‘I interact therefore I am’ Human becoming in and through social interaction

SPEAKER_01: Hello and welcome everyone to Active Inference Lab to the guest stream, the Active Inference guest stream number 2.1 on March 18th, 2021, featuring Dimitris Bolas. And this is going to be a really awesome discussion on a wide variety of topics. So I'll just pass it to Dimitris to introduce himself and take it away. We're going to have a presentation first, and then we'll be documenting questions from the live chat. So please drop any thoughts or questions in there. And then we'll have a discussion after this presentation. So thanks again for coming on the stream. We really appreciate the time and please take it away. SPEAKER_00: Hello, everybody. I'm very happy being here. Thank you very much, the organizers for um organizing and presenting such an interesting series of short seminars so today i would like to present you a work that we have been doing primarily the last six years in munich in collaboration with leonard zilbach and his group in max planck and basically the title i instructed 4im Human Becoming in and Through Social Interaction is the title of my PhD dissertation that was presented last year about this month. So for anybody that would like more details at the end of the talk, they would always go back to the document. It's already published in ResearchGate. And there you can find also the already first papers that came out from this work. But more are coming in the way in the next few months. So I'll start by presenting the outline of this presentation. So first, we will go through the theoretical work. which consists of the dialectical at-human hypothesis and the dialectical mis-at-human hypothesis, which both focus and emphasize the importance of social interaction in human becoming across various contexts and various scales, from evolution to cultural development and psychopathology. Then, Importantly, we will discuss concrete empirical methodologies with regards to how we can put into the formal test this kind of hypothesis, which we call two-person psychophysiology, because this work tries to extend the traditional psychophysiology work in the social domain. So we will see how, based on hyperscanning research for example we integrate different streams of studying for monitoring recording and analyzing data in high resolution from multiple people at the same time that they are able to interact in real time then we will go through the empirical work and the first two studies which is about the interpersonal and human in real-time social interactions, especially through gaze. And second, about the interpersonal and human in real-life social relationships. And this is with regards to autistic traits and interpersonal similarity. Fourth, we will discuss some scientific and societal implications of his work. And we will briefly conclude. So, the theoretical work is based on two main pillars. That's a philosophical framework developed across many centuries, going back to ancient years, ancient Greece and also ancient China or India. and we will go through more details later but this was developed further in more modern times in especially in france and germany and also we lean upon heavily the bayesian brain hypothesis and especially the framework of predictive processing and active inference so i guess most of the people here might be already familiar with these frameworks, but I would like to go through a simple example just to make clear the practical implications of this kind of frameworks. So let us imagine a lady waking up late for her work and So she cannot decide what to wear for going to work. But based on her previous experience, as she lives in the south part of Greece, in Crete, she believes that most probably the weather will be good and sunny. So she decides to go out without carrying an umbrella or a coat. However, these days it's unlikely. Contrary to her predictions, the weather was rainy. And that day, she got wet. The second day, even though she believed that the probability for…