Myth of objectivity and the origin of symbols

hello and welcome everyone to active inference Institute it is October 20th 2023 and we're here in active guest stream 61.1 with shagor Ramen so today we'll be having a presentation myth of objectivity and the origin of symbols followed by a discussion so thank you very much for joining looking forward to the talk thank you very much s for coordinating this um and and thanks yeah for all the the work that you and the active in active inference Institute does um also wanted to briefly thank um Carl fren and Paul B Badcock for um helping me with this paper and kind of making it a reality so this is um the title of the paper here so it's called myth of objectivity in the origin of symbols um and it's in Frontiers and sociology um and so just get right into it as um as Daniel said and do you hopefully a brief overview and we can do a discussion at at the tail end this um and so I guess briefly the thesis that I'm trying to argue for uh is that and you know some of these words will need clarification um particularly in in the context we use him um but it is that the belief in Universal and kind of a codified egalitarian um social norms or in other words morality this essentially underwrites broadly our use of symbols um so what is that kind of mean functionally in terms of what other disciplines use um or how they would think of our use of symbols um well there's cultural Niche um and this you can think of as you know our ability to engage and cultural Evolution um from Joseph enrik and others who have highlighted that as an area of an important area of Humanity's distinction another one is social reality and this is um more in the psychological realm um but you know how we use things like money um you know how we um obey someone with a crown on their head um so just things that are socially constructed um realities are socially constructed as opposed to you know existing in more of a physical sense that other um non-human animals do and of course this is gets to our symbolic capacity so this is you know our symbolic Consciousness our um ability to kind of think deeply in the past to plan deeply in the future um and to engage with kind of any number of um Concepts as well as people uh and so the claim we can divide up this claim into kind of three areas um the first is our kind of modern social dynamics and social bias and so you know how this is the sociology side um so you know how our economic systems um look how our Civic uh and political institutions look um and kind of building on um that so I think once we have the structure on hopefully I convince you of um a way we look at um Humanity's uh structure of their social reality and know their kind of symbolic reality um then you know the question is well how did we get there you know how did we become um the kind of you know primate that points fingers and feels guilt as you can kind of see in that picture um and for this we can look to you know two areas so one is you know non-human social animals so pites um you know cations and another animals that engage in social behavior of a similar nature um so this is distinct right from usocial insects from Mano ants and bees um but rather this is you know chimps um you know bonobos marasa monkeys and and some others that have been studied um specifically you know by researchers um seeking to examine Humanity social norms and how it differs from you know primat and other animals and and kind of lastly is is the are of of anthropology um so whatever we're able to you know determine about our you know the social environments of our ancestors um you know what can that tell us about how we got here and I'll make some kind of specific claims in regards um yeah and so so I set out my goal and essentially my goal is to kind of tackle that first part and to you know persuade folks um you know on the call here that our social system takes on a particular structure and that structure is a essentially a symbolic self and I use that in in the…