 Okay, hello, everyone. Welcome to the Active Inference Lab to an Active Inference Livestream with John Boyk. This is going to be great. It's our second of these interactive discussions on the sequence of papers that John has written. And today, we're going to be hearing about motivation and strategy as well as active inference, of course, a lot. So I'm Daniel Friedman. I'm a postdoc in California. And I'm going to pass it to John to introduce myself. Lead us into this second discussion while I share the Jamboard link with our live participants. So, John, thanks again for coming on and please take it away. All right, Daniel, thanks for having me on again. This is great. All right, so my name is John Boyk. I'm a courtesy faculty at Oregon State University Environmental Sciences Graduate Program. And we're here in the series of talks. This is the second of the series to talk about the series of three papers that I recently published in the Journal of Sustainability. The topic is societal transformation, in particular, the de novo development of new societal systems, new economic systems, new governance systems, legal systems, educational systems, and so on. And last week, as maybe you can see on the Jamboard now, last week, we started with the first part, which was on worldview. The title is science driven societal transformation, part one worldview. And we didn't actually get through that. So we're going to pick up a few tail end ideas there and then hopefully start on the second paper, part two, which is subtitled motivation strategy. And the links for the three papers are there. And I, of course, encourage people to download the papers. They're open access so everyone can get them for free. Page two, perhaps? Yep. Okay. So just for more information about the project, about the links for the papers, for other links, there's a bunch of little articles that you could look at if you're interested. There's also an interactive model you could go to the principal society's project website. And the address is given there. So further information, if you need it, you can find it there. Cool. Three. All right. Three. Okay. All right. So we, we didn't get through the first, do the paper all the way in the first our first talk. So there's a few things that I'd like to catch up on before we move on to paper part two. We touched on active inference in the, in our last talk, but we didn't really get around to discussing it. So I want to say a few words about active inference itself. A little bit of a description about it for those who are not familiar. And then we have the topics of cooperation and communication and the concept that complex organisms have complex needs. And then on to some practical implications. And this is really the main thing I wanted to finish up with is that in part one, I, I, I provide some kind of high level sort of abstract concepts. And I would imagine that the reader in certain places might be wondering why are we discussing this? What does this have to do with actually building new societal systems? So I want to talk about a little bit of the practical implications of all of this kind of abstract, all these abstract notions that we've been working with. So I would like to just recall just a few ideas from our last talk. And one is the end that I claim at least that is society has an intrinsic purpose. And that and by intrinsic purpose, I really mean a biological purpose that we have gained through eons of evolution. And that intrinsic purpose is the same purpose that every living organism has. So every living organism has this purpose, whether that's a bacteria or a human. And then I also claim that society is an organism that can be seen as an organism can be viewed as an organism. And a society has the same intrinsic purpose. So if we're if our task is to develop new societal systems, it really helps to have some ideas of, well, who are we and who are we building this for? And what is the purpose of if we were to build a new societal system, new economic system, for example, what would be the purpose? And if we know the purpose, then we can take the remains the next step and say, okay, we know what an economic system is supposed to do, we know what a governance system is supposed to do. So is this new design, design A, design B, is it fit for purpose? That's where that's the concept is that if we're going to design new societal systems, de novo from scratch, then we ought to have an idea of what they are supposed to do and then how we might measure their fitness so that we can determine did we did we create something that is fit for purpose? And which one of these options, which one of these designs might be more fit for purpose than others? All right, so that's that's kind of where we're going here. And so the the by claim that the intrinsic purpose of the society and organism, any organism or any organism is to achieve and maintain vitality, which is accomplished through largely through cognition and cooperation. And so to maintain and achieve vitality for who and that who I claim is the extended self. So the extent this all of us are, are enmeshed in our world enmeshed in our environment enmeshed in a society with each other. And if we're speaking of a body, then the extended self is those interactions with those necessary and vital interactions with the rest of the world. So the extended self then is the self that extends to other people to to societies to other societies to the environment, the local environment, the global environment, the biosphere. So then in that sense, then if our purpose is to achieve and maintain vitality, our purpose is to achieve achieve and maintain vitality for that larger extended self that really goes all the way to the biosphere where all of life is in this together, all of life is connected in one. And and all of life is doing this thing, doing this thing of acting to achieve and maintain vitality. And over eons of evolution, we get this amazing world of life and whales and sequoia trees and ecosystem and all these trees talking to fungi in the ground and plants talking to each other and beads is doing their thing with flowers and each other. And I mean, it's just like amazing coordination and communication and cooperation happening between species and within a species and within a human body like all of ourselves. So we just the if I would say that if we're going to create a better society or create new systems that lead to a better society, then the task will be to to fulfill our intrinsic purpose, which in a way means to simply get with the program that is get with the program of what all of life is doing around us, right? Just align with what life is doing. And then we will, you know, we'd be off to a good start if we can do that. Alright, so that's that's purpose. And then I did at the bottom of that slide, I just highlight the word wisdom, because it is reasonable, you know, we think of wise action as something that is, you know, widely beneficial and action that is aware of the needs of others and is useful action. But that is what we're talking about. We're talking about of taking actions that help to fulfill our intrinsic purpose and really by definition, I would say that would be wise actions. So in that sense, we're aiming at wisdom society, a society where wisdom is valued and discussed and sought after and, you know, and hopefully one in which individuals and groups and others, institutions that act with wisdom will be recognized, you know, as such. Okay, so I do ask the question there at the bottom, can wisdom be rigorously defined? Now, often it's, you know, it's a term that is just a generically applied to, like, to, to, you know, actions that are that are some people feel are useful or appear to be useful. But but if we're going to build a new societal systems, and we're going to have some sense of fitness for these systems, and the systems are in some way supposed to help us to act with wisdom and to facilitate action with wisdom, then perhaps there is some way actually to rigorously define wisdom or to know when when actions are wise. And I would say then that leads us right into the concept of active inference. Because because through active inference, we what we might say that actions that reduce uncertainty and maintain, you know, reduce expected uncertainty, but are, are, are, are thriving or survival or survival into the future. Those are those are benefit, those are beneficial actions, and then again, by definition, they're wise actions. So there might be some way to actually talk about wisdom in the same sentence as fitness, right, the two concepts, two concepts, concepts must be closely related. Okay, John, can I ask, I have two things I wrote down. So one was cognition. And when we talk about multi scale cognition, especially with a computational or a modeling bent, it's easy to get caught up with cognition being a really mechanical process. But I liked how you brought it to wisdom. And so it's like, if we're going to be a cognitive system, or if that's a framework we're taking, are we going to be calculators, and just do zero through nine calculations, or will there be wisdom in the system? And that kind of brings me to the question, which is clarifying wisdom is, is a big opportunity. But also there are risks and uncertainties. So here, you know, in 2021, looking forward potentially to some type of wisdom transformation, what can we cling to? And how can we follow wisdom? Because it sounds like a great idea. But then how will we know it in the mist? Right, right. Okay, so you're, I've talked to your first point. First, that excellent. So, so I want to emphasize that we're not talking about building a society of robotic, you know, linear thinking, logical organisms, you know, that's not really what humans are. Anyway, that's what no organisms are. You know, every organism has, you know, some degree of complexity of its, of itself. And humans are very complex. It will talk about the complexity of human needs in a moment. But this, its life is not all about logic. And it is partly about, you know, a good share of it is about heart and intuition and all the other emotion and all the other aspects that come to play in, in what it means to be human. So I'll repeat something I had said earlier too, is, you know, if we are to build better societal systems, better societies, those would be societies that would help us be ourselves more, help us be true to ourselves more, true to our hearts more true to our deepest longings more. And we're deepest longings more. So I'm certainly not talking about building a society of logistic people doing logic or computational logic or something like that. There's not at all what this is about. This is about being more human, more ourselves, more capable of, of making wise decisions, right? Yeah. And I think some of these ideas from the, you know, from over that have been developed, say in the last 10 years of science, ideas from complex system science, ideas from cognitive science, ideas from active inference, ideas from evolutionary biology and some others are, are, we're in a much better position today to be talking about, you know, how, how might we do this? How might we build systems that actually recognize the full human, the full society, the full, the full interactions and then, and then help provide guidance of how that might best be done, right? Yeah, just one quick point on that is people have talked about general systems theory and about how we could simulate or choose utilitarian outcomes or all these different ideas