**Links to**: [[The infinite other]], [[Dialove]], [[On Dialogical Reason]], [[Dialogue]], [[Dialogical]], [[Dialogics]], [[Dialectics]], [[Marx]], [[Catarina Dutihl Novaes]], [[Argument]], [[Distributed cognition]], [[Memory]], [[Empirical or metaphysical]]. ### [[Postulate]]: The opposite of the categorical imperative. The uncategorizable unsettling.^[Unsettling in the sense of anti-settler, mostly.] The argument for the infinite other is that, in order for a loving politics to be possible, one ought to model the other as possibly *infinite*. Always. This way, a generative model remains open to otherness-novelty. Not reducing others to simple images we have of ourselves. Of others. Of ourselves, etc. If the given condition is irreversible, and this is what we have to work with, then the infinite other is how we guarantee _renewable social learning_. The practical consequences of the FEP (see: [[Free energy principle]]) as modeling possibilities in applied Active Inference provide an apparatus for understanding the mechanics and the dynamics (see: [[Mechanics and dynamics]]) of how systems navigate *and* can benefit from high-entropy situations. Awareness of and exposure to diversity serves as a necessary perturbation of established cognitive-behavioral sociocultural patterns. If we praise novelty and learning, which we seem to do, then we can understand this explorative condition as optimizing further systemic conditions: we avoid stagnation, homogeneity, monoculture. Central to this argument is the possible mathematical formalization of cultural exploration as an engagement with ever-novel potentiality: with infinity. If we conceive of specific forms of enculturation as finite domains (ie., **this** is what culture a, b or c *is*), we implicitly suggest the possibility of complete epistemic closure—a stagnant mapping of the territory, so to speak. An acknowledgement of an inherent inexhaustibility that resists final categorization or complete assimilation into existing frameworks is therefore necessary (a similar argument is also made in [[03 Semantic noise]]). Lived uncertainty, the possible control of high-entropy situations, is tricky, though. How much is too much entropy? This varies, and the middle road, or the well-tempered clavier, are examples of ethico-aesthetic moments at which visions have been rendered possible, and enjoyable by the many. In what we often delineate as evolutionary biology, challenges to metastability (or homeorhesis, see: [[Allostasis]]) become essential drivers of adaptive flow. Stagnation, inbreeding, etc., are the result of operating solely within familiar parameters. ### Background This concept takes from Luhmann’s double contingency. And: >“You are not a fish. How do you know that the fish are happy?” said Huizi, >“You are not I. How do you know that I do not know that the fish are happy?” said Zhuangzi. > >Zhuangzi, 145?–89? BCE, Watson translation, 2013. And: >Kant’s renunciation of the idea that the human subject is capable of intellectual intuition, whereby it can theoretically comprehend ideas such as freedom, God, and immortality, suggests the limit of the I think. > >Hui, _Recursivity and Contingency_, p. 50. And: >If cannibalism is an image of thought and the enemy a conceptual persona, all that remains is to write a chapter of Deleuzo-Guattarian geophilosophy. A prototypical expression of the other in the Occidental tradition is the figure of _the friend_. The friend is an other, but the other as a moment of the self If I were to define myself as the friend of the friend, this would only be because the friend, per Aristotle's well-known definition, is another oneself. Ego is there from the outset, with the friend being the Other-condition retroactively projected onto the conditioned form of the subject. As François Wolff has observed, this definition implies a theory where "every relation to the other, and consequently every form of friendship, has its foundation in the relation of each man with himself" (2000: 169). The social bond presumes self-relation as its origin and model.” ... “Refusing to put the question in terms of belief seems to me a crucial aspect of the anthropological decision. In order to emphasize it, we will resume our discussion of the Deleuzian Other (D. 1990a; D. G. 1994). The other is the expression of a possible world, but this world must always, in the ordinary course of social interaction, be actualized by Ego: the implication of the possible in the other is explicated by an "I." This entails the possible passing through a process of verification that dissipates its structure in entropic fashion. When I develop a world expressed by the other, I do so in order to validate its reality and penetrate it, or else to refute it as unreal. This explication is what puts the element of belief into play. By describing this process, Deleuze indicates the limit condition of the determination of the concept of the Other . . . > >>“These relations of development, which form our commonalities as well as our disagreements with the other, also dissolve its structure and reduce it either to the status of an object or to the status of a subject. That is why, in order to grasp the other as such, we were right to insist upon special conditions of experience, however artificial—namely, the moment at which the expressed has (for us) no existence apart from that which expresses it: the Other as the expression of a possible world. (D. 1994: 260-61).” >> >. . . and he concludes by recalling a fundamental maxim of his mode of reflection: > >>“The rule invoked earlier—not to be explicated too much—meant, above all, not to explicate oneself too much with the other, not to explicate the other too much, but to maintain one's implicit values and multiply one's own world by populating it with all those expresseds that do not exist apart from their expressions. (D. 1994: 261).” > >Anthropology would profit from heeding this lesson. Keeping the values of the Other implicit does not mean celebrating whatever transcendent mystery it supposedly keeps enclosed in itself. It consists in refusing co actualize the possibles expressed by indigenous thought, making a decision co maintain