Active Inference for Organizations

"Give me a sober activism anytime, rather than that rose-tinted fatalism!" - Viktor Frankl, Yes to Life

This is version 1.0 of a document intended to help organizations apply some of the latest insights emerging from research into the social and physical sciences in regard to the use of models for future planning, policy comparison, analysis, and selection or modification. In addition to this, some of the much deeper history behind these ideas will be introduced as well. A simple outline with an introduction, a general description of models and active inference, and several example applications will be followed. Frequent references to related work that may be familiar to the reader will be utilized to ground the content. Throughout, I hope to challenge the reader to use the lens developed here and see if new approaches to addressing some of the most intransigent problems we face today can be found.

Why are models important?

According to "dual inheritance theory" (also called gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution), human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Genes and culture continually interact in a feedback loop, where changes in one can influence changes in the other. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian selection process, which dual inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution. As Marshall McLuhan wrote “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” Theoretical evolutionary biologist Eörs Szathmáry wrote: "It was language, with its unlimited hereditary potential, that opened up the possibility of open-ended cumulative cultural evolution... It is culture where the main action is going on."

Joseph Henrich noted that culture arises from genetically evolved psychological adaptations for acquiring models from others. And models evolve according to Darwinian principles. So if there is variation, differential selection, and heredity, then adaptive design must occur, even in the absence of a conscious designer. The development of new cultural models since the start of the stable Holocene epoch (about ten thousand years ago, when the first Agricultural Revolution[1] occurred) has accelerated even faster with the start of the Industrial Revolution. Today cultural evolution dramatically outpaces genetic evolution, with both good and bad results. In some ways this has improved the fit between our heuristics and the structure of our environment, increasing our capacity to do what is best in the long run. But we've also seen the growth of economic exploitation, social inequality, and political conflict. Historians have struggled to account for how harmful developments have persisted alongside other, more beneficial aspects of cultural change. But if anthropologists like Henrich are right that the acquisition and use of models plays a significant role in cultural features, then by understanding how these processes occur we may improve our ability to select models that are more consistent with our norms and values.

In popular culture and folk psychology, a "model" is a standard of comparison, as in a role model, something representing a pattern by which we can measure our progress or determine success or failure. It can be a teaching tool, when we describe the model of a healthy lifestyle. But most of our mental models are patterns of thinking that are invisible to us. “Like a pane of glass framing and subtly distorting our vision, mental models determine what we see. Human beings cannot navigate through the complex environments of our world without cognitive ‘mental maps’; and all of the mental maps, by definition, are flawed in some way." (Peter Senge et al. 1994, 235-236) "Understanding your mental models will probably be your greatest challenge and your greatest leverage for change. When people with different personalities, moral values, and expertise are trying to work together on a problem-solving team, they bring many different mental models that often generate misunderstanding and conflict. If the diverse mental models of group members can be shared and understood, communication and creativity improve, often dramatically." (Burgess 2018) The exploration of our mental models and the ability to connect to people who may be very different from us is part of a spreading awareness associated with learning organizations, learning communities, and adaptive management.

What is Active Inference?

This brings us to the more recent research being conducted today about the nature of the interactions between ourselves and the world around us (also called agent-environment systems). Traditional Ecological Knowledge has long recognized that there is a holistic coupling between organism and environment. Only recently has modern science been able to appreciate the implications of this insight. The extent by which the human system has become decoupled from the greater system it lives within, the environment, since the start of the Industrial Revolution has been unprecedented. We need models that re-couple the systems and allow us to recognize and live within the limits of each. In order to identify these we will need to understand a few new concepts. The first of these is the free energy principle (FEP), which states that models which reduce uncertainty are always preferentially selected. Another important idea is that of "model evidence". It says that if our model makes a prediction, and we see evidence that the prediction was right, that is evidence for the model, or model evidence. Those models which have the greatest evidence and reduce uncertainty are the models we will need to select, as these can help us re-couple the human and natural systems. Other researchers, and notably anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, have utilized the concept of being "attuned to the environment" to describe this.