that have been percolating for truly thousands of years in many cultures. What's different? Well, in your pocket, there's something that can simulate not the universe, but it can do calculations that complement human abilities in a really potentially beneficial way. That's different. It's on a continuum with other extended cognitive elements like books, and communications, telecommunications media and things like that. But we're in a computational and a conceptual phase that's totally novel. And so we need to consider classical critiques like it can't be done, it won't be done amidst the truly ongoing changes. That's right. Actually, exponentially, expanding capacities for computation. But your point is very well taken this. Again, I do not mean that we're going to have computers deciding our every action. It's not at all what I'm talking about. I'm talking about becoming more human and using the tools that we have available to extend our computation and help us to understand better the complexities of the world around us. Right. So this is humans taking advantage of all the tools they have to become more themselves and better and wiser and better decision making, better decision makers. Okay, so that's what we're going to cover today, this first part. And then we'll move on to part two. All right, next slide. All right, four, four. So, so this is a slide on active inference. I just want to put again, for those who maybe are not too familiar with the concept, I want to give a kind of a brief overview. Excellent. Carl Friston, obviously is one of the, you know, the main forces behind this concept, he's been working on it for well over a decade now. There's a little image there on the left of the slide that I'll just say a few words about. So we can talk about two opponents to the universe, the universe at large, and then some individual that is in some sense separate from the universe. Right. So the concept of an individual is something that is that can be demarcated from the rest of its background. So for the moment, we'll say there's we're going to draw a circle around the individual, and then the rest of the world is going to be outside that circle. So the rest of the universe has hidden states, it has a, you could say it has kind of a in a sense of generative model of how it works, how it functions, when it is what it has, you know, is is is acted upon by an individual that responds in some way it has a sense it has a model to do that. And the individual has a model of what the individual how it understands the larger picture. Now, obviously, the universe is bigger than a human mind. So there is no way that a human mind is ever going to understand every little detail about the universe. That's impossible. So a human then or any really Indian individual is faced with this problem of trying to act in a universe that is far more complex, far more complicated and dangerous at times. So how do you how do you act under uncertainty? That's the problem of humans and other organisms, how do you make good decisions under uncertainty? And that's certainly the problem for society to how do you make good decisions wise decisions under uncertainty. So a when we talk about separating the individual from the rest of the universe, we're talking statistically, we're talking about independence from the rest of the universe. And in this line of thinking, that independence is granted by what's called a Markov blanket. So the individual knows its own beliefs, or it has its own beliefs, and it can choose actions, and it can receive sensations from the world so it can act and it can observe the result of its actions. And then the universe on the other half universe is impacted by actions and then changes in some way has some dynamics. And then that leads to sensations for the individual and then the individual receives those sensations. So we have kind of a circular pattern going on here where the, the individual acts may, well, maybe we'll say this way, the individual receives sensations after some action, receive sensations from the universe. And then it can do really one of two things that can, it can, it can alter its beliefs about the world, maybe, maybe the sensations tells the individual that it was wrong in some way. So maybe one option then is for the individual to update its beliefs about the world. That's new here, or it can take some kind of action to better fit the, better fit its experience to, to how it understands the world. So if I'm cold, if my sensation is being cold, my action might be to put on a coat so that I don't freeze it up. Right, I can bring the world, try to align the world with what I expect the world to, to what I expected myself or what I expected my own condition and how I expect the world to act. So that's the, that's the kind of the two options we have available. We can update our understanding and beliefs about the world and we can choose actions. So that's really the gist of what that picture is. And then over on the left, on the right hand side, I have a few equations that sort of puts that into kind of a formulative way. So the first one that was just, that's just a slide taken from Wikipedia. But the concept is that because I'm an individual and because I don't, I can't actually know what the generative process of the universe is, I can only know my sensations and my actions. I would like to reduce the surprise that appears. Like, I don't, you know, it's surprising to me if I'm cold and sick and hungry and harmed, right? I don't want those kinds of surprises. I want some certainty about me existing into the future. But the trouble is, I don't know what the world's model is. So I have to essentially create my own version of it. That's the density Q in this model. I'm going to create a my best guess as to how the universe works. And the universe has the density P in this equation. And I'm going to do something actually that is really common in data science. So if any data scientists are listening, there you ought to be probably very familiar with these concepts already. This is a variational inference. So it's a technique widely used in data science to solve problems. And the idea that's the central idea is you you have some complicated density P, and you don't really know how to deal with it. So you do instead choose a much simpler density Q, that is more better behaved, and then you work with that. And the whole idea is if you bring Q closer and closer to P, then you'll be closer and closer to actually having a model of the real model of the world. So just in that term for the elbow, the evidence lower bound is called in data science. There's a KL term, KL divergence term, and that just simply means that term will go to zero as P and Q come closer. And the other term there log P, that is really just the negative of that is called surprise. So you, the agent would like to reduce the surprise that it recognizes experiences. And one way to do that is to also bring the densities P and Q closer. So you get a good model of the universe, and you act in a way that is consistent with your understanding of the universe. And you update your beliefs as necessary to be have a better model of the universe. And if you do all of that, the your surprise about how the universe acts and your surprise about maintaining yourself into the future will be reduced. So that functional is called a free energy functional. And the whole concept is an active inference is to use this action updating, observing from the universe what the sensations are, and then going in a circle and updating an action and updating an action of you know, updating action of observation, updating action observation. So the the the idea is to reduce this functional of free energy. And that, first and I would say claims that this is what all organisms are doing. This is what life is doing. And if this doing so leads to really all the structural diversity that we that we are aware of in our universe, the ecologies and ecosystems and organisms and cooperating cells within a human body and all of that is has has has become what it has become through a process through this free energy minimization process. So so in a sense, if we wanted to somehow talk rigorously about wisdom, it would be in some sense, at least, you know, from this perspective, it would be wise actions and learning activities and explorations. Wisdom is the equivalent to reducing expected free energy. I just want to make just a few other comments here is this this is the simple this page is the simple version. So what we really want to do is is reduce expected free energy, like what will happen, you know, a tiger is running at me, I could run, I could fight, I could jump on a car, I could jump in a car, I could do all these things I have these options pass these paths I could take these decisions I could take, which of them is going to be best for me in the long run or in the short run. And so that requires expectations of free energy over possible decisions in the future. And that becomes quite complicated. None of that is really in this slide. But I do want to want to realize that that's there. John, I want to lock in two really key points that you touched on here and then ask a question. So the first is the first thing you said on this slide is active inference is about the reduction of uncertainty. So that's in direct contrast with the human as an economic maximizer or an optimizer of the reward or that we're trying to do some sort of optimization maximization on an outcome. It's a process based reduction of uncertainty that active inference highlights. And so of course you're highlighting the outcomes that we want to see those are our values our preferences and our predictions we hope. But we're going about it with a process based and uncertainty reduction based lens rather than simply like number is going to go up we got to get there. So that's the richness of just if nothing else all the critiques of active inference aside to focus on the process and the reduction of uncertainty is really powerful. And the second lock in is you immediately went from the reduction of uncertainty to collective behavior. And it's like there's things that the brain knows that a neuron doesn't like how to speak English. And there's things the colony knows and does that the antnest mate doesn't. So part of this is about realizing well there's things surely society knows with all of our diversity and all of our different skills that an individual doesn't. So what does it look like to take that seriously that the cognitive systems are not just nested internally like well the brain the brain region the neural circuit the neuron the organ L yeah you can go down but you can go out and it's not just a cope. And so what that looks like is a really important point so the two things there reduction of uncertainty with active inference and multi scale cognitive systems and it's really important points. Good or can I ask the question. Excellent excellent. I'm just trying to catch up because you say a lot of awesome points in each of these breakdowns and the question is really what kinds is on the Jamboard what kinds of social processes or data are promising for active inference modeling. Let's just say now maybe in the future will license other deployments but right now like what kind of data would you be curious to collect or find out about. We may talk about it later in the economic or social context but what kind of data types are we thinking about making active inference models of. Yeah okay so to answer that question I'm going