Social constraints (Lecture) — Course home

Hello and welcome everyone. It's October 18th, 2023. We're in the course Active Inference for the Social Sciences. And today we're in the lecture by the course co-organizer and that will kick off the final leg of the course, which is Avel Guinin-Carlu's lecture, Social Constraints and the Existential Stance, What Makes Us Human. So we'll be looking forward to a lecture followed by a discussion. So if you have any questions, please feel free to add them in the live chat or submit to the course syllabus. And also at the end, we'll talk about how we're going to conclude this course. So with that, thank you to you, Avel. Hello. So do you see the slides correctly? Everything is fine? I will take silence as a yes. So the role of this session is basically to show you the inspiring intuition behind the whole course and to show very concretely, well, very abstractly, but in my mind concretely, why the specific formalism of Active Inference and Social Constraints is really going to understand the human species and the structural evolution of, you know, things that we do. So we'll talk of social constraints of the existential stance and of what makes us human. So disclaimer, this paper, this presentation is closely aligned with the upcoming paper, which was name is like the same, I think. It's tentative for now. And whose quarter, whose job is a co-author. So first, let us ask basic questions about the topic at hand. What is culture? By psychologist, Seshila Haiz, culture is typically used in one of three ways. Culture can be information or behavior required socially. So like, if I am an ant and I figure out that you need to go somewhere because of the pheromones, this is culture. It can be socially acquired behavior that is shared within a group. So for example, if I am a nape and I figure out how to open knots with a stone thing and the group, just everyone does it the same way. This is culture. And it can be the adaptive evolution of socially acquired behavior, which is very well. We have evidence of it in the wild for corvids and humans only. So the question is, we know that culture is the human specific, like it is the case simply. But depending on what we mean by culture, it can describe behavior that is very much shared with other species. So the question, a question that needs to be answered is how specific are the human cultural mechanisms? So one core thing to understand is that there is no such thing as the cultural mechanism. The mechanisms of social learning in humans are culturally transmitted, whether you will listen to, I don't know, an elder, a rapper, a scientist depends on the cultural norms in which you exist. And the specific way in which teacher-student interaction are supposed to go is again culturally embedded. And the type of information that people will try to figure out is or transmit is itself culturally embedded. So we can't just write the mechanism for human social learning. This is empirically there is none. And conceptually, I don't think the notion is coherent to begin with. So one core element for this is we have basically explicit linguistic rules about who we who we should trust, like listen to your parents. And those are linguistic and language varies from culture to culture. So this changes from culture to culture, pretty straightforward. And in general, the practice of cultural transmission of intentional teaching, they are varying between cultures. And I do not want to get into it because I don't think I would say something that is accurate without notes. And we can, however, take a look at a behavior that is, I think, nearly universal, which is storytelling. When people tell a story, they use stories to transmit norms. And like, in the specific culture of the Agda, or Agta, I have misspelled it at least once, I think it is Agda. Like you have a core role of storytelling in telling people what to do. And you have specific tales that were studied and that were associated to specific norms. And…