# Full Text: Way Finding in the Infinite Imaginarium: Juxtaposing Epistemic Tempos and Modes

> Extracted from `2024_InfiniteImaginarium.pdf`

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Way Finding in the Infinite Imaginarium:
Juxtaposing Epistemic Tempos and Modes
Daniel Ari Friedman 1,2
1. Active Inference Institute
2. Cognitive Security & Education Forum (COGSEC)
Daniel@ActiveInference.Institute
January 31, 2024 ~ Version 1.0
10.5281/zenodo.10601082
0000-0001-6232-9096
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Situation
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Background
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Avenues of Approach
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Milestones
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An Example
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Implications
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Administration
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Conclusion
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As we head through and past January 2024, I wondered if/that…
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Situation
The situation is called “Infinite Imaginarium” —
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The Known territory is the “clean, well-lighted place” to read words and facts like books.
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The Gray Zone is an ever-receding forager-specific situational periphery.
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The Dark Imaginarium is the Unknown territory past (a, some, or all) Gray Zone(s) 1.
Background
Let’s stack up some linguistic dominoes —
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“Ba, ba, ba,” babbles the baby. Each successfully-uttered phoneme is an upright domino
(even a parrot, or a language model, can do this).
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At first the speaker is just kicking up dominos in the vocalization-playpen
according to multiscale EcoEvoDevo unfolding and (re)normalization, according
to the priors and dependent arising.
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Canalized development proceeds according to intrinsic and extrinsic mechanisms
to stabilize semiotic coincidences such as:
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“Are you hungry?” →“Yes”
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“Who’s a cute lil’ larva?!?” →“That’s me”
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“That’s me” →“I am me”
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By these and other processes 2, we (develop to) produce speech from language, and
(learn to) glean language from speech.
Stacking dominos is verbal expression —
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Sentences are structured speech acts. A clause that isn't quite done ends in a comma,
while a clause or sentence that concludes a statement ends in a period. Do questions
always end in question marks?
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Other formatting and grammatical cues – stylistic choices like the usage of lists,
rhythmicity, and parentheticals – convey super-linear information about the cognitive
model of the speaker, for example by demonstrating pacing, care, or humor; and all in
linearized time (fancy that)!
2 Such as the roles we play in infinite games for infinite teams.
1 Reports of Rainbow Zones exist from Shanna Dobson from the Dark alveolar P-adic infinity-sleep.
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Avenues of Approach 3
“Gap-filling” epistemic modes are solid, wide, and slow —
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In the “gap-filling” genre, the measurement-brick-dominos are laid down like an asphalt
road. This shape is very lateral and stable against certain impacts (though subject to
infrastructural deterioration and under-funding). To hyperbolize, Gap-filling implicitly or
explicitly dreams of converting all of the Imaginarium into the Known, like some parking
lot project to plan 4.
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Some facts are far out, like the temperature at the center of the sun, or the expression of
an mRNA transcript in some cell in your liver. And facts – measurements – are on the
classical screen 5. Parking lots are always still ground level (even underground or
multi-story parking garages are like shelving that creates local ground levels).
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To the extent that all agents in an ecosystem of shared intelligence have justified true
belief about a fact, it is most classically-consensually factual. There's nothing wrong with
facts AND you cannot build a staircase to the moon.
“Gap-respecting” epistemic modes are diaphanous and fast —
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“Gap-respecting” canal-jumping is a quantum Active Inference mode of covert internal
(attention[al awareness]) and overt external (verbalization) domino-play.
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“Gap-respecting” builds up (all the better to lithely jump with) not so much out (all the
better to drive cars over) 6.
Milestones
A question is like a Jenga tower assembled by the questioner —
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Intelligence like an invisible flick or twist at the top of the Jenga stack (this is the full clip,
extended field work concept, working memory, no-holds-barred, etc).
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The flick introduces a chirality to the situation (qubit spin). The question-domino-tower, if
aptly constructed, when flicked, can be used as a pole to take Giant Steps over vast
epistemic landscapes, as fine forceps for ant brain dissection, or to spin spiraling Tets.
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And yet even such disciplinary uses are just boundary conditions, locations of arising, or
classical stigmergic traces – skills orthogonal to these are necessary for relevant use
(e.g. when should we Giant Step, dissect, flick, or what) – this is learning as/of strategy.
6 Though note that in (Buckminster) Fuller accuracy, building something taller is actually building “out” with respect to
Earth’s center, and building something conventionally-understood today as “wider” is just a different “out”. The
contemporary geometric framing is retained here and in several other locations for communicative clarity (under the
hopeful expectation that such writing will be Tet-compatible in a future timelock).
5 Socio-instrumentally we can say that facts exist on at least the screen of discourse, like: it's a fact that X asserted Y.
4 Cue “They paved paradise...”.
3 A question arising here is: “are these Avenues in parallel or is one a street and the other an avenue (and we decide
which is which...when)?” (Dean Tickles, personal communication, 2024).
