An Ecologue for Earth

1. Holistic: We are part of a much larger community of life. From a holistic perspective there is empathy, and from empathy there is equanimity.¹ Holism binds one person to the next, and one day to the next.
2. Interpersonal: We are adapted to read the minds of trusted others while at the same time assisting those others in reading our own minds. Our minds mutually interpenetrate. The desire to bring about the well-being of others (mettā bhāvanā) entails the explicit enrichment and narrative elaboration of one’s mental models of others.^2,3 "Look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present, but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground - the unborn of the future Nation."⁴
3. Embodied: Coherent narratives link together experiences, help maintain goal pursuit, and enable groups to engage in cooperative action.^5,6 All of us have some roles to play. We each have to say, given my role here, what's my responsibility? What should I do in this situation? Not just what do I want, not just what would look good, but given my role here, what should I do?^7,8 "To be awakened is to realize that one has a role in the harmonious development of all and to strive to fulfill that role."⁹
4. Predictive: Our ability to protect depends upon our ability to predict changes before they occur, and, if needed, intervene to bring about preferred states and prevent or mitigate possible threats.^10,11
   
5. Enactive: The formation of a model (or models) of our environment enables us to anticipate change and cooperatively aim for a deeply considered preferred future, to be reached via a deeply considered pathway¹²; to 'navigate into the future' rather than be 'driven by the past'.^13,14 But if our planning horizon is insufficient to contemplate distal outcomes, we can easily get stuck as we pursue our goals.¹⁵
6. Extended: Creatures like us have deep generative models that transcend the present and see far into the future, enabling our capacity to select courses of action that consider long term consequences.¹⁶ A chess player must evaluate their actions in light of possible outcomes, and think several moves ahead. With a greater planning horizon we are able to plan and execute the shortest path to our goals, which often involves excursions through state (and belief) space that point away from them.¹⁵
   
7. Comparative: Active inference rests upon the coupling between a generative process (i.e., environment) and a generative model of that process (i.e., agent). The free-energy principle can be regarded as an attempt to understand the ‘fit’ between the environment and an agent living within it, where the quantity of free-energy is a measure for the ‘misfit’ or disattunement.¹¹
8. Sympoietic¹⁷: We can think of the environment as consisting of multiple agents¹⁸ collectively enacting a generative model of their relations over vast spatial and temporal distances,¹⁹ where the sensory states of one agent are generated by the action of the other agents. Over time, the agents mutually constrain each other until an attracting (synchronization) manifold is reached.¹¹
9. Adaptive: Mutual adaptation means that there is a common phenotypic space that is shared by the environment and agent. Convergence, or synchronization, emerges as the agent and environment ‘get to know each other’.¹¹
10. Harmonized: Appropriate action (wuwei) follows from being in tune with our environment. The goal is not constancy, but coordinated variation.²⁰

References:

[1] Democritus, fragment 191

[2] Veissière et al., "Thinking Through Other Minds"

[3] Ed Yong, "Empathy With Your Future Self"

[4] Iroquois Constitution

[5] Bouizegarene et al., "Narrative as Active Inference"

[6] Marshall Ganz, "Public Narrative, Collective Action, and Power"

[7] Yuval Levin, "When Institutions Are Used As Stages, People Lose Trust"

[8] Henry Rosemont Jr., "Cooperating Interrelated Role-bearing Persons" 

[9] A.T. Ariyaratne, "Sarvodaya"

[10] Dolega and Dewhurst, "Fame in the Predictive Brain"

[11] Bruineberg et al., "Free-energy Minimization in Joint Agent-Environment Systems"

[12] Linson et al., "The Active Inference Approach to Ecological Perception"

[13] Andy Clark, "Surfing Uncertainty"

[14] Conant and Ashby, "Every Good Regulator of a System must be a Model of that System"

[15] Friston et al., "Sophisticated Inference"

[16] Friston et al., "Sentience and the Origins of Consciousness"

[17] Donna Haraway, "Staying with the Trouble"

[18] Eduardo Kohn, "How Forests Think"

[19] Ramstead et al., "Variational Ecology and the Physics of Sentient Systems"

[20] Peter Sterling, "Principles of Allostasis"