to ask that question and about two more slides so I'm going to ask that very question to you and to the viewers out there but I'll do I can give you just one example. Okay we can come back to it but go for example. Yeah I'll give one example because I also want to emphasize something else that you also just very briefly touched on so and also I had touched on but I want to emphasize that if we're talking about expected uncertainty that implies that we are anticipatory so I just want to underline that every organism is anticipatory every organism is doing this reducing free energy you know from this view and that requires anticipation of what the future will be and so anticipation or you might call it forecasting forecasting is central to our well-being our continued existence I'm forecasting that if I see a tiger coming towards me that it's I'm going to be it's lunch if I don't do something so you know that's I if we don't we don't think clearly about what's going to happen next then cognition is there is no hardly any cognition just one one short comment on that is anticipation and anticipatory systems has been discussed in many other contexts like cybernetics and active inference helps us walk from this very simple beginning you said okay there's an inside and outside if you don't have that you know think a little bit more clearly about the system or something like that but we can start with the simplest and then we can build it out to the sophisticated affective inference with the affective charge and all these other modern models but we're starting with this loop which is why we always come back to these kinds of figures and why it's really important that you're making it at this level right so just so so we can ask the question all right if anticipation is you know tell me like what does the system want to be good at forecasting and you know I actually I'll ask this question a few slides so we don't have to go too far into it now but let's just just take say governments or leaders, political leaders if a political leader is good at understanding what's coming next what the future is going to be then great then the political leader can say hey we better do something because if we don't this thing is going to happen right but as a society today do we actually remember those predictions do we in any way like you know score accuracy of people's predictions or the predictions of science or the predictions of organizations is there like how does society today remember that predictions have been made and now the future has evolved and come about and how who was good at anticipating the future who excels what what organization political group or whatever who's been really good at understanding what's going to come next right so I'll just leave that open question because it gets the mind working that you can think of all kinds of ways that we don't do a good job of remembering and anticipating today just to ask a question from the chat someone wrote does John use active inference mathematical framework in his work for merely descriptive purposes so potentially as opposed to generative or like real time decision making so where does where are you right now or where do you want to be with respect to using active inference to describe simulate make decision support etc right right good question so and maybe maybe the part of the answer to that question is to tell you what stage of this project is so the series has just been published this the series proposes a R&D program that that society could undertake and it is conceptual at the moment the whole program is conceptual it's not been funded it's I mean you're in a sense you're looking at it this is it it's the three papers and our conversation and whatever you know other people have to add to this so this is where we're at we're we're obviously focusing or I'm focusing now on the kind of the the big picture conceptual ideas because that has to it's that has to happen before you actually get into the nets and bolts okay how do we use this what how does this go what kind of models can we build but I would guess and I would expect that if this project moves forward then at some point we'll be talking about the numerous ways that society uses information and how it remembers and how it anticipates and what models might be used for different kinds of anticipation and and you know how do the nuts and bolts of that go together so that's to come that's the research project to come and I hope I hope we get a chance to go there that would be fantastic we'll lay it out as likely and then we'll make it happen there we go all right so so that's that slide it's going to the next sounds good five yeah and maybe two before we move off the last slide I do want to say that active inference has this wonderful part of it that I'm very attracted to and that is that it provides a way for an organism act in its environment to play it by ear to learn as it goes to be to have a process of learning and a goal for learning and action that can evolve over time right so if we were going to program an active inference robot we would not be giving it a formula for do this ten points do that five points now find a way to act in the world where you you know maximize the number of points you can get it's not really like that and the world is for in a real setting the world is far too complex for someone to pre-program how many points you get for certain activities or reaching certain goals right so a intelligent agent has to be able to alter it's understanding of the world and it's goals at the same time and we'll talk about this again but to balance exploitation of what it knows already to use what it knows about the current situation and exploration jumping into new unknowns considering new proposals considering new rearrangements so active inference and really the structural development and evolution of all of life and ecosystems and cells and communications between organisms and all of that is kind of built on this balance between exploitation and exploration and you might think of that in various ways between old and new you could even think of that in terms of like in modern day society to a degree you could even think of it in terms of liberal political versus conservative political in their best sense that is you know conservative political might be more more interested in relying on tradition and exploiting the current knowledge and perhaps a liberal might be more interested in exploring new ideas and taking the leaps of you know into the unknown to learn something new and do something better to improve a process to change a process right so decision making is very much a balance between those two exploitation exploration and active inference provides a mechanism by which that can occur quite naturally and I won't even go into detail to say that an action model and reducing uncertainty on that helps you act in unknown unknowns I think it's something I want to unknown unknowns it's correct yeah of which there are plenty now slide 5 I guess this is following up on active inference just a bit and I think we've talked on most of these things the the I think we have the whole point is to resolve expected uncertainty so okay good so next 6 alright so I just want to touch just a few ideas on cooperation and communication so actually cooperation and communication are go hand in hand they may have even evolved together so cooperation is the almost the rule in our world life cooperates in so many ways and the more we study it we realize how deep the cooperation is within a species within a between species between trees and fungus between ecosystems between ecosystems I mean it's just cooperation is everywhere and as I said last in our last show if you want evidence of it that is if you want mind-blowing evidence of cooperation just think of your own body the trillion or so cells that are cooperating for you to be what you are right so cooperation exists everywhere and it is nearly impossible without communication like you cannot cooperate with someone if you don't communicate and the richer the communication the at least potentially the richer the cooperation and obviously by cooperation I mean by communication I mean honest communication we're this honest communication is hardly communication right so we're talking about honest exchanges between cells between people between societies so it's interesting though that you know like to take your body for example you have all these trillion cells and they don't have to cooperate I mean there's you know they cannot cooperate and sometimes they don't cooperate with each other and they can act independently to some degree right so there's always throughout the universe there's this tension between what cooperation provides and what the individual you know what the individual might want to how it might want to behave if it were just left to its own to its own right so why would anything cooperate and the kind of the big picture answered that question is because it reduces expected uncertainty it's again it reduces free energy so by cooperation an organism can assure itself of survival it can make its survival easier it can make communication easier it can you know do have all these benefits right so nevertheless every given moment is this there's this tenuous balance between you know do I continue to cooperate in this sphere or not and who and at what to what extent do I cooperate do I cooperate within my family and or in my community and or in my society and or between societies at like at what level am I interested in cooperating right you know the answer the general answer that question is I am interested in cooperating at every level in which my uncertainty is reduced my vitality is insured my uncertainty is reduced right so across the layers across scales but we do see this examples of when cooperation fails and one example that I like to use is the example of cancer in a body cells cells transform cells start to not cooperate with the with their milieu with their tissues with their environment so so my question for listeners is so we have an idea of what cooperation means and then what is the opposite of cooperation like you might think okay well the opposite of cooperation is selfishness and I would suggest maybe in certain circumstances that seems pretty clear but in a more general sense maybe that's not the opposite of cooperation right maybe there's almost always cooperation and what changes is the extent of self of the agent the organism that is taking the action for example cancer cells cooperate they cooperate with each other at least so and they might cooperate within their very small tumor milieu there's a lot of communication that happens between cancer cells once a cancer forms there's communication that goes on between cancer cells so maybe it's not maybe it's not so useful for us to think of cooperation versus selfishness but rather cooperation as a scale scales of cooperation in extent like am I cooperating with my immediate family with my you know like or am I cooperating with their far-flung and halfway across the world right to the degree that we understand our self to be extended we are cooperating with our self you have to understand that if I understand that I am part of this environment this ecology then any actions I take to benefit the ecology are actions that I take to benefit myself so if my sense of self to the world to the degree that it's extended up to the world I am interested in cooperating with myself to better myself to reduce my overall uncertainty