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Going out to ask questions is heading out to near the edge of known facts —
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Usually near the edge there is a trailhead, paper, or basecamp with a parking lot that
takes you right up into this point of departure. It could be new to you, or some, or all.
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From there, in terms of Abductive directions of travel as you head out, there is Gap-filling
brick extension (low and slow) and Gap-respecting pole jumping (fast and far) into the
Gray or Dark zone.
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And there is coming back holding a seed and/or leaving a pheromone trail – enacted
without deleterious false positive and negative seed carry and pheromone deposition.
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Wayfinders PREPARE to go out AND they MEASURE when they are back 7.
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And people have been Preparing and Measuring the Fourfold/Tetrahedral
aspects of Speech for a long time 8.
An Example
The total situational-ecological intelligence of a cognitive engagement is like —
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Alice the student constructs a stack of dominos to asks the librarian Bob a Quantum
Question about where a Geometry book is, Bob rebuilds a Jenga tower internally and
flicks it to land on brick "516.3 Analytic geometries" (a memorized factual response), or
he has the meta-cognitive situational awareness to flick the stack over to land in the
zone of tacit know-how to look up the title. For this flexibility – Bob is a librarian.
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Pulling back a step, the book was recommended to Alice by the professor in response to
some empirical situation (e.g. answer a student gave on a test), or the actual advent of a
question from Alice. We could also do a causal traceback zooming out from the book as
classical artifact rather than quantum student; this route would take us back to the
emitted phonemic domino-chain by that book author, and ultimately on back through that
author’s childhood babbling and beyond.
8 "If speech did not exist there would be no awareness of merit and demerit, nor of truth and untruth, good and evil,
the pleasant and the unpleasant. Speech alone makes it possible to understand all this. Worship speech."
- Chandogya Upanishad Verse 7.2.1
“Four are the definite grades of speech; those Brahmaṇas who are wise know them; three, deposited in secret,
indicate no meaning; men speak the fourth grade of speech.”
- Rig Veda 1.164.45
7 at least the ones we hear about do.
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Implications
You are being asked by the environment (another agent): “¿What now // now What?” —
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Combining the epistemic imperative with the optionality/capacity action preference, and
the forensic-realtime-anticipatory (past-present-future) interpretative plurality preference
9; you are always already in a situation where your agency over the strategy of the
response contains (a minimum of) two archetypal modes.
The first response mode to reduce uncertainty about a Question is to to merely resolve it like —
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Q →“What is 2+2?” 10
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A1 →“4.”
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The A1-type response acts to beat or blaze a path back to the multiversity or institute: we
scaffold the questioner's convergence towards the centers, towards known knowns.
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This can look like pulling out from system-of-interest Minute Particulars, to the
system-independent scale-free/scale-friendly ontology at or around the center of Active
Inference. This first response and training, can reflect Subject Matter Expertise
(approaching the center from a certain direction or in a certain way).
A second archetypal response mode is to canal jump (canal co-jump) out further like —
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Q →“What is 2+2?”
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A2 →“Some say 4; it depends on what you mean by 2."
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A3 →“It depends on what you mean by ‘is’.”
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A4 →“It depends on what you mean by ‘+’.”
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An →...infinite possible situational responses reflecting affordances.
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Way Finders get back, and they go out 11.
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Departing from the original question, effectively compressing the initial query, and
moving into an alternative/higher level of epistemic optionality/value/meaning for the
learner (approaching & diverging from centers).
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In terms of similarities with the first response strategy, this second way is a linearized
speech act demonstrative of understanding.
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In terms of differences, the second mode reflects 12 the Subject Matter Expertise AND
presents as Prediction Matter Expertise. The Prediction in this case is the territory of the
real (strategy, consequences, action, stance, in the) situation, including the multiple
(precarious, risky, un-prestatable) contexts/temporalities/presencings of the unfolding
cognitive ecosystem which now includes 13 Alice, Bob, and the extended site.
13 This is a Homo Sacer-like tetralemmal (exclusion through inclusion // inclusion through exclusion) occurring in the
formalized setting of meta-Bayesian nested particular things.
12 …presupposes, avoids, dismantles, delays, transcends, complements…
11 Process watchers give back, and they watch out.
10 This Q-for-Question is the canal jump from the questioner, emitted as a linearized string like the unwinding of a
string of yarn from around a Tetrahedra-as-cognitive-particle, or a trace of light/smoke emitted by spinning Tet.
9 This dual epistemic & pragmatic character can be seen analytically in the decompositions of Expected Free Energy,
and structurally in the "attention as covert action" hierarchical models of meta-awareness.
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Administration
Knowledge, Intelligence, and Wisdom develop in & though conversations —
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This process occurs, with some similar and different patterns and with different
Media/Messaging in different enacted bodies of discourse and literature.
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Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. Turn-taking and leap-frogging all the way [to/from] home.
Conclusion
Language is gap-respecting even in funda-Mental Tet-essence —
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And language is gap-respecting in differently-linearized emittances like this one.
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Thus the anaphora unsaid: is only one aporia of language.
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May your reading have been in this light (of lights & darks of lights & darks).
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*Extraction method: pymupdf*