them, infinitely, as possibles-neither derealizing chem as fantasies of the other nor fantasizing chat they are actual for us. The anthropological experiment, in chat event, depends on the formal internalization of those specific and artificial conditions Deleuze spoke of: the moment the world of the ocher is no longer thought co exist outside its expression, it transforms into an eternal condition, which is to say one internal co the anthropological relation, which realizes this possible qua virtual. If there is something that _de jure_ belongs to anthropology, it is not the cask of explaining the world of the ocher but that of multiplying our world, "populating it with all these expresseds that do not exist outside their expressions." For we cannot chink like Indians; at most, we can chink with them. And on this point, (to attempt, but of course just for a moment, to think "like them"), it should be said that if there is a clear message in Amerindian perspectivism, it is chat one should never cry to actualize the world that is expressed in the gaze of the other. > >Viveiros de Castro 2014 (2009), pp. 193-6. %% [[Multiscale systems]]: “The multiscale perspective afforded by the free energy principle means this disambiguation between self and other is constrained by the hierarchical level (i.e. spatiotemporal scale) above (Kirchhoff 2018; Kirchhoff et al. 2018; Ramstead et al. 2018; Hesp et al. 2019; Ramstead et al. 2019; Palacios et al. 2020)—a necessary facet of ‘belonging to something greater’. On a general note, this thesis rejects dualism in the same spirit of recent proposals—from molecular biology (Kuchling et al. 2019; Manicka and Levin 2019) to evolution (Ao 2005; Frank 2012; Campbell 2016; Ramirez and Marshall 2017)—that put inference, beliefs 1 and purpose into biological processes.” (Bhat, Friston, Parr, Ramstead 2021) https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10539-021-09801-6.pdf .... “The Free Energy Principle (FEP) is a formalisation and extension of Schrödinger’s (1956) seminal observation that living organisms are defined by the avoidance of entropy—in other words, they ‘self-organise’, or maintain homeostasis. Supplied by the mathematics of nonequilibria, it emerges that all self-organising (and therefore biological) systems are fundamentally driven to minimise a quantity called ‘free energy’—which can be heuristically understood as a measure of unlikeliness.2 Active inference is an application of the FEP to sentient behaviour. It specifies that self-organising systems, in addition to adapting to their environment, can also act upon it so that it conforms to their internal, generative model of the world (Fris- ton et al. 2010; Parr and Friston 2018, 2019). An internal model is a probabilis- tic account of how sensory data are generated—normally comprising a prior (how probable is a hypothesis before making any observations) and a likelihood (how likely are observed data under that hypothesis). For more sophisticated systems, this model may represent sequences through time, making it possible to select ‘policies’ (sequences of actions) that minimise ‘expected free energy’—which (heuristically) is the free energy expected on pursuing a policy. Some of these terms may seem somewhat anthropomorphic. This is because the origins of active inference were in application to the human brain, building upon Helmholtz’s (1866/1962) ideas about ‘unconscious inference’ and the concepts of the ‘Bayesian brain’ and ‘predictive coding’ (Rao and Ballard 1999; Knill and Pouget 2004)—equating free energy minimisation with ‘prediction error minimisation’, or ‘belief updating’.3 Under these frameworks, the internal dynamics of a biological system can be understood as solving an inference problem using sensory data. By combing prior beliefs with the likelihood associated with sensory data, we arrive at a poste- rior belief; namely, the probability of some explanation of observed sensory data. Behaviour is guided by these inferences (Friston et al. 2010; Adams et al. 2013a, b; Friston and Frith 2015a, b). Identifying the inference problem that the system is solving supplies an explanation, in the form of a generative model, that underwrites optimal behaviour. In a sense, this approach represents a formal rejection of Carte- sian dualism in favour of a Markovian Monism (Friston et al. 2020). The first step in trying to understand the inference problem a system is implicitly solving is to define what is meant by ‘a system’. The statistical construct of a ‘Markov blanket’ (Pearl 1988) is typically applied to delimit a self-organising system, by rendering the internal components of the system conditionally independent from its environ- ment, while accommodating a vicarious communication between the inside and the outside. 4 This bidirectional communication is wrought by dividing the blanket into unidirectional influences that are either sensory (e.g. from pathogen to immune sys- tem) or active (e.g. from immune system to pathogen). Further, under the Complete Class theorem (Wald 1947; Daunizeau et al. 2010), any behaviour can be rendered Bayes optimal given the appropriate prior beliefs. This means that defining the ‘inference problem’ can also help to explain (by lesion- ing the optimal generative model) maladaptive behaviours, such as might be seen in autoimmune or psychiatric disorders. This approach has been applied fruitfully to explain—for example—visual neglect (Parr and Friston 2018), hallucinations (Adams, Stephan et al. 2013a, b; Benrimoh, Parr et al. 2019) and failures of inter- personal communication (Moutoussis et al. 2014). The implication for philosophy here is support from the physics of biology for a hermeneutic perspective (Gadamer 1976; Friston and Frith 2015a, b) of constant (and imperfect) energetic dialogue between an organism and its environment; and a relativism wherein normality is context dependent, perception is deeply subjective and absolute objective reality is unattainable.” %% *See also*: [[Ouroboros that is its own tongue]]. And perhaps also: [[The bodies of all those people who did not ask to be bodies]]. For a presentation of aspects of this live, see: [[All things mirrored]]. ### Footnotes