so cancer perhaps is it's not really a matter of being selfish perhaps people say that cancers are really selfish they're just gonna only pay attention to what's good for them but they're cooperating they're cooperating with a smaller group and because they're cooperating with a smaller group and because their extent of self is reduced their capacity for cognition is reduced we're talking we're kind of anthropomorphic here but they would have a small tumor would have a more difficult time understanding the long-term effects their long-term effects because their cognitive their cognitive that is a small set of cells versus the human body which has the full cooperation of the brain and the feet and the understanding and the capacity to use your mouth to ask others what's gonna happen next so the more you the more you extend into the world and are cooperating with the world the larger your cognitive capacity the larger your problem solving capacity and the better you will be at understanding in the long-term the outcomes of your actions and how that's gonna affect your own how it's gonna affect you as an individual and you as an extent of self so I got a little off there but I'm just saying cooperation is everywhere and it's all about communication and shared computational capacity and shared decision-making the potential for more more cognitive capacity and better decision-making the only point I'd make here as a ant researcher and have thought about conflict and cooperation across scales is that it's really a story we're telling about a certain outcome like when the white blood cell eats a cancer cell is that altruism at the higher level is a conflict at the lower level so it's a scale dependent and it's often a perspectival narrative that we're telling about what cooperation is and it's just like yin and yang there's a complement between what we call cooperation and communication they're like the good guy and the bad guy they come into existence when we have fitness and free energy to dissipate so we need a story that allows us to act as if we're getting fatalistic about competition or getting utopian about cooperation because this is not going to be necessarily a smooth and lovey-dovey ride with cooperation nor is it in the body so it's like a very nice nuanced way and that's why we fall back to active inference rather than an ism or a specific metaphor of choice like the selfish gene right, excellent just to underline that this project is not about asking people to behave super altruistically or something like that or to cooperate beyond what would be natural that would never work it would fail because that's not how what life is doing that's not how life is working we just really need to set up our system set up our processes set up our societal decision-making you know, ways we go about making decisions and just align ourselves with what we actually are and what life is actually doing and that means that there is a continual conflict between cooperation and you know not cooperation between kind of an individualism and a more cooperative stance just like there's an ongoing conflict between exploitation and exploration between you know, conservative and liberal between old information value of old information and the value of new information all of this is a dance it's a dynamic dance but there is a sweet spot in that dance there is a place to hover, a sphere to hover in where you're balancing old and new exploitation exploration you're balancing them and because you're in that sweet spot in that critical area you're able to do about the best that any organism could do under uncertainty and life the magnificence of life is the proof of that Awesome View 7, speaking of life Yeah, right So at our last talk I had mentioned that that complexity is you can think of it, at least in a certain way you can think of it as problem solving capacity organisms complexify, environments complexify, ecologies complexify in order to solve ever more difficult, challenging problems So it is not true that complexity is just a path to to chaos and failure systems do fail, I mean obviously that does happen, there's complex systems that can fail, but by and large complexity is a path to greater problem solving capacity So humans are complex of all the organisms on the planet we're pretty complex we have complex brains complex cognitive processes we think about what might happen in a thousand years and we're concerned about what might happen in a thousand years that's enormously complex say compared to a bacteria that doesn't have a central nervous system So because we're complex and this is true for all organisms in general that the more complex an organism is the more complex it needs right, it's the more feelers it has out in the universe the more extended it is into the universe in a sense and that is certainly true for humans and this table is some needs according to Maslow and I just want to mention these as an example not that these are the needs we should focus on but just as an example of needs, I think he has maybe nine or eight or nine I think, but affection we want to be loved and we want to love both we want to share friendships it makes us happy to do that we want to be creative we want to create things we want to build skills we want to have freedom to associate with whom we want to associate freedom to move about and look around and poke around and look under things we want to participate we want to cooperate we want to understand learning is fun hopefully learning is fun we want to rest when we're tired we want to get some exercise we want to move about we need to relax sometimes, like all these things these are if we can call these core human needs these speak to something that I think briefly mentioned in the last talk which is called essential variables so if an organism is intrinsic purpose is to maintain vitality into the future what are those variables that are important in maintaining vitality you can think of a few important things about the bath like fresh water to drink clean air to breathe, food to shelter you could start to think of what some of these essential variables might be but I would like to suggest some of these core human needs somehow fit into the concept of essential variables humans need to be humans need affection we will be sick if we don't have affection we will be sick if we don't have freedom we will be ill and we won't be able to and we won't be able to we won't be able to be good problem solvers in our environment if we're hampered by the lack of meeting essential variables will be worse the point of all that is when we think about a complex organism like a human we can think about complex needs and then we can think about now it's starting to become clear when we're reducing uncertainty we're reducing uncertainty about these essential variables which might be like the 8 or so 9 core needs that I'm listing so I want to, for example I don't want to be uncertain that I will be loved in the future or that I'll have food to eat or that I'll be able to move about freely I would like to be fairly certain that I'm going to have those freedoms I'm going to have these needs met so again then we're not talking about some big computational calculator thing for this project this is about heart and soul and being a human even more human than society allows us to be today society is not set up our society is not set up to focus on providing for these complex human needs we have billions of people in poverty in the world and that's already like all kinds of needs are not met because someone doesn't have the financial capacity to do what they need to do so though we can there's one last thing on this slide a little phrase that I like to use is the solving problems that matter so society might solve all kinds of problems if I work for a manufacturer that is producing some some commercial relatively useless product that people are buying because commercialism is pushed maybe I'm solving the immediate problem of making an income so that I can pay my rent on that and by solving problems that matter I don't have a good example maybe someone else does a useless thing that many people do with their life's work their 40 hours a week is doing something useless there was a book about that a while ago and he had a phrase I forget exactly what his phrase was I don't know if it was a family friendly phrase but I think I know a book I hesitate to say it it was a friend friendly it's like whose team are team that kind of a call and response which problems the ones that matter then what does it mean to matter well that's our preferences and our affordances and then as far as cases where the work or the problem doesn't matter there's times where the person might think that the problem matters but when you pull back it's actually a non-linear response where even if it does matter what they're concerned about that their effort may not be the most efficacious and this isn't going to go back to another optimization you must be engaged in the most efficacious because we're actually putting space for play and identity and participation understanding all these attributes that aren't just some simple cybernetic like action and selection but it's really important to keep this as our guiding light it's the problems and those are the salient ones the ones that matter but we need to be informed by our values and obviously we're talking high level here we're trying to give a context for this whole thing of what could society be and how would we go about measuring fitness and what is the society supposed to accomplish and for whom and then we have to talk about these high level concepts because they can be guides for us just the phrase solving problems that matter it can be a useful guide because it reminds us oh yeah what matters and what am I doing with my life and what are we doing in society with our lives are we doing things are we solving problems that matter and obviously there's a whole bunch of enormous problems that we're not solving like climate change and other things if society was solving problems that matter there would be enormous armies of biologists and other people ecologists and field workers and all kinds of people focusing on the problems that matter most for happiness and survival and currently in today's world that is heating up to be climate change and biodiversity loss and ecological destruction and pollution and groundwater depletion and all the things that were pushed all the damage we've done to our to our world certainly cleaning those problems up ought to be among the problems that matter okay so there we go I think one last thing on this slide throw in the bottom right I bring the topic of culture in and I just want to just say a word about culture from an active inference so you know at its best culture is a remembering of what is important to teach not only to teach new people to teach new young adults as they mature what's important but also to to offload some of the computational burden that individuals would otherwise face so if I have to figure out everything for myself from scratch as an organism oh that's tough it is so much easier for me if my peers point me in the right direction and tell me give me some indication of what's dangerous what's not dangerous what's important what's not important give me some guidance I can learn so much faster if I have some good guidance and also if I can just rely on culture to you know like okay culture does this thing and I'm not going to even think about it too deeply because if