece to this and so the communication is never left as a oneoff exercise. I just read the paper affordance is set up to interact with information to be able to receive it at multiple different time points because I think in the dot one you said we could look at it as slices of time but that's probably not accurate in terms of the dynamic that's in play.

1:24:23 So one of the things the Actor Coherence Institute also does is has a textbook group. Now, I've not been a part of the text group and I don't know whether they do it in sets of three as well to create that kind of triangulation so that the interaction with the communication doesn't become monolithic or monistic or here's the words that have come down now off the mound. Accept them and start carrying them out.

Even though you don't have a context, right? Chiseling them into the stone doesn't increase their priority ant least if you don't have the context. So what I'm curious about from the three of you is if you want to get past instructionalism in terms or if you want to get past transmission, is there a basic requirement to have multiple reinterpretations or at least the opportunity to reinterpret from a communication standpoint?

1:25:29 Must we have reflection and time for that? Do we have to have time built in for that or are we then bound to a transmitted state?

Only anybody can answer yes.

1:25:47 Speaker B:

Bleu first.

1:25:52 Speaker C:

In the way that we have reflection, like we have a pre brief and then the actual belief and then the reflection time in the live stream series. So not in that way. But I do think that in effective

I want scrambled eggs. If that was the conversation, it wouldn't work, right? So there has to be some element of reflecting back what the other person is saying to you in communication that's effective. It's not just this tower of disjointed blocks being built.

1:26:53 Speaker B:

Yes.

1:26:55 Daniel:

Yeah, I think that what you said the Bleu is interesting. The really important element of generative communication is that when you're talking to somebody, when you're in a dialogue, you have to concede a part of your autonomy. You have to accept to be regulated by the other person. And that's I think people who like talk past each other and don't listen to each other and interact, it happens really often.

Some friends talk like it seems like when they're waiting, they're just waiting. When they're listening, they're just waiting to say what they want to say. So these people don't respect the kind of pragmatic principle of like you have to pay attention to what the other person is saying and to have a proper to have a correct communicative interaction, you have to concede like you have to accept that your field of affordance is regulated by the person who is talking to you. You have to let yourself be influenced, be constrained by the by the person who's talking to you just because you have to listen to it and you have to refrain from turning away and go do something else.

1:28:10 It's really just accepting, considering a part of your autonomy.

And that's another idea from Deepalo as an active approach of language where like there's in communicative interaction, any cooperative interaction, but in communication interaction in particular, you have to inhibit a part of your field of affordance to participate in this interaction and listen. Because suppose that what I'm saying is really boring to you and you just want to go eat your piece of cake in the fridge. Like you have to in order to participate, to maintain the interaction, you have to inhibit this solicitation and to let me regulate your field of affordance. And so there's this part of I can see that something in order to maintain the interaction and when there's no more interest or I'm not able to I don't want to be regulated and there's another solicitation outside the introduction that's more interesting to me, but then I will leave the interaction.

1:29:16 But to maintain the interaction, you have to have capacity of inhibition, executive some form of what would be called executive control to be able to listen and take what the person is saying.

If you don't have that, you're just going to think about something else and not let yourself be constrained by the communicative ants of the other person.

1:29:51 Speaker B:

Back to Dean's point about multi Parr and multiplayer communication and engagement. When we only have one communication, then it can feel like a transmission like the Rosetta Stone transmitted from

So especially with three, because one, two, three, there may be enough of a recurrent engagement and interweaving to support reflection development to de emphasize any single of those events because none of them are even half of the total series of three.

1:31:16 So none of them can even be said to be a plurality or a majority if the dot zero, one and two were to vote, to vote one of them out or something like that. And I think it does point towards the reality of our continued interaction with materials and then towards structures that allow us to engage naturally. Remy.

1:31:49 Daniel:

I think that what communication repetitively with the same people, what it achieves, it obviously shapes the generative model. It aligns them in some ways. So we come to share expectation and share Fields of affordance. So it clearly eases communicative interaction because we don't have to communicate as much. There's this trade off between if you have a lot of shared context, you don't have to communicate as much and if you don't have a lot of shared concept, you have to communicate more to have a useful introduction, to have a productive interaction.

And so what I think we've done is we have align our generative models in ways that helps us understand each other better than we did at the beginning.

1:32:51 For instance, we can refer to things that we said in the past. We can say, oh well when you said that. So I think that's what events now and so we can point to relations, to things that we said earlier. So there's this continual easing of communication when you have repetitive communicative interaction with somebody.

That I think, is why we can come to believe that people we're living with, we can read each other's mind without talking because there's so much shared context that something can happen and it can make us think something that is shared without us even saying anything. So there's this context come to be really complex and really deep. Interacting repetitively obviously eases the communication.

