Epistemic Communities under Active Inference

Hello, it is March 9th, 2022. We're here in ActInfLab guest stream number 17.1 with Mau Abarasan. Mau is a product director at Game Addict, a researcher at Versus Computational Phenomenology Lab and finishing a PhD in Cognitive Computing at UQAM. So we'll have a fun discussion today. Feel free to write any questions in the chat during the presentation and we'll have a great time learning. So thanks a lot for joining this guest stream and really looking forward to what you have to share. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm really glad to be able to present this paper. We've submitted it and we're in the process of reviewing it. So it's a really exciting paper that I'm hoping we can get out soon. So today I'm going to try and go through a lot of big concepts and how they apply in active inference. And then I'm going to try to explain the nitty gritty of a generative model, how to make a simulation, and then what are the takeaways and limitations. I'm going to try to keep this quick. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them and I'll take anything as it goes. So let's begin with the main concept here, which is confirmation bias and conformity. This was the starting point of our research. We were thinking with my co-authors, which are Connor Hines and Daphne Damaikus and Maxwell Ramstead, we were trying to think through what leads people to see the world in such a way that they have a hard time then reconciling their view of the world with other people. And so it went back to the practice of exchanging ideas, sharing concepts and values between different minds, which is a fundamental process. It really allows humans and and other living agents to coordinate and basically operate socially. By sharing ideas, individuals, communities can really pursue their pragmatic goals. So basically, you know, get food is one of the pragmatic goals you might want to optimize for. They improve their understanding of the world. And then we notice that humans are compulsory cooperators. Human individuals survive based on the predication that they have access and they can leverage the bodies of accumulated cultural knowledge. Over the course of evolutionary history, humans have developed an exquisitely sensitive capacity to discriminate between reliable sources of information from unreliable ones, which seems counterintuitive in the age that we're at. But you have to understand how far we've come before we got to the arms race towards misinformation. So the epistemic process, as I just said, it's really not without flaws. Humans are not computing machines. They're not perfect. They mostly use heuristics. They process information by reasoning to limit the consumption of energy and facilitate rapid decision making. That's the basis of survival. For example, confirmation bias implies that all other things being equal, individuals prefer sticking to their own beliefs over changing their minds. It's easier for them to potentially change their model less than if they had to really all the time constantly deal with the volatile model of the world. There's a lot of research about confirmation bias and its relation to cognitive dissonance. We really don't like cognitive dissonance. We don't like feeling like the world is not what we understand it to be. And when we're faced with information that conflicts with our core beliefs, we do in fact experience cognitive dissonance. The tolerance for cognitive dissonance tends to vary across individuals. So there's people who can really tolerate a wildly volatile world and they accept that they don't know things and they accept that they could be wrong. And then there's personality types who are much less likely to take this dissonance and are more likely to try to avoid this dissonance. And so confirmation bias in this way has a social influence. Individuals will prefer sampling data from their in-group and will seek to confirm their own ideas by forging for confirmatory information from their in-group. This…