Collective Behaviour, Enslaved Attention, Building Intelligence

hello everyone and welcome back to active inference insights I am your host Daris parvy Wayne and today I'm thrilled to be speaking with Connor Hines Connor is a PhD student although he just told me he just finished his PhD at the max plank Institute of animal behavior as well as a researcher at versus AI his work focuses on the apparent Theology of complex systems and especially how they can be described as conducting variational basian inference over their environment thus Connor leans heavily on active infont and the free energy principle in his analysis Collective Behavioral Systems and so he is the perfect guest for today's episode Connor Thank you so much for being here I'm super excited to learn from you um I need to put my technical hat on because your papers are are technical um but I think there's a lot that non-technical audiences will be able to get out of them and I want to start having me no no it's genuinely it's absolutely my pleasure um I feel like psychology or cognitive science likes taking the unit of analysis as the individual and then saying okay how can we extrapolate from the individual to describe group dynamics so I wanted to start very broadly with a kind of axiomatic question about when you uh study Collective systems is there a difference between Collective behavior in and of itself like what you talk about in terms of collective behavior and then the behavior of an aggregation of individuals who we can say belong to a group so is there something over and above the behavior of individuals when we talk about Collective Behavior yeah I mean this is this question is is one of the motivations for why ended up studying this and I think it ties into like what I would say is a larger unifying theme of complex systems in general complex system science I think if you could like sum up sum it up in one phrase would be more is different the whole is greater or different than the sum of its parts um and that is really evident I think in the study Collective Behavior so yeah I I would say that there's something absolutely different about kind of blurring your eyes so to speak on the individual components of a system and treating the system as a thing as an emergent thing and there's a lot of theories about whether that's like an Epi phenomenal thing is that just something that exists on on a descriptive level or does this larger thing like a flock of birds or a school of fish or a society or an economy does it in some way have like causal power and influence on these like level individuals but I like the the larger if the last like whatever 30 years of complex system science has shown us that yes there is something qualitatively different about the bigger picture than just an aggregation of uh individual components yeah I think in terms of let's say sociocultural groups the top- down influence is quite transparent I mean in terms of an economy the economy that you've function in presumably has a kind of circular causality with the agents in the economy totally I'm wondering whether in terms of more mechanical complex systems um so even in let's say simulation work is there something that emerges ontologically in terms of the actual dynamics of the group as a whole that can't be reduced to let's say just like a summation of those individual behaviors and I guess in that even if there is can we distinguish that from top- down causality so as you say you might have something which like is ontologically different you can actually say okay this is a different phenomenon but where do you see the top down causality coming in before we get to let's say languages or broader cultures or uh economies yeah no that's a that's a hotly debated topic effectively so there's a lot of work that's kind of trying to actually quantify the amount of top- down causation that there is because of course like we can always Define some set of macroscopic or coar grain variables from an ensemble of microscopic variables like say I have a…