I'm just as fed up with the over-confidence of the active inference bros
(AIBs). I give Nick a hard time for his monist fever dream. But we all have
some deep seated reductionist tendency ... toward whatever overly simple model
of the universe we find we can hold in our head. Granted, the cognitively
blessed amongst us can hold more paradox than the rest of us. But we all still
do it, even the most powered amongst us. Pluralism is rare.
So it doesn't actually matter much how the AIBs would hijack communication or
co-construction. It would still be a hijack. As an example, I'm in an ongoing
argument with a pub goer about the distinction between art and craft. And I
think we both agree that a typical hallmark of art is that it *can* be
surprising. Sure, Kid Rock or Ted Nugent fans may not want to be surprised. But
even some percentage of those sorts of people end up with panic attacks or
mid-life crises that, I think, provide some evidence that overly effective
surprisal minimization is an anti-pattern. The tokens exchanged would, then, be
at least non-communicative if not anti-communicative. The token exchange is
there to maintain behaviors below the conscious threshold. Most lay conceptions
of communication seem to me to imply it raises non-conscious, habitual things
*up* into consciousness ... i.e. a failure of surprisal minimization.
I feel confident the Entropy Bros will have something to say, here ... something about a λ
parameter adjusting between boredom and berserker mode. It doesn't matter, the point stands
regardless of the context, "communication" does not cohere except when it's hijacked and
rendered meaningful in that smaller universe. Is that true for all words? ... Jordan Peterson style
("What do you mean by 'believe'?")? No.
I think we can do what LLMs are doing and assess which words cohere and which words don't ... components and hubs of the graph. And if
a word's in and out edges are literally *everywhere*, then it's incoherent. But if we modify such a word into a phrase, then that
composite "word" likely does cohere. E.g. "communication breakdown" is more coherent than
"communication". Given that, we might be able to quantify the degree of the 2 nodes. Let's say "communication" has
degree N and "communication breakdown" has degree M. Similar with a large sample of other words and their composites. Those
words where N >> M are can be labeled incoherent or meaningless without a modifier. (Or there are higher order graph properties
we could bring to bear, if for some reason degree is inadequate.)
My (testable) assertion is communication is one such word. "God" is another.
Stupid, useless word, that one.
On 2/5/26 12:50 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
what does it mean for a dyad (Joyce and Hubby) to exchange tokens with the
distinct (but recursive) goals of minimizing surprisal (Friston-esque)?
/"I did what you think I think I did"/
They might not be converging on *truth* (Hubby and Joyce both want to suppress
the fact of him having just left the motel with a cinnamon candle and a hooker,
for different reasons) so they co-conjure a story about cinnamon sprinkles on a
cupcake to resolve the (potential) discordant alignment between marriage and
cinnamon-candle facilitated (in)fidelity@motel6? And the yokel in Iceland
telling a story about a guy, a hooker, a candle and a wife is swirling the
bottom of the same attractor?
--
¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω.
.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ...
--- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
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