my culture is good it's maybe reflecting in some capacity this importance of putting attention on those things that matter so now we've now talked about two important things here actually culture and how culture relates to reduction of uncertainty overall and then also attention and the role of culture in directing attention so those are themes that will be coming back on nice so attention attention and essential variables you know like those go together right if we not a paying attention to essential variables then our whole free energy minimization thing is not functioning correctly right because we have to put attention on those things that are important okay next alright so now we get to the slide where I get to ask you and any listeners like what does this mean practically so we've talked about all these high level concepts we've given the some context for you know for who we are and what we might need and what what a societal system is supposed to do and those were all fairly high level discussions and now maybe it's time just to talk a little bit about what that might actually mean in a practical sense so the title of the slide is practical implications but I've done at the bottom I have also known as how do you solve problems because the two are the same thing like this is the question how do you how do we solve how do we how do we how do we how do we solve problems how do we focus on if we're good at solving solving if we're good at solving problems how do we do it and obviously we want if we're going to build new societal systems we want to build societal systems that help us that facilitate our problem solving capacity facilitate our capacity to reduce uncertainty expected uncertainty so I'm just going to list some things and maybe on the first read of this just we can just acknowledge like okay that's how we solve problems we number one there we gather data we sense our world you know obviously right that's how an organism solves a problem and even knows that there's a problem to solve for that matter and we remember we remember what we did maybe last week or last year we remember how we solved something before we remember that this situation is dangerous and we might want to avoid it in the future so we remember remember we anticipate or make forecasts and we've already talked about the importance of anticipation forever for cognition in any organism and and cooperate we cooperate with those around us we have a problem to solve and we get some help maybe we solve it together we work together we build a house together we you know build a jumbo chat together we do all these things together we farm together but what's so cooperation is one way to solve a problem and then what is cooperation well it requires that we maybe as a group we reward pro-social or cooperative behavior and maybe penalize antisocial behavior you know I mean that's you can in game theory they've done all these studies about cooperation and it's pretty you know there's some really good ideas pretty clear ideas basic ideas of when when how do you actually facilitate cooperation and and what makes cooperation go down the toilet right so if your communication really helps cooperation rewarding pro-social behavior transparency helps cooperation fairness helps cooperation like all these we know all these things right from common experiences in life and also from studies in game theory in other fields so solve a problem we cooperate we communicate we direct attention there's that word attention again we direct our attention to those things that matter we learn from our actions and observations so we update our models of things when we realize like oh no it's I guess the world doesn't work that way I should I should learn something but the world is a little more it works differently than I was anticipating than I had thought before and then we act we do suspected uncertainty we experiment we we we have goal directed activities our actions where we you know try to that's the exploitation aspect and then we also have the exploration aspect action for epistemic gain and again then we have this exploration versus exploitation trade-off so so I'm just saying what I think everyone already understands I'm just making a list here but now the question is okay fine so that's how we solve problems how do each of these play out in a societal system setting so you know if I think if we want to we won't because we don't have time but I think if we wanted to we could list like 500 ways this any of these play out and maybe should play out or could play out in a healthy society a society that's good at solving problems I had already mentioned one earlier so let's just say on the topic of anticipation wouldn't it be reasonable to somehow remember and pay attention to who is good it's who is good at anticipating the future so if you know if a certain political figure or you know certain organization is that turns out to have a really good track record of accurately predicting what's going to happen next well then maybe we want to pay attention to them and pay more attention to them than to others who have a terrible track record of predicting what's going to happen next you know like if a politician says oh if you do this if you do a then B is going to happen well you know if I enlarge those kinds of predictions are wrong then you know politicians probably not worth much but not just in politics obviously we anticipate and like for example that's what science does science is you know awash with trying to figure out how the world works what's going to happen next and so that's another area that we could you know a healthy society might really support the scientific you know the scientific endeavor and pay attention to what scientists are saying like for example with climate change and other things you know if the whole scientific world is saying hey this is serious you got to do something about it well then maybe a healthy society would actually do something about it right honesty I'm just picking out things off the list you know but I think we could talk for numerous hours about how any of these might play out in a real setting right honesty so look at the amount of dishonest information or manipulated information that is flowing around us today in this world you know why is that I mean obviously a healthy society would want to share honest and valid information quality information you know models are good models are built on quality information so you know why here's a question why in our world why is there so much just information and I would suggest that at least some of it is due to the fact that individuals and organizations corporations are fantastically rewarded for putting out dishonest information I mean just think of a thief I can call you up in a phone scam and if I can convince you that I'm your bank and I need your account number then I can have enormous rewards for being dastardly dishonest but it's true I mean maybe that's an extreme example but it's true in just ordinary examples of business and life that one can be rewarded greatly or being fairly dishonest or you know putting out something less than quality information and then you gotta ask okay well then if you know like society doesn't want to reward antisocial anti transparent, anti-honest behavior how would a society reward pro-social honest behavior how would a society become more transparent so transparency obviously would be a part of this but I'm sort of honing in I don't know if you can tell but I'm sort of honing in just on this little question about how do we reward behaviors in this world as a society and then that suddenly brings up the question of how does an economic system work and how does how do we view money and how do we view income and how do we use money and income in our lives and is there some way that we could reinvent an economy and reinvent money so that it wasn't rewarding reinvent rules and reinvent whatever we need to reinvent so that we are actually day to day moment to moment we're rewarding cooperative pro-social behavior and honest behavior so like how do we do that now I have some ideas on how to do that but that's in the part three of the paper so we'll get to them later so I don't want to go much further on this but I'm just suggesting that that we could spend each of these could raise 100 ideas of how what we could do in a healthier society to improve our capacity for group problem solving nice points good for nine yeah I always think I am but hold on one second on the right hand side of slide eight are a few other ideas so you know obviously we already talked about the societal systems measuring the fitness of them so you know how do we that's also a general answer to this question of how do we build a society that is more fit well we actually measure things that are important and we score them and we share that information widely so we know how we're doing so we know so we can evaluate either our systems or our organizations or our institutions or society at large or those kinds of things so metrics are important I already mentioned science and critical thinking are important so that touches on the educational system for example healthy educational system would really value critical thinking and would train individuals to be critical thinkers at an early age I would think and then obviously then removing the barriers to cooperation this society has enormous barriers to cooperation I might want to for just one example out of what could be a million examples say that I was kind of wanted to make the I wanted to use my life's energy my work time my 40 hours of work a week to make the world a better place so I want to jump in and I want to I don't know let's say I want to teach kids little children you know maybe I want to be a teacher be a good teacher well that's great fantastic but if I do that I have to pay a financial penalty I could become a banker instead I suppose those are my two choices I could become a banker or a finance finance person or something or I could become a teacher well society is going to reward me greatly for being a banker or a finance person and it's going to not reward me very well for being a teacher so I might want to cooperate I might want to work to for the betterment of humankind but if I do there's a good chance I'm going to be relatively poor like I pay a heavy price for that and that's just a barrier to cooperation we should design systems so that cooperation becomes the default easy no like duh do it this way because it's good for everyone it's good for you and sure you want to teach well great we have come on in here's opportunities for you to teach and you're not going to pay a penalty for becoming a teacher this is going to be easy you want to be a teacher help young children learn better great here's wonderful opportunities and you're not going to have to pay a penalty for doing that actually just the opposite we're going to reward you for doing that now we're done with slide 9 sounds good to 9 so the only thing I really want to say about this slide is that the concept of the societal systems as a cognitive architecture you know probably somewhere in the literature there's something talking about that in some sense but I think maybe I don't know if it's as kind of like pointed as I'm making it in this series and there really is no name for what is the name for the set of societal systems that helps the society that facilitates societal cognition what is the name of that and there isn't a name you know it's not an economic system and it's