Snakes and Ladders in Paleoanthropology & To copy or not to copy…

Hello and welcome. It's March 17th, 2023. We're here in ActInv Livestream number 53.0. Welcome to the ActInv Institute. We're a participatory online institute that is communicating, learning, and practicing applied active inference. You can find us at the links on the slide. This is a recorded and archived live stream, so please provide feedback so we can improve our work. All backgrounds and perspectives are welcome. We'll be following video etiquette for live streams. Head over to activeinference.org to learn more about the institute and getting involved with learning groups and projects. We're here in ActInv Stream number 53.0, and our goal is to learn and discuss a pair of papers. The first paper is Snakes and Ladders in Paleoanthropology from Cognitive Surprise to Skillfulness a Million Years Ago by Hector Manrique, Carl Friston, and Michael Walker. The article was posted to SciArchive in 2022. And the second paper is To Copy or Not to Copy? That is the Question. From Chimpanzees to the Foundation of Human Technological Culture. This paper is with Manrique and Walker as authors, Friston-less. It was also uploaded to SciArchive, and recently, as we have been delighted to discover, the paper has been accepted in Physics of Life reviews. However, the quotes that we're drawing from and reading from today are drawn from the SciArchive version, just so people know. And like all the videos, we're here to make an introduction for some of the ideas and the materials. It's not a review or a final word. In this 53.0 video, we're going to introduce ourselves, say hello, and then we are going to call it like we see it with the aims and claims, abstract, roadmap, keywords. And there are no figures or formalisms in these papers, but I think we'll have enough bounded surprise to navigate nonetheless. So, let us begin with introductions and then we'll head into big questions. So, Dean. Thanks, Danny. I'm Dean. I'm here in Calgary. I'm not going to do much around the warm-up question piece, because I've got a big question coming up. So I'll pass it over to you. I'm Daniel. I'm in California and agreed. Please lead in with your big questions. Well, I'm going to start by just sort of highlighting the big questions that the authors have, if that's okay. I'll just read them out. So for the snakes and ladder paper, there were a number of questions that sort of enabled the authors to go forward with their ideas. Two questions arise. First, what is it that could provoke cognitive awareness as to the possibility of fashioning stone hand axes in relation to the affordances of raw materials and potential advantages for minimizing bioenergetic effort? Secondly, what does this say about the irregular appearance of this regular technique in the Pleistocene spatial temporal record? Also, how was remembered awareness retrieved from personal short and long-term memory transmitted as knowledge to others in whose memories it could become embedded with a degree of fidelity sufficient to enable intergenerational or intercommunal diffusion? How far was observational learning involved? Do you want me to read the CRNC or do you want to do that yourself? All right. I'll read the questions from the authors in copy or not to copy. They wrote, why do chimpanzees not live in a complex technological world? Why does innovation fail to translate into technological cumulative complexity? Does it owe to a limited capacity to copy with fidelity? What is the implication for innovations? What ingredients must be present from a free energy principle standpoint in innovators' minds slash brains and in observers' minds slash brains for innovation to take root in a community and be transmitted between generations? Yeah. Yeah. Great questions. Now, how do we want, well, we know how we're, we want to do this, but one of the things before we get too far along is, we want to, we as hosts today, really want to honor the fact that a lot of time has been spent making sure that we're…