1:33:50 Speaker B:

Okay? So we can meet multiple times, do preparation, engagement and reflection before, during and after a communication and structure communication so that there are multiple such kind of peaks and troughs. We can talk about aligning or synchronizing in the general synchrony sense, not making identical but rather coordinating our generative model models through perception and learning. As you mentioned, it helps us understand each other better. Like a goal of a communication could be epistemic, let's get to know each other and it could also have an element of pragmatic value like let's take epistemic action to find out if a collaboration is relevant here and then we're going to engage in these pragmatic actions.

1:34:51 Daniel:

1:35:58 But when we're in academic context, often the goal of the interactions is talking about ideas, transmitting some concepts, transmitting some theories. For instance, explaining theories, explaining arguments. And so these interactions, we look at them and we're like, oh, that's clearly they were transmitting content when we're talking. But the idea is that this is really a small subset of the cases of communicative interaction that we engage in in everyday life. And we take these as paradigmatic cases of communicative introduction when they are really the pinnacle of the linguistic civilization.

We're in a really rarefied context where, like, academic discussions are not what we do in everyday settings. When we talk to each other and we do this, it's because it's an explicit aim of our introduction.

1:36:59 Now that we do this. But in other cases, in most cases when we speak to each other, the explicit aim is not to transfer some information or talk about theories. It's about doing things together.

And now we're doing something together. We're talking about active and friends, but it looks as if it can be understood in terms of content sharing and content transmission. But that's because it's the goal of our interaction. It's not because it's the nature of communication.

I don't know if I'm being clear.

1:37:37 Speaker B:

Yes, Dean. You had your Henry.

1:37:44 Speaker D:

I don't want to put my philosophers cap on, but I will just briefly. I think we use language and communication to save time. It's an exploitation strategy. And so I think when we put a 13 week set of parentheses around a learning moment or opportunity, we oftentimes get the car ahead of the horse. We don't see the pragmatics because we're busy transmitting.

And what ends up happening is the plan forward that affordance that exploitation or optimization or savings of time jumps ahead of the prep to participate in the permeate. Now, we can say that's a luxury, but if we don't respect the fact that people maybe don't necessarily learn as well when they're handed the plan, as opposed to given an opportunity to build one or form one themselves through preparation, participation and permeation, we could go away from this live stream and each of us could literally now design a better plan.

1:38:48 As opposed to Remy came to us with a plan. No, what Remy came to us with was a sketch and then we prepped, participated and permeated that. Now the sophistication of whatever comes out of that in terms of a go forward move for each one of us is orders of magnitude greater because somebody didn't say, oh, well, I've only got 13 weeks.

1:39:48 And again, you don't even have to be on the zoom as long as you give over the amount of time to see and sense what it's like to prep participate. And I think the most important one of all, stick around for the permeate because that's where the real nuggets seem to Daniel's metaphor of icebergs things float to the surface when you give it enough time. But I understand there's also a 13 week window and I'm paying thousands of dollars to sit in your class and comma on exploit the daylights out of your communication. And I just don't know that people don't realize that they're cutting off their noses despite their learning.

1:40:44 Speaker B:

Interesting a lot, there permeation letting it pervade our generative models or percolate letting those messages be past, letting that ripple or the perturbation take effect at slower and deeper levels. And it is really a challenge when the logistical and transmission aspects of communication are scaffolded and those are like the metadata Fields that have to be filled out, the boxes that have to be checked, and they can feel constraining. Yet simply removing them is not a positive solution. And so the path of least action for many learning scenarios is to replicate the prior over the decades, a professor who might teach the same class in the same way.

1:41:53 And there's pros and cons to that.

In fact, some of the most enlivened learning communities have like a vibrancy that transcends an almost ironically static learning experience. Like, we all read this thing. So it's not that I think the mode of communication and cooperation and education that we're explore here means that every single experience is going to be like some kind of full attention, transformative depth psychology. I think it would feel more normal and natural and just like participating in a cool ecosystem that works with that individuals situation.

1:42:54 What else can we add or where can we go? Where active inference lab in all of this?

Where do you see active inference? Not like what are your intentions with my child, but where active inference lab in your further research agenda? Remy.

1:43:24 Daniel:

I think it gives the, like, allencompassing framework and the abstractness of the framework allows us to apply it to, as we said, like communication between sales and communication between countries or groups of individuals. This multiscale property of active coherence lab think is really useful in allowing us to describe communicative interaction between these various kinds of free energy minimizing agents that are useful.

I think that the learning mechanisms that are at work in active inference are really useful also to explain how communicative interaction is conducted and how repeated communicative interaction can lead to a form of synchrony of the generative models as has been explored by Anil in a paper in 2020.

