“Enactive-Dynamic Social Cognition and Active Inference” “Active Inference and Abduction”

All right. Hello and welcome everyone. This is ACT-INF livestream number 47.0. It is August 3rd, 2022. Welcome to the Active Inference Institute. We are a participatory online lab and institute that is communicating, learning, and practicing applied active inference. You can find us at some of the links on the slide. This is a recorded and an archived and transcribed and published livestream. So please provide us with feedback so we can improve our work. All backgrounds and perspectives are welcome and we'll be following video etiquette for livestreams. All Active Inference Institute activities are participatory. So do let us know if you want to contribute or get involved. Head over to activeinference.org and click the links to participate directly and to learn more. Well, we are about to set off on an odd-numbered and unique adventure in 47. We're going to be discussing and juxtaposing not one paper, as per usual, but have a multiple eyes-open approach towards two papers in this situation. We're going to be learning and discussing in a juxtaposed fashion two papers, Active Inference and Abduction in 2021 by Ati Vaiko, Pieteran, and Majid Beni. Also, we'll be discussing inactive dynamic social cognition and active inference by Inez Hippolito and Thomas Van Es, also from 2021. All videos, dot zeros and otherwise, are introductions to these ideas and additional context, not a review or evaluation or final word. And we are going to consistently, we hope, use this coloration of a light red for the abductive paper and a light blue for the inactive, leaving the space open for new colors and combinations to arise that demonstrate some areas of synthesis. And we're going to talk in this dot zero with some big questions and go over our aims, as well as reading in between those aims, which is a little bit different than many live streams. We're then going to provide overview information on each paper in terms of the aims, the claims, the roadmap, and the abstract. We'll then move to a background and context section that will include a lot of information on inaction, semiotics, abductive logic, and so on. We'll then move into a juxtaposition of the two papers. And we're going to have a lot of time to discuss with hopefully multiple authors in the upcoming discussions, dot one, dot two, and maybe beyond. So today we wanted to bring a big picture context, talk about some very interesting threads, provide a little bit of background that helps one enter into this space, and then provide an initial juxtaposition and run through these papers that, again, will just get somebody excited to read the papers, dive in more deeply, and bring their own perspective to bear on these very interesting topics. So we'll move to the introductions. I'm Daniel. I'm a researcher in California. And I'll talk more about what's exciting in the coming slides. I'll pass it to Dean. Good morning. Good morning. My name is Dean. I'm in Calgary. And I guess I was maybe the warped mind that tried to put this idea together and maybe change a little bit the way that we look at active inference by trying to pull two different papers of seemingly different focuses. And then both of those also incorporating the use of active inferences as a methodology to situationally analyze. And so what are the implications for that? So I find that really kind of exciting. And I'll pass it over to Stephen. So thank you, Dean. Yes, Stephen here. I'm in Toronto, Canada. And I'm really interested in about both of these papers because they both speak a lot to kind of participatory approaches in general and the idea of how people are engaging in the world. So the questions around inaction is really relevant, as is the abduction piece. So while they're both quite different papers, they're both speaking to me quite strongly. So that's really interesting. So I'm looking forward to being able to sort of explore that. I work with participatory theatre, community psychology, community development,…