The cognitive archeology of sociocultural lifeforms

2023/03/17 by Avel GUÉNIN--CARLUT, Ben White, Lorena Sganzerla · 1 voice
Neuroscience · Social Sciences · Psychology · #Embodied and Extended Cognition #Language and cultural evolution #Action Observation and Synchronization

paper · pdf · doi:10.31219/osf.io/qxszh

openalex publication_date 2023/03/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/27

Abstract

We draw from the recent enactivist literature to articulate an operational definition of Wittgensteinien forms of life as a self-productive collection of constraints over collective behavior. We propose that humans integrate and enact those account through the Active Inference of shared “regimes of attentions”, which are experienced as embedded normativity within direct engagement with a shared sociocultural niche. Given those elements, we discuss how sociocultural lifeforms “encode information” in the material niche, and discuss how this information may be recovered by cognitive archeologists.

Citations

• The Ties That Bind Us
• From participatory sense-making to language: there and back again
• Autopoiesis: The organization of living systems, its characterization and a model
• Defining Agency: Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry, and Spatio-temporality in Action
• Coarse-graining as a downward causation mechanism
• Music as a coevolved system for social bonding
• Thinking like a State : Embodied intelligence in the deep history of our collective mind
• Physics of creation - Symmetry breaking, (en)active inference, and unfolding statespaces

Discussions

• Guénin--Carlut, Avel, et Mahault Albarracin. 2024. « On Embedded Normativity an Active Inference Account of Agency Beyond Flesh ». Communications in Computer and Information Science. Cham: Springer Na [bsky, 0 points, 2 comments]