tanichu The arbitrariness of symbols is a plasticity that humans have outside the brain. System 3 uses this variable for representational learning, which is what makes human populations socially intelligent. This is collective predictive coding.
From this perspective, humans appear to be allopoietic, but from a human perspective, the subject is only a human and only participates in a distributed manner in the Bayesian inference of the variable.
This way of taking a perspective is commonly associated with neo-cybernetics (and basic informatics). However, I believe that this participation itself is quite evolutionarily embedded and acquired, and the fact that humans are creatures who “read meaning” into symbols/language - homosignificance - appears in this area.
This difference is also the essential difference between humans and animals that is the basis of human civilization, and corresponds to the Collective Regularization term that Hayashi tweeted about.
This is something that does not appear in the normal animal free energy principle. One realization that can decentralize this inference is the Metropolis Hastings naming game, but that is only one example, and I believe that the language games and social interactions we play realize this decentralized Bayesian inference in various ways.
The difference between humans and animals is that we form symbols based on our experience of the real world, but we have the freedom of symbols apart from it, creating and sharing fictions, and then also advancing our collective behavior based on those fictions. It is not an “imagined community.”
“Symbolic Emergent Systems Theory” seems to be clearly increasing its points of contact with various discussions via collective predictive coding.
I will be able to share the manuscript I am writing with Mr. Hayashi and other interesting members next week, and I would like to systematize this academic theory in a cross-disciplinary don’t-miss manner.
This is a miscellaneous poem, but I’m kind of trudging along in bed.
Let’s make a textbook series in a few years: … (Publishers, please)
At any rate, “Symbolic Emergent Systems” will be published on September 1.
hayashiyus A note on the Collective Predictive Coding (CPC) hypothesis
hayashiyus A post in which the discoverer of the theory explains in his own words the core of the collective predictive coding hypothesis. The consequence that society is inherently unstable because it does not have a body like the agents that compose it naturally emerges from the relationship between society and a group of agents that follow the free energy principle.
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