Semiotics and Semantics (Discussion) — Course home

Hello and welcome. It is September 12, 2023. We're here in the Active Inference for the Social Sciences course at the Active Inference Institute and having a discussion section on semiotics and semantics here with Lorena Siganzala. We're going to be having a fun discussion, I hope. If you're watching live, please feel free to write any questions in the live chat. If you thought about joining and you weren't sure, it's not too late. Otherwise, we're going to pick up on some key points from the lecture and on the topic and see where we go. So, Lorena, welcome back and let's, however you want to begin, let's go from there. Okay. Hello. Thank you, Daniel. So, let's try to recap a little bit where we left off during the lecture. Um, just to remind us where we were, like my point, what I was trying to articulate, uh, was the idea of what does it mean to talk about a form of semantics in a way that is not really loaded because it's an interesting thought, like, to have a semantic, semantics that is actually only formal, right? In principle, it would be relative to meaningful, uh, to meaning, right? And in the notion that active inference is trying to cache it out. It is, it's more like an idea or a way of modeling how, how we deal with meaningful situations. And to understand that in a more interesting, more embodied and more concrete way, I was suggesting that we could use biosemiotics as, uh, as a model and as a theory for living creatures, like language users to navigate the realm of symbols. And gave one example, which came from, uh, James Scott, which is the European forestry that comes with a practice understanding this scientific understanding of forests as a practice that may, that allows us to, to refer to meaningful, to meaningful things in the environment in terms of what is valuable, what's interesting and what is not. And what, interestingly, what, what is more important also from what becomes valuable, it, it is what is cropped out from the meaningful perspective. So things, natural, uh, parts of nature becomes left out or understood as something that is not desirable. And you just understand what you don't want in your articulating principle as weeds or something that you should get rid of in respect to what is more desirable in terms of crops and how you understand nature in a more commoditized way. And I find like this example from Scott kind of very, very, uh, elucidating. Uh, in, in the book, he creates this, in the book, he's talking about states, how we articulate life around one specific notion of state. But in this specific example, he has the idea of one official observer, and this official observer establishes a principle of meaning. In a way, you have to have a handle of nature. And that also articulates how villages and how practices around agriculture and, and how people relate to each other within these practices gets organized. Specifically for one interesting point that he makes that is to appreciate the constriction of that is like a vision that notices not what within the meaningful crops, but which is left outside the field of vision. and i bring that specifically to understand how the free unity principle can or could be connected to a generalized synchronization over time in relation to those symbols and those practices in terms of meat construction and how those how this meat construction brings along with the symbolic use of language a predictive value thank you brin wanna bring up any thoughts on that or any other pieces or i'm happy to add a comment bryn okay guess not okay um a lot to say there there was a little bit of a double play with what is cropped on one hand what is cropped is the industrial crop that is being prepared and um and then the other side of that coin is what is cropped out and what what we crop in is the part that we're paying attention to and we can't pay attention to everything so it's it's like two sides of the same coin what we pay attention to what we include in…