A World Unto Itself: Human Communication as Active Inference

live streaming is on okay it looks like we are a lot so welcome everybody to team com podcast number three we're really looking forward to this discussion and we really appreciate everyone who has come out to come speak with us so without further ado i'm going to share my screen and we're going to jump into our podcast section so this is team com podcast number three welcome to team com everyone this is a recorded and an archived live stream that we're performing we are an experiment in online team communication and learning and we are the active inference stream for now so people can connect with us via twitter at inferenceactive at this gmail address here we have a public key based team and also if you're watching this you probably know but we're on youtube at this username we really welcome all skills backgrounds and perspectives so please let us know how we can help you and help help provide an on-ramp for wherever you're coming from and please be respectful of the rules of online communication and dialogue so you if you're not speaking if there's noise in the background you can use the raise your hand feature which is on the bottom left of jitsi and so on and please provide us with feedback so we can be improving our work here's going to be the structure of the discussion today first we're going to have a check-in and a warm-up then we're going to briefly cover tin bergens for questions which are a big idea that help us organize some of the concepts that are discussed in the paper then we will get to discussing the paper we'll talk about the goals of the paper and the abstract we'll go through the road map of the paper and talk about the section headers and how the authors get from a to z we'll talk about each one of the figures and try to understand them and then we'll have time for questions throughout as well as at the end so in the check-in or warm-up everyone absolutely feel free to introduce yourself briefly and your location however you'd like and maybe for each of these questions if one or two people could just give a first thought so first warm-up question is what is communication people can raise their hand or just kind of pop corn in yeah go ahead jared uh yeah so alright yeah so hi everyone my name is uh jared faisal i'm uh uh in north carolina in uh in the united states of america um yes uh for me communication is just uh a kind of a set of behaviors and inferences that people use to align their mental states it's kind of like an abstract i think kind of way to think about it but um it inherits from my advisor's line of thought that communication is a sort of tool for people aligning their mental states to a degree good enough for their purposes um yeah that's that's it i'd like to think of it as a behavior that's extended that uh is like a sort of continuous extension of uh behaviors that species across the animal kingdom use um trying to think of it in a way that's anything too too special in linguistics for instance thought of something very very special and unique and it is in a certain way but uh the way that i found it useful to think about communication is as a another sort of behavior in people's toolkits any other thoughts on that yep stefan yeah i would say that i agree with what was just said there actually and uh if you take like an active embodied approach you could say that the um it's an extension communication is an extension of the organism into the environment but one which can happen with interactions with other organisms also extending into their environment and their niche cool and that kind of presages this second question which is what is special interesting or important about human communication and could be nothing could be everything um any thoughts on that one yeah so i have a thought that it's maybe not super special anything about human communication um my name is shannon i'm at the university of california in merced but because of the pandemic i'm at home in south dakota for the…