1:44:51 I think so. I think that's really useful there's a lot of things that I think we can take from the

I think the fundamental intuition is that all action is free energy. Minimization that's trivial. But I think there's a pragmatist, insight active inference lab that we can use to support the pragmatic view of communication. Everything that an organism does, it does it to minimize its free energy, and active inference is no different. And communicative active inference as a form of active inference also aims to minimize the free energy of an organism.

And so when an organism finds itself in a situation where there is a lot of free energy, there's a lot of errors, prediction, it will try to engage it in its intervenience and environment in order to bring itself back in viable states.

1:46:07 And so all these ideas, when we apply them to communication, I think they lead not necessarily by implication, but I think there's a path to these ideas through the pragmatic view of communication, that communication is another form of it's just a mechanism of regulation of organisms in order to minimize their free energy. I think there's this kind of basic biological understanding of the behavior of organism. I think it leads us more towards the pragmatist view of communication rather than toward the more informational or transmission view that is more at home in our really highly advanced and complex linguistic interaction. And I think that this, like, basic biological framework is a good place to start to understand communication in the pragmatic issue.

1:47:12 Speaker B:

Very nice answer. I'll read a comment from Stephen, and then we can give a thought on it as well as provide some closing thoughts. So Stephen wrote, explicit aims of interaction are important and can be invisible. Thus communication appears to be based on transmission. Should we identify the concept through the affordances or via naming the water, like the water we swim in?

That is, is the context and the explicit aims apparent via the affordances? Or is there a special sauce that flavors the cultural waters in which we are swimming?

Yes, Dean. Special sauce.

1:48:01 Speaker D:

Real quick on that. I think what maybe did build on what Remy just said, I think perhaps active coherence opens up that space to the idea of a special sauce. It doesn't guarantee that there will be one, and it certainly doesn't promise.

But what it does do is it says, what are the possibilities within this? Not just what are we collapsing down to? I mean, throughout this series, I've been talking a lot about, well, we can't leave the absolutes, the things that we've experienced out of this equation. But I think what I think active inference lab affords is that those relativities, those entailments, and those entanglements always to be determined, can be moved towards and may be accepted with more abundance if we use active inference. But that's just my optimistic take on it.

1:49:04 Speaker B:

Do you have any other closing words before we hear some final thoughts from the others.

Excellent. Okay, Bleu or Remy with some final thoughts.

How will it permeate with you?

1:49:27 Daniel:

Okay, so I'll go ahead. I was really happy to have a chance to talk about the paper with you. I think that's one of the most important things that I'll take home is that now I have a really salient solicitation to go see the plant robot in action. So, like Ant, the second that I close the Zoom meeting, I'm going to go see that. That's really something that I'm taking from this discussion.

But, yeah, it was really interesting to see different perspectives, different backgrounds, what these different backgrounds can bring to a discussion.

I think that was really enlightening for me, and I was really happy to be there.

1:50:21 Speaker C:

Just to say thanks for coming, Remy. We really enjoyed this discussion. And for me, I think what will permeate is everything I think about now. I just think about how can I model this in terms active coherence lab? And I feel like this paper will influence maybe the way that I think about communication, which is a big part of modeling active inference period, especially like in a multi agent dynamics system.

So I think I will probably leverage the psychological approach in the way that I think about it going forward. So I appreciate the opportunity to learn about it.

1:51:00 Speaker B:

Awesome. My closing thought, what I'm left with here is active inference as about affordances. The content of the model is about affordances.

Active inference lab is an affordance. It allows us to realize epistemic and pragmatic value today and in the future. And in that way, we can see it as gripper and gripped, just like we could talk about the hand as gripper and grip, whether it's holding hands or grabbing an object. And especially in this dot two some very nice points added on language as gripper and gripped and contextualizing this kind of breakaway verbal community of research and scholarly education in academia and recognizing that breakaway community and skill as something that's crystallizing out of a much more inclusive and pragmatically oriented niche.

1:52:10 And I think that will be a win win framing because it will help ground what can be abstract and lofty discussions and also elevate and bring attention and support to some areas and types of communication that are absolutely natural in the field of affordance view and the ecological view, but are not always respected.

So highly under, like a symbolic transmission view. And the closing image for me is making the sauce underwater. I'm just imagining it's like, I don't know, SpongeBob Square Pants or someone's trying to cook and make the sauce, but we're adding things, and it's more just like happening in this diffuse of space. And in a way, all kitchens are in fluids. That's why we can smell what we're cooking.

But it's different enough that the sauce stays in the pan.

1:53:11 And I think the social introduction of active inference is when the sauce is spilling out of the pan.

All right, Ronnie, you're always welcome back, so hopefully you'll share some developments in this line. Good luck with the rest of your work.

1:53:31 Speaker D:

Thanks to all of you.

1:53:33 Daniel

All right, fare

1:53:35 Remi

Bye!


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