The world is a very dynamic place, constantly in motion, and so current research is focused on understanding how staying in tune with the world is possible. Organisms and entire ecosystems are highly adaptive. Karl Friston has described the process of adaptation as "active inference", a theory that underpins the way we perceive and act in the world. It describes our ability to construct, share, and compare detailed models, which are continually being tuned, and allow us to effectively plan and act in an uncertain future. Garrett Hardin noted that this is a constant process: "Every reform deliberately instituted in the structure of society changes both history and the selective forces that affect evolution — though evolutionary change may be the farthest thing from our minds as reformers. We are not free to avoid producing evolution: we are only free to close our eyes to what we are doing." Hopefully, an active inference perspective will open our eyes and enable us to select the models and policies needed to bring us into a better future for both social and planetary dynamics.

Eduardo Kohn asked "How are we going to create an ethical practice in the Anthropocene, this time of ours in which futures, of human and nonhuman kinds, are increasingly entangled, and interdependent in their mutual uncertainty?” Active inference provides one possible response: an account for how our ecology of mind (a term used by both Bateson and Kohn) becomes, or fails to become, attuned to the world. A recent paper coauthored by Friston stated: "In active inference, everything that can change, changes to minimise the mismatch between organism and environment." Let's see if this might help to provide us with some useful tools by exploring several examples...

Societal models: Elinor Ostrum, Peter Corning, Kate Raworth, and...

Elinor Ostrum identified eight "design principles" of stable local common pool resource management, which have since been modified to include additional variables affecting the success of self-organized governance systems. She showed that a polycentric approach where natural resources are jointly managed by their users, can be both economically and ecologically sustainable. Peter Corning has identified 14 categories of basic needs that are shared among the members of society, and without which significant harm would result. He has advocated for policies that would provide these, explaining that the ability to realize greater sustainability and self actualization cannot proceed until the necessary foundation of requisite physical systems has been put in place. Kate Raworth has combined the concept of planetary boundaries with the complementary concept of social boundaries to assist communities as they seek to live within both.

Social models such as these are normative - they specify a set of conditions that are intended to allow, at a bare minimum, the continued existence of their members, though optimally they are intended support a flourishing community or nation. When they are effective, it is by means of providing a context sensitive grip on the econiche, a wide range of affordances for action, and model evidence, reducing future uncertainty/ surprise, and overall improving the coupling/ attunement/ symmetry between the model and environment. Since these social/ political/ economic models are made with the intention of guaranteeing a normative standard of future health, if they instead lead to social destabilization, or fail to protect the well being of the community from threats (as from a pandemic, etc) and consequently uncertainty and surprise increase, those normative expectations are violated. As a result the societal models change via ongoing processes of active inference, and reform or even revolution can result. Therefore those social models that are able to anticipate potentially surprising threats and prevent or prepare for them are preferentially selected for. They must be sufficient to meet human needs, environmentally sustainable, and therefore in some sense holistic. When we compare the variety of social models that have existed in the past and are extant today - those which have failed to meet our basic needs and compromised the health of citizens and the structure of society itself have been more vulnerable to destabilization.

Key terms: free energy principle, active inference, Markov blankets, generative model (dynamic causal model), modeling processes, model evidence, surprisal, affordance, attunement

Reference material:
Signs of Meaning in the Universe, Jesper Hoffmeyer
How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn
Oasis Earth, Rick Steiner
A Manifesto for Earth, Ted Mosquin and Stan Rowe
Drawdown, Paul Hawken

Conversation Styles and Dialogue, Tony Burgess

Let the environment guide our development, Johan Rockström

Notes: [1] Graeber and Wengrow point out "Clearly, it no longer makes any sense to use phrases like ‘the agricultural revolution’ when dealing with processes of such inordinate length and complexity." It is nice to see the "just so" stories of human cultural development dismantled. And this is an excellent example of how we can update our models when we understand the evidence for egalitarian cities and nations does not support the belief that these are improbable. They conclude "Almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly ‘scale up’ to anything like a city, a region, or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place."