From Contextuality to Social Constraints — An Active Inference ontology for participatory realism and social change

All right. Hello and welcome. It's 9th of March 2025. We're in Active Inference Guest Stream 99.1 with Avelle. So welcome, Avelle, if you would like to say hello and go into your presentation. We're looking forward to it. So go for it. Hello. So I'm Avelle Guénard-Carlu. I work with Andy Clark, who is a cognitive philosopher at the University of Sussex in the context of the X-Kype Project, which is a project on archaeology, cognitive archaeology, which focuses on the relation between mind and natural culture. I'm also a founding member of Kyrus Scientific Para-Academic Organization. Think of it as a think tank. And what I will present today, let us consider it as an advertisement for the social science sub-project in the Active Inference Institute, because it's the aggregation of the work I did to motivate, well, necessity for, I will say, new mathematics for the study of social change that are inspired by Active Inference, but, you know, not really in line with what is done mathematically to formalize it. So we will go from contextuality to constraints, and I will try to articulate an Active Inference Ontology for participatory realism and social change. So, first let us try to motivate what is it that we are doing here. So, human minds and human culture display a very clear sign of open-ended evolution. What do I mean by open-ended evolution? It is evolution that is open-ended. I'm sorry, it's kind of circular, but essentially you can make new things things that did not exist before, that were not a thing before, that were not a part of some platonic space of things. We made it up. It was made up. This is what I mean by open-ended evolution. And this is true in generally whatever it is that you might do. So, for example, we have an impression of experience escape on the left of the screen. And, you know, it's buildings. We made them up. We built those buildings and they ensue a specific perception of what a building is that did not predate the concept of a building, the invention of building by humans. And this is very manifest, for example, in writing because, you know, writing uses sign. The interactivity of writing relies on signs being a thing. But signs are a thing only if we look at them as signs. So, we are looking at letters on this screen and want to stamp them as being embedded with meaning. But the concept of a C does not pre-exist humanity. There is no C dimension in the universal wave function at Big Bang. We built it up. It's a planet evolution. And the problem of explaining, presenting, addressing mathematically and physically the open-ended evolution of stuff is a pretty huge problem. Stuart Kaufman, best physics guy, in my opinion, dedicated his career to that. And, let's be frank, he did not solve it. He is not near to solving it. Because it's a hard problem. Because there is this idea that open-ended change brings out new stuff. And in mathematics, we have to represent a nice space that has specific possibilities in it. Else, we are not going far. And this seems to be incoherent with the logic of open-ended evolution. So, hard problem. I will jump to cognitive science because, again, my interest here is in human mind and social evolution. And I will try to explain what we mean by explaining in cognitive science. So, for schematic purposes, I will say there are three kinds of explanations that we can go for. One is nomological. It's with regard to laws. So, for example, if I don't know a third thing and see that it falls this way, I can formulate a law that describes what happens. And because it happens a lot, happens every time I try, I claim it is a law. I claim that describing the regularity explains this activity. So, it's a phenomenological approach to explanation. I just described the phenomena and hope this is explanatory. This is how we do things in physics, not in psychology, not in biology, not in cognitive science, not in sociology. What is more natural in those disciplines, the special…