not a governance system it's just those are just some systems that have their own connotations so what is the name of this whole set of integrated systems that helps the society to think well there is no name so I mean there is no formal name and so you can't look if you're going to search in the literature on this topic there's no term to search for and so I thought maybe it would be useful if I try to suggest some terms at least and I suggest the term societal cognitive architecture for the general idea that societal systems are a cognitive architecture for society but then for the more specific developing de novo systems to be good at facilitating societal cognition I suggest the term sales societal active inference and learning systems I mean maybe there's some other better term I don't know if I threw together this one so it's sales that I'm interested in developing new designs of societal systems that facilitate facilitating societal cognition so if one of these terms catch on maybe then in the future we'll be able to if we're interested in the topic we can actually do a search on Google and we'll find 100 papers or 1000 papers on some of these topics and a quick note on that it points to the need for improved cognitive architecture such as knowledge management tools that help us collaborate and find information semantically like information is for our experience because you're right it is fragmented and therefore unproductive across truly different disciplines and different jargons different languages as well unscanned documents things that are just only on someone's notepad just it's all over the place right and and sometimes a thing doesn't really exist until you name it and then it sort of exists for the larger it can't exist for the larger society so I'm naming this because maybe if we name it we can talk about it you know yes the other problem there is like when I go to it would be much easier for me to just throw out a term like cognitive social cognitive societal architecture and if people understood that term then I wouldn't have to spend a half hour trying to explain what it is that I'm talking about right so terms can help if we have a shared understanding of what their meaning is. What is not sales because it's a you know what's not part of the function of the body how do we differentiate what is apart from that instead of this just being the one to one wrapper around economics governance legal etc etc right right good point and I really my use of the term sales I'm suggesting it for use really in this de novo design you know process of creating new systems so quite true the you know the cognitive the concepts of cognition that we've been talking about they are universal so it is true that we're kind of focusing on just sales as a term for the kind of R&D project R&D projects to move forward that might look at the de novo designs of new systems just the pun traveling sales person ah it's a problem you know it's a hard problem actually the traveling sales person problem yes it is alright so with that we are ready to move on to the actual talk cool drum roll please drum roll awesome the second part you know this is a different media we're kind of spilling above and beyond what you've wrote in the papers because the three papers are the version of reference that's where people will cite but actually in this increasingly digitized and citable world perhaps the things that you're sharing with us as well as even the anonymous content that people produce on a jam border live chat like this all becomes part of how we produce our uncertainty in act yeah yeah and hopefully becomes part of the record and part of the useful record for moving forward on some of these concepts okay so part one was all about world view it was you know high level discussions high level topics about what creates world view and how what kind of world view would be useful in the setting for developing new systems and then now we're moving on to the more nuts and bolts of things a little bit more in the sense of why are we even motivated to transform and and if we do want to develop new systems what kind of strategy you know what but it's not enough just to come up with some great design it has to be viable in the sense that it can be implemented there has to be some way to actually use these ideas actually live these ideas and if there's not then we're sort of wasting our time so strategy is core to the whole proposed r&d program right so yeah so I'm going to in part two I talk about really I try to argue a given narrative in part two that I try to argue that transformation is prudent given the risks we face attractive given its potential benefits and achievable given the current political, financial and social constraints so that's what I hope to accomplish in this paper and that's what I hope to accomplish in this talk too cool alright so on the question of motivation like why transform we touched on some of these ideas in our first talk but I would just like to point out that we face a host of extremely difficult problems climate change being one of them climate change, biodiversity loss, groundwater depletion soils depletion poverty financial uncertainty you know in that sense debt might play into that role you know if you make a list of all the very serious problems that humanity faces it's kind of a long list migration and then one problem causes another so climate change is certainly likely almost certainly will increase the number of refugees trying to cross borders people living without homes that are fleeing areas that don't have enough water or not livable or you know things like that so one problem causes the other and you know what everyone is fearful of happening is is that you have this the collection of 10 or 20 really serious problems and then something happens to flare one of them up and then suddenly that problem transfers to other problems and then you have just one like everything is connected so with one part of our global society gives sway it could be that everything starts to kind of fall apart so there is a fear of that and there is a need to address these problems independently and then also in a holistic sense and I would like to emphasize that these problems we face are in a sense symptoms not really problems in and of themselves they are symptoms of a failure of society you know to today a failure to address the needs of the society a failure to reduce uncertainty a failure to do exactly what we were talking about in the previous part of this talk right so climate change is because we failed to take action we've known about climate change for 60 years I don't know I mean like it's been in the it's been in the scientific world like in a major way major agreement on the implications and the basic processes and what it means to society that's been talked about the scientific world was on this 30 years ago and talking about it and writing papers and you know so we didn't society didn't listen and it didn't and I would say it didn't listen for a reason because if it had listened to those warnings it society would have had to have changed and there are elements of society that are doing well and are maybe not so interested in changing behaviors especially changing power distributions so the powers that more or less guide society were not interested in dealing with our serious problems because we have gotten worse over the last 50 years or whatever these problems have amplified but solve a problem that tends to get larger that's exactly what's happened now we're at the period of not only will climate change affect the GDP that's the yes the real problem is are we going to go extinct this is serious this is life and death now if not billions or billions of people it's life and death for our species we have to deal with this in some kind of bold way or we won't have children on this planet in 50 years 100 years 200 years humans won't be a thing so that's how I say that because that's how badly society has failed us we are at the brink of a cliff maybe we already fell off a cliff and we just don't quite realize it yet what kind of healthy organism puts itself commit suicide what healthy system commits suicide none were they only the phoenix only the phoenix maybe it worked out for that one it rose I guess and maybe we'll do the same but you know my point is that the serious problems we face are all symptoms of our lack of cognitive capacity at the societal level and there have been solutions to all these problems for decades and we simply have not taken them because doing so would have disrupted I think the distribution of power in society and people weren't willing to do that so in this paper on this call for transformational change so I am trying to I'm calling for transformational change right now but I'm not alone so this idea of we need bold change this is not just me in a vacuum this is most of the scientific world and most of the global policy making world and a large section of the global public is all realizing that we are in deep trouble and we need to change not incrementally not slowly but rapidly and deeply and across every aspect of society so I'll just use the words this is from the 2019 global assessment from the IPBES the UN as they in their words they say current national global programs are insufficient to avoid catastrophe and they call for transformational change they use the word transformational and they define it as a fundamental system-wide reorganization across technological social factors including paradigms goals and values essentially enormous fundamental change in how we understand ourselves, how we understand the world how we behave, what we do for a living how industry works how consumers works what products we make, how we recycle like how much energy we use how where we get our energy so I think maybe I don't want to put words in the UN's mouths but I think maybe they were really still kind of talking about like improving current systems like we can improve our economic system to do this we can improve our we can take bold steps within our governance systems we can take bold steps within our economic systems, financial systems we can do better, there's ways that we can do better I would like to very much agree with that, there are ways we can do better we should I would put that under the category of reform we should do everything in our power to reform the existing systems because that is the quickest bang for the buck, I mean we can do more that isn't imperative that we act and put our energies behind reforming as best we can the existing systems working within existing systems and reforming them so they can do a better job so that we can reach some kind of transformation even within existing systems but this proposed R&D program and my interests are beyond that so I'm not my interest here is not in reform, not in improving capitalism for example or representative democracy is in building de novo systems from the ground up that are fit for purpose as we've been talking about so that's what I mean when I say societal transformation I mean shifting to building testing and shifting to new systems we're familiar with these kind of concepts when we download software in the software world there the terms are usually updates so I'm going to update my software for a minor improvement I'm going to upgrade my software to a new version I'm going to get version 4 instead of version 3 so that's kind of like big reform I'm going to get an upgrade then migrations I don't even like this company or this product I'm