Collective Behavior (Lecture) — Course home

Hello, everyone. It is August 2nd, 2023. We're in the Active Inference for the Social Sciences course. I'm Daniel Friedman, and this is going to be a lecture on collective behavior. Now, of course, disclaimers could abound, and there's so many ways to go about this topic of collective behavior that in actuality, in enactment, I really hope it is multi-scale and collective. I'm really looking forward to your comments and your engagement with this area, with this lecture, with this course. So if you're watching live, you can add comments into the live chat or questions, and I'll check them out at the end. Also in the YouTube live chat and in the video description, there is a link to where you can submit questions for all of the teachers of this course. That's going to be a the platform form. And just more generally, let's have fun enacting ecosystems of shared intelligence together. And I hope that this lecture can be something like one attempt to make that happen epistemically. We're going to have many fun things to talk about. Collective behavior, what differentiates it from simply behavior? I mean, aren't all behaving systems assemblages? Is not the brain composed of multiple parts, brain and body, multiple people? What are we really talking about with individual behavior? Why do we need adjectives at all for behavior? What is a collective and how would we even know it except through its behavior? So there's going to be all kinds of fun topics. Avel provided me with this image and suggested that it would be a great place to head towards. And so we can think of this as where we're going. And where we're going is understanding the agents or the human in a social relationship through social action and the recipient of social constraints and observations. Through that interface or blanket or holographic screen, the agent or the human is engaging on this sociocultural landscape. And so we can think about that agent of engagement with a social world and the dynamic of sociocultural constraints. Now that's where we're going and that's how someone else has framed where we're going. What I'll tell you here is how we're getting there. How we're getting there, it's going to be a lot of fun. There's going to be a lot of ants and the door is going to be wide open. So everyone is a nest mate on this slide and we're going to be with our regimes of attention and our stigmatic trails just absolutely up, down, left, right, all over this sociocultural landscape. All right. So here's the plan for the collective behavior lecture. It's going to be presented as a sequence of views. Each view or perspective is going to consist of at very least a central citation and then one or more reflections on that citation. Four views on collective behavior taken as a bundle will constitute a main section of this lecture. And there are going to be three main sections of this lecture split on one hand into three groups of four and on the other hand into two groups of six. Splitting into fours, the main three sections are going to be background and context, which is going to provide some views and insights that are from outside of active inference because surprise, surprise, what was true before active inference or outside of active inference is also true within and after. Then we're going to turn to active inference specifically. We're going to talk about active inference insights and fundamentals for collective behavior and applications and implications of utilizing or of conceptualizing of a social system as an active inference system. So those second two sections are each going to center around also specific recent work in the field. To split it into two groups of six, the first six views that are presented, so all of background and context and then half of the insights and fundamentals are going to be in support linguistically or rhetorically of a declarative statement. Whereas the latter six views are going to support or open up to a question. And that'll lead us…