Communication as Socially Extended Active Inference: An Ecological Approach to Communicative Behavior

FRIEDMAN: All right. Hello. Welcome. It is September 2nd, 2022, and we're in ActInfLab Livestream number 48.0. Welcome to the Active Inference Institute. We're a participatory online institute that is communicating, learning and practicing applied active inference. This is a recorded and archived livestream, so please provide feedback so we can improve our work. All backgrounds and perspectives are welcome and we'll be following video etiquette for live. Head to active inference dot org or active inference institute to come to our website. Learn more. We are in active stream number 48 series. We're going to be discussing the paper communication as socially extended, active inference and ecological approach to communicative behavior. Paper in 2021 by Rémi Thyssen and Pierre Poirier. The video is a total introduction to some of these ideas. It's not a review or capturing every aspect for that. You can read the paper and explore some of the ideas. We are going to talk about. Aims and claims, abstract roadmap, keywords and bring up some notable points. It is still upcoming with the 48.1 and 48.2. So people are welcome to submit questions or things to discuss, write comments and join the panels live if they want. So let's begin with introductions and warmup. I think we can share more with our big question. So Jean, why don't you say hello and introduce your big question? TICKLES: Thanks, Daniel. I'm Dina. I'm Sharon, Calgary, and well, I could I could read out the big question, but it's pretty long winded. So I'll just say that I'm always curious about what happens when active inference isn't something that we look at as a subject or a topic. That is something that we actually use or perceive as being around us. And so I think the question of whether or not you focus on what's inside of an ecological space or look at the ecology and the system in which we believe active inference exist this as and and maybe within because we can the 2747 live stream we kind of touched on the idea could be both if if we're going to if we're going to expand our horizons and look at what kind of limits are and describe that as an ecology. My question then is as communication and of communication, what is the product of communication and what is communication serve? And so that's kind of like the questions and that's what in the next three life means, we can start maybe at least staking out where that ecology begins and ends FRIEDMAN: by. Well, very interesting. Thanks a lot. Also for so much of the preparation here, we're still coming down off of 47. And so I think it's going to be interesting to see how we approach pragmatism in this discussions. So the big questions that brought me to this paper or that I was thinking about during the paper were what are the applications and implications of different interpretations of communication? Why does it matter what would be the things in the world, including the mind that would be changed as a factor with or downstream of how our interpretation of communication is? And then what are the causes and consequences of different perspectives? We take on active inference, where perspective also includes action, propensity and engagement with. So perspective is like where one is situated and viewing. And so it's the view from somewhere from something rather than a view from nowhere. Slash everywhere. And I think in that specificity we can have a lot of discussions about ecology as a great system to learn from in yeah. I think when we're outside it earth we perceive ourselves where we're we're framing that would be the on this slide that would be the first box. That's our sense that we're kind of outside of the system looking in, whereas the second box on the right would be, well, we're embedded. And now the, the, the, the reason we're at it is as the genie came out, it got out and now it's all around us. TICKLES: It's kind of like that. The perfume is now being distributed through the air and now we're walking…