going to switch to open source and I'm going to use the Linux operating system or some other, I'm going to do something else I'm going to use some entirely new system because the old one really doesn't work very well so my focus is is on migration the testing development and implementation of de novo designed societal systems so I think in a science driven in a science driven process that's important to add too so lots of people calling for transformational change and that's what this paper is about transformation understood as migration to new systems on slide 12 I think maybe, I mean others might disagree but I think maybe this is the first series in the literature that in the science literature that really blaze out an R&D program that aims to tackle this de novo design of new systems I don't I've not seen any others that are kind of comparable so I think we're maybe you know, having new ground here perhaps, at least I hope I want to emphasize something we talked about in the last talk that this is we're talking about second order sciences first order science so first order science again is what we normally think of as science someone is doing experiments they're detached from the experiment the scientists are detached they set it up, they let the experiment run they don't interfere they just record what happened and hopefully they gain some knowledge from doing so fantastic stuff most of science is all first order science is wonderful but through these kinds of problems for this kind of problem that we're facing this global crisis problem this I think requires what is called second order science and there's a series I cite the work by Faisy et al on this topic and that's a great article I recommend that to everyone it's in the paper so you can get it there but he describes what they I should say they it's a long list of authors describe what they mean by a second order science and why it's important and they just kind of in a nutshell we're talking about in our case building new systems we're talking about kind of a meta learning so we're learning to learn we're learning to build new systems that help us to learn and build new systems we want to excel at learning that's the whole concept of this we want a society that excels at learning and problem solving and adaptation and we're in the process of learning to build new systems that produce this effect so it's a kind of a meta learning science meta learning process and just in general the second order science is the focus is on process the effort is value driven and the scientists are participants along with stakeholders who together learn develop and evaluate solutions together so it's quite different from first order science and it's exactly the kind of science I think that is necessary for this larger meta learning project in the paper I talk about six overarching systems I just want to say that's what we're focused on here so economic governance, legal health, analytical and educational systems those are the ones I've chosen to focus on and each of them can be split down further like in my terminology the economic system also includes a monetary system and a financial system and so on and each of these can be split down further so that's what we're doing we're trying to develop designs for each of these that are integrated not just hey let's just build a new economic system and leave everything else and change we'll do the economic system first that's not the point of the process the idea is how can we build an integrated set of systems of full cognitive architecture that helps us to achieve these goals and it's really a nice dovetailing with development is what organisms do that's embryonic development or colony level development or the niche being modified so it's like research and development research, information foraging whatever we want to think about information foraging to mean here with research or just search but it's like we already have designed latent within potentially even the structures we have so how are we going to pull out of the tailspin that's where we're in to build towards developing a healthier trajectory that's right we're in the process of evolution you know and every organism is evolving exactly as you said and developing so we're just being a part of that and you know quite a sensible part of that I might add too it's kind of like oh we're faced with severe problems that we might have a mass die off of humans or go extinct because of so let me think of what would be a good idea oh let's think about doing things differently let's try to build a different way to live our lives you know that's just kind of like that's a good idea let's find a better way to live our lives and be more cooperative and have a healthier world that's an excellent idea okay so in this is kind of a warm up to what's coming in the paper I speak a lot about local community and I just want to emphasize or I want to explain what that means a little bit so for one thing I call society an organism or a super organism and a cognitive organism at that and by society I mean really a society of any size so in particular I'm interested in local communities for some reasons I will become clear shortly so local community might be just like a fraction of a city not even a full city and not even a political body not like a formal political body but a group of people who in this case are particularly interested in participating in trying out and field testing and using some of these new systems that we're talking about developing so you know let's say when I say local community let's say a group of a thousand people or more it could be larger but not necessarily even a city and certainly not a nation so I said that the UN and others are this is slide 13 the UN and others have come out with strong language calling for transformational change which I think again for many folks involved there I think maybe their idea of really is more what I would call reform very very important but it might help here to talk about why reform might not be enough like why you know if the UN and other agencies and other groups are really putting up some great proposals for reform and improvement of existing systems why am I interested in developing new systems why don't we just do reform you know if that'll do the trick let's why bother with more and there's numerous reasons that I lay out in the paper number two of why I think transformation new system development is necessary and you know to start with and as we've kind of been saying here you can look at the world and the problems that we face with climate change and biodiversity loss and others and you can suspect that current systems are incapable maybe incapable of preventing widespread catastrophe and securing our continued vitality I mean really the report card doesn't look good for existing systems they've done a rather crappy job of protecting the human health and the environment to the extent that we now face perhaps in our lifetime or soon after perhaps a mass die off of humans or even extinction of humans so why would we think that they're capable now suddenly of acting differently you know excellent to do reform I don't want to talk anyone out of the reform efforts because they're absolutely important but I am suggesting that maybe we should have a plan B in case plan A doesn't work out so well so you know transformation this is a plan B in a sense and in the end it might turn out to be better than plan A even if reform is useful and helpful plan B might turn out to be the better bet so you kind of catch it on both ends there so I just talk about a few things I mentioned in the paper of why why why evidence of current systems being incapable of preventing a widespread catastrophe so one is the Paris Agreement and then this is quoting from one of the theories I believe it says ambitions are broadly consistent with cost-effective pathways that result in a global warming of about three degrees by 2100 with warming continuing afterwards okay so so you know in a practical sense if the Paris Agreement were interactive that's sort of what where it would lead to it is clearly it is maybe an important agreement but not enough not nearly enough it looks like and if indeed we were to reach about three degrees centigrade change from historical levels that is that's already in the iffy category of like you know how do humans what do we do we even have a civilization if we reach three degrees you know it's iffy question maybe we do maybe we find a way to deal with it get by or maybe we don't maybe we're already way too much and also the reform efforts don't adequately address certain structural problems that we face like most reform efforts are not really looking at the extreme income and wealth divisions in the world you know most of the reform efforts are not looking at how we cannot have billionaires but rather have everyone more or less equally engaged in the you know economic sphere in a sense having economic power to make decisions in this world so even if reform efforts are useful and good I hope they are maybe they won't be enough and maybe they won't even touch deeply on some topics that really need to be addressed so I argue you know this section covers several pages but in the end I argue that even if reform efforts are useful and helpful and they're successful and you know for what they're shooting for they're still likely to leave society's hamper in their capacity to learn and adapt with many unsolved problems to address like even for example even right now even at one whatever at not sure what degree we're at right now over historical levels but still below two degrees maybe we're 1.3 I don't know what it is already there's nations that are you know the island nations that are not able to handle this you know like people are already started I have to relip it and every indication is that's just going to become worse and worse so even if we even if we keep it below 1.5 degrees or we keep it below 2 degrees the warming we're going to have severe problems social problems economic problems environmental problems ecologic problems and somehow we're going to have to deal with this harsher world than even harsher than today you know more dangerous than today and more strained than today more stressful than today and I'm suggesting that the best way to deal with a future world that is stressful and uncertain highly uncertain difficult is to become really good at problem solving isn't coming that's how you would go about it that's you would be if you can you would become really good at acting in an uncertain world and making wise decisions so that you don't have to suffer anymore than is necessary um uh yeah so that's that's you know like there would be even even if we even if reform is successful it would still be useful to develop to become better at problem solving um and I think that there there's great opportunity to become better I mean as a whole society hasn't even really tried to become a good problem solve really you know in a in a focused science driven way we've never really put our mind to this and we can put our mind to it and I think that would be tremendous improvements that we could make that's you know that's why I wrote the series is because I think we could do so much better than we're doing today which is not very well um let's see anything else on this slide yes down in the lower right hand corner I have a kind of a long list of things that we need to do and I won't read it now but you know we basically have to remake everything from what