**Links to**: [[Concept]], [[Predicate]], [[05 Prediction]], [[Sociality]], [[Honesty]], [[Manipulation]], [[Empathy]], [[Generalization]], [[Abstraction]], [[Platonism]], [[Equivalence]], [[Difference]]. >_[[THIS LIE IS A SENTENCE]]_, Z. Fork, 2023. ### [[Postulate]]: When considering active inference as the default of all perception-action, lying can be understood a predictive strategy which embeds itself to a high degree of possibilistic complexity in the social landscape. To speak is to generalize is to lie, this is because of the effacement of difference(s) that is the genetic, necessary foundation of any pre-dictation. To pre-state, to predicate, is to admit that we will (temporarily) forget about whatever might be _different_ in the future, so we can hang on to some kind of certainty (i.e., predictability). This process makes possibilistic paths cognitively available: without things remaining the same there is no advancing of any path, there is only pure difference (read: irresolution, incoherent discrepancy, mental noise, homeostatic instability, undecidability, chaos, etc.). Living, lying, lyrical things such as humans track desired predictions by effacing difference. Concepts, as effacements, offer vantage points into dimensions for action. To say “to say” is to say that I am right now making an attempt at furthering the type of prediction within the possibilities of your cognition, so that you may say, with me: “to say” is to say _this_. While we both may say different things at different times: we can agree, for now, that we relax our differences so that we may, in unison, say _this_. Of course, here comes the necessary mention of _On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense_ (1873), by [[Nietzsche]]: >“Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept ‘leaf’ is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the Leaf: the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted — but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model.” To speak to each other is to lie. Social lying, of the “sorry I can’t make it to the meeting, I am tied up” kind, is the giving to another a perspective which one imagines will “sit better” than the one at hand. We seem to want to stay within certain homeostatic social parameters, not to disappoint, where disappointment is precisely the undoing of a consensual _point_, literally and figuratively. A social prediction we engage in, together, can only hold when it is assumed to hold for all the various xpectators involved. Whence the concept-activity of social lying when mimesis, replication, imitation, etc. are all functionally, existentially foundational to organic life? If deception falls within this realm, and humans are not the only ones who deceive: all manner of animals play dead, morph, imitate each other, hide, etc., then the punishing lens lying received can only be attributed to other predictive strategies that override it: Judeo-Christian traditions, in our context. In other religious; philosophical contexts (e.g., Yoruba traditions), where multiplicity is not a problem and does not need to be reduced to oversimplifying strategies, trickery and deception are fundamental parts of the games we play, not problems. Neverminding our religious embedding, we tend to modernly, scientifically view this through evolutionary goggles, which turns these activities into survival strategies. We could also thus understand human lying, the worst kinds, even, as a kind of survival strategy. But, they can also be viewed as self-fulfilling prophecy strategies beyond species survival, tending more towards semantic survival: if I believe the world is X, the world might as well be X, not only because forcing X onto the world might accommodate my generative models better, but also because when I cease and desist some kind of semantic after-effect will endure. In any case, lying is more complex than we tend to colloquially give it credit for. The _as if_ structure of cognition-perception-action is all we can have, in a reality where it appears as if we track structures which we necessarily co-generate with the stochastic world out there (remember prediction as the hallucination of reality). To deceive in order to manipulate includes lying, but this is one aspect of lying. Lying is a permanent aspect of producing reality: in the structures of perception and thus conceptuality, as well as in the very fact that we’ve inherited a vast network of lies where it seems difficult, if not impossible, to discern which of them track reality “better” than others. When considering active inference as the default of all perception-action, lying can be understood a predictive strategy which embeds itself to a high degree of possibilistic complexity in the social landscape because one xpectator attempts to track reality for others. This, however, is what happens in most collective intentionality, though sometimes it is more commun(ic)ally accommodating than other times. >“Here, we are reminded of the soul’s connections with vitality, breath, and inner being. While Bockie remarks that visions of the physical body, nitu, can appear following someone’s death, Fu-Kiau noted that a person’s double, identified as mwèla-ngindu, remains with the community, and ‘continues to act and to talk to and among the community’s members as well as to the world’s community, through dreams, and visions’ (Fu-Kiau 2001, 71). This suggests that in Kongo notions of personhood, multiple selves carry on communal activities after death, even if appearing as a specter of the former human self. (Daniels 2021, p. 9). > >So, the lies of spirits and spirits as lies continue on, whether they desired it or not. Linking what is said above about continuation after death in every respect. >“_‘Sa yo rele nanm nan, se lòt moun sa a ki andedan nou an, ki se konsyans la …Nanm nan se sa ki invizib, ki detache de kò a, ki ka transfere a yon lòt eritye. /_ That which they call the nanm, it’s that other person who is inside us, which is the conscious…The nanm is that which is invisible, which is detached from the body, which can be transferred to a new heir’ (Interview, May 10, 2020). Here, Manbo Maude identifies the nanm as an interior self, an inner person with inherited qualities to be transmitted to the next generation. Even some ritual objects are known to have nanm. " (ibid. pp. 11-12). If concepts are like spirits, poltergeists, we could speculate they make our individualities _overlap_ in difference. ____ #todo “His translator notes, at the end of the essay, that Benjamin used two different words for body – _Korper_, and _Leibe_.” _Korper_ is a word that the translator explains is the opposite of _Geist_ –  “body and mind”, and “denotes human physicality,” while _Leib_ is the repository of the soul. (intro psychophysical problem: relate to kadaver body in Daniels).