Cultural Affordances: Scaffolding Local Worlds Through Shared Intentionality and Regimes of Attention

live streaming hello everyone and welcome this is team com podcast 4.1 on september 15th 2020. welcome to everybody hello all participants i'm going to share my screen and we will jump right in this is team com podcast 4.1 and this is team com teamcom is an experiment in online team communication and learning related to active inference you can find us on twitter at inferenceactive you can email us you can find us on the public key base team as well as at the youtube channel this is a recorded and archived live stream so please provide us with any feedback participants as well as viewers so that we can improve our work all backgrounds and perspectives are welcome here and also just on a note of video etiquette if people are muted in a noisy background or raising their hands when there's this many participants in the chat it would be excellent and help us with our turn taking and reduction of uncertainty about who's to speak next so here we are in stream 4.1 and the structure of today is going to go like this first we're going to have a few check-in questions and warm-up discussion then we'll get to the paper itself which is ramstead at all 2016. we'll talk about the big aims of the paper go through a roadmap of the paper to see how the authors get from a to z we'll go through the abstract to understand how the authors represent their own work then we'll go through the box of definitions as well as the figures at that point we'll have time for questions and other insights and also we've implicitly prepared for a podcast 4.2 where we'll be able to have further discussions on some key quotations or anything arising that we don't get to this week so thanks for that part here we are in the check-in and everybody can feel free to introduce themselves in their location if they would like the first question is pretty broad but that's what the warm-up is about so what is culture it's a good question or in the sense of this paper in the sense of culture that's being scaffolded within a kind of framework that we might want to build out what would that kind of culture refer to well so i'm maxwell ramstad i'm uh the first author on this paper cultural affordances um by the way i'm really grateful uh for this uh podcast you all have been so great just in general over the last few weeks and i'm i'm particularly touched that you're giving uh the work that we've developed so much attention um and it's like just i'm just so full of gratitude this is so cool um so culture at least in the sense that we're using uh the term here means something like the taken for granted i think is sort of the heuristic way that i like to think about it it's sort of like in a given local frame of reference uh in a given environment shared by a group of people a living together what are the things that are taken for granted what are the uh sets of expectations and beliefs and sets of practices and norms um you know that that are shared and that essentially uh structure people's intuitive grip on their shared social world any other thoughts on culture there yeah in sociology uh we define culture it's kind of three different dimensions you have the symbolic ideal dimension which is really i think equivalent to or equivalent to semantic knowledge uh we break it up in terms of norms values and beliefs uh we have a psychobehavioral dimension which is really about in body culture how your body moves um the skills that you have in in terms of psychological kind of terminology i would really say your skills and habits um in in kind of that non-declarative memory sense and then the third dimension is really our material dimensions of the physical things that we create the tools the buildings the fashion um which i think the degree to which i understand the affordance literature i think all three of those dimensions definitely have versions of affordances that could connect to that um i think that was one thing i did see in the paper that it did seem to be very much focused…