we make how we make it how we use it where it goes how it's disposed of how we treat each other how we cooperate who we cooperate I mean just like deep transformation from across every aspect of human life and in human social life so you know to me at least it's inconceivable that existing systems could even come close to the level of transformation that is actually not only needed but would be beneficial like would be really beneficial if societies became good at problem solving and adaptation and it's pretty much inconceivable to me at least that existing systems and existing reform proposals and efforts could come close to what is actually needed and would be beneficial I think you know this is really great I'm just looking for a natural pause point for where we would want to be what do you think about doing 14 going through it taking our time and then this R&D program being the pickup point for our third session I know we're going slow you're going on some great boomerangs so it's awesome but let's walk through leaving somebody at the end of the second discussion what would an R&D program be that would meet the scope and the type of these challenges and then three is going to be like you want to know what it is go there yeah and I think for listeners Daniel and I have been talking but you know there's a lot of material to unpack here so I think we're going to have more than three videos but we'll figure out what the dates will be for them so that we can go through the whole thing you know carefully perfect okay so we'll end on slide 14 then and I maybe to start I would just like to say that I've the series is a proposal for you know like a soft proposal for a new R&D programming to de novo development in the systems but other people might come up with another proposal like you know mine maybe is just one of many possible ways to go about the R&D program for new proposals and I would welcome I would hope even that would be fantastic if there were you know 20 projects happening around the world of aimed at this same thing and that each of these projects was cooperating with each other so that we can learn from each other and move forward you know in the most efficient and useful most useful way so that's one of the reasons that I made this data list is like what would be if there's going to be multiple R&D programs or even if it's just this one that I put out you know what would be a good what has to be included in the R&D program you know what should be there so that we would know that it's you know like a reasonably complete one and so that we could compare R&D programs so if I propose this one and someone else proposes another one we can compare number five develops new integrated systems that span all six of these major societal systems, economic governance etc well if someone else proposes one that it's only focused on economic systems well there's a way to distinguish between the two R&D programs so that's part of my purpose here of laying this out and then it's also the purpose that you will see as you read the series that I talk about each one of these so this is just in a sense it's an index to the larger series and also one point is that a scientist might say you need to do A, B and C to really study the mosquitoes wing and then of course they measure A, B and C so of course they solve the mosquitoes wing but actually you're laying out a protocol for evaluating policy across scales and then putting up almost like a retort to yourself at least initially that you believe could be held against this rubric like a report card and then again where a policy is better on point five or eleven or whatever it be we can make that decision in a way or we can version the rubric so this isn't just setting the target or painting the target Texas sharpshooter paint the target after you wrote the paper hypothesizing after the results are known harking this is like laying out where we do want it to go. Right exactly exactly and I hope that we refined it together as a community refined this list so that we hone it better even maybe there's some things I left out or some things I should have said or things I said I didn't need to say but I'm sure it could be improved so we don't have much time and I won't go I won't go into detail on these but maybe I'll just just to give a flavor I'll just talk about a few scattering here so obviously number one if you you're talking about a R&D program it might help to actually provide some information about the scale of the intended effect we're thinking that this R&D program is going to build new systems for a for one particular city or for a nation or for what scale is this whole thing going to apply where is it going to go if it's successful what is the scale and what are the costs, what are the risks how much money is this whole thing going to take and we'll talk about that money we'll talk about in the next talk based on second order science which I mentioned already number three it has a theory of change like fine you you tested a new system you built it to get great computer simulation models great now what do we do with it how would you ever take that idea and make it real implement it in a real society somewhere how does it how does that work and where is the blowback going to be where is the pressure is going to be against it what might go wrong so that should be in there theory of change number five it develops integrated I claim that it's important that it develops integrated systems across all six of the major ones because if it doesn't if you build a governance system independent from an economic system and you're still using the old economic system it's not going to work very well because they're going to be it ends with each other not integrated six describes the purpose of the system what in the world is this supposed to do how do we know it even worked what have we measured fitness it's supposed to accomplish and how can we how can we evaluate it on what it did accomplish or what it's supposed to how does cognition play like in this whole series is well focused on societal cognition maybe some other pH maybe some other R&D program doesn't even use the word cognition maybe they have an entirely different way to think about what a society is and how it does and what the purpose is so if so you know it would be good to say so makes the work freely available to the public so and I didn't we haven't talked about this but I it's assumed here that whatever is developed would be developed in an open source way or would be freely available to the world this is not a proprietary project at all number eight it develops flexible options that the public can choose from if there is no one size fits all solution I mean that wouldn't be very wise at all societies have to have flexibility in how they act how they what they implement what they choose so hopefully it would be the program would develop a smorgasbord of ideas possibilities that could be useful in different settings number 11 addresses the cultural changes what kind of educational changes for example would be necessary to make this work there would be substantial ones actually because you build a new system for one thing you'd have to explain or educate people on how the new system is even goes together and how it works and how how would you know if it's not working all those kinds of questions number 12 if new systems are implemented in multiple locations is that information shared between them how does that work is each independent or are they communicating is this all part of a larger plan to have multiple tests going on at the same time or are those just independent things that come and go as they do obviously number 13 develop systems that are fair and just that is reasonable and number 14 what would be expected impacts when you do simulations for this new system was how does it look for energy use and waste generation and climate change and biodiversity loss what are we going to get if we build these what is the likely outcome of these things so that's just a few ideas a few topics that would be important to address in any R&D program and I've tried my best to address them here and even in just three papers some of these are addressed in just a few sentences or a few paragraphs somewhere in the papers because you would really need a book I think or a series of books to really do a thorough job on all of these you know what I kind of saw almost when you have this list is like a GitHub or a versioned open source repository where people can fork the rubrics they like they can add more challenges they can go into detail what do you mean by fair what do you mean that they're just well those are things that we actually we can get down to and that's not to say that we're going to be carving out the human it means that we're going to be designing for ourselves and for whoever's on board and just like the ship makers make it for those who are on the ship but the ship is part of society there's going to be a ship with sails so I think they'll be such interesting conversations because really you could fractal into yeah seven what is the role of information I went to a conference today on only a fragment of that so of course seven is going to be a big topic but it's a third order science what you did with laying out the second order criticism paradigm so it's quite interesting to read about and learn yeah you know speaking of a repository you know at the very least you need a language means of communications that you can convey if I have an idea for new systems I need to convey that to the rest of the world in some way to convey it to you maybe you have your own idea of what a new system would look like so how do we convey that idea how do we convey a complicated idea to each other so that we know what each other is talking about and then we can start to do tests on them or figure out which one works better and what situations like just just just to begin we just need a way to communicate a way to present the information so that we can understand what each other is saying just one kind of closing metaphor or at least thought that comes to mind is like let's say two people like a movie one person said I love the special effects the other one says the special effects were super cheesy I thought the story and the other person says I didn't even I don't like movies but I like the book so everyone can like the movie and the point is they're aligned on action they might even want to hang out together they might be part of a fan club they might have a product or a movie but if the if the problem is framed as okay come to consensus on why you like this movie we cannot personalize the solution so everybody can have a different understanding of why they like the movie that's playing out in front of our eyes and if it's about which part of this movie do you like or not like we're going to be arguing a lot and if it's like which movie should we watch potentially that's a different question or how should we reduce uncertainty about the movie that we should watch there's a lot of ways to frame it that I would hope would be new yeah I think so I think so yeah yeah maybe we should leave it there and we'll pick up more next time I'm looking forward John thanks so much again I'm going to just re-upload this video in case there's any weirdness with the livestream we'll be in touch about planning these upcoming sessions but we will know that we will meet next week on April 20th at 3pm Pacific PDT for the third session of N of BLEEP okay sounds good see you later John peace