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| The Oracle |
A monk said to Joshu, “I have entered this monastery. I beg you to teach me.”
Joshu asked, “Have you eaten your rice gruel?”
“I have,” replied the monk.
“Then”, said Joshu, “go and wash your bowl.”
Oracle: OK, now I'm supposed to say, "Hmm, that's interesting, but..." then you say...
Neo: ..."but what?"
Oracle: But... you already know what I'm going to tell you.
"He doesn't realize that he's already a part of the Neverending Story." - Childlike Empress
“I have watched you perform in the opera of life. You have shown great timing and skill; however you never went beyond the role you played.” - The Grandmaster
Summary
Gregory Bateson argued that any condition of ecosystem collapse would be characterized first by a collapse in its communicative order. In light of this, to paraphrase Eduardo Kohn, “our job is to provide a better account for how our ecology of scripts becomes (or fails to become) attuned to the world". The implementation of an ecological scripts paradigm may help to preserve this order. A script is a list of explicit, goal oriented instructions and contextual cues for agent-environment systems that directs situationally appropriate behavior within a niche/schema and indicates affordances or possibilities for action. Learning how to leverage these epistemic cues enhances performance (e.g., memory recall, reaction times, etc.). Observation of the actions of another person can help us infer our role in a script, and predict the next actions. They provide us with the ability to engage in cooperative action by avoiding ‘unexpected’ states of uncoordinated or contextually inappropriate action; i.e., ‘this is how we do things here (and not in other ways)’. Scripts enable inference to the best prediction; e.g., ‘what would happen if I did that’. Having access to a variety of meaningful and coherent scripts is positively associated with adaptive functioning (i.e., elevated psychological well-being and absence of psychiatric disorders). The niche serves a crucial function. It should be able to predict a certain pattern of behavior, provide only the relevant and salient tools, offer feedback on whether the role is enacted properly, and enable us to infer what the proper policy to adopt is in order to maintain a script. Script phylogenies, possibly expressed in the form of cladograms, can record the most common scripts, and flowcharts can display functional relationships among a collection of scripts (cf. monitoring, infrastructure, policy, and resources). By using an ecological scripts paradigm we can potentially incorporate greater salience into climate action plans and make that explicit to all stakeholders, rather than just having a laundry list of items that may only be loosely integrated together, appear incongruous, or have little relevance to members and the problems or goals that matter most to them. This can also promote stigmergic collaboration, a form of decentralized global coordination through local action.
Introduction
The Wachowskis created two characters, the Oracle and the Architect, who try to synchronize people with their environment in a fictional dystopian world. The Oracle understands that the only way to do that is by understanding how the mind brings forth the future. She was programmed to investigate and understand the human psyche, and this enhanced understanding of how the mind operates provided her with the ability to make uncannily accurate predictions. But these were only calculated probabilities, presented as riddles, disguising an inherent uncertainty that was never fully removed. She's described as an “intuitive program” within the matrix simulation, so we can assume her various actions were subroutines within her program that correspond roughly to “social scripts”. In The Matrix, when Neo sees the Oracle she is a grandmotherly type completing a task (a script or subroutine). She's been working the dough, she's dolloped it, and even waited precisely for the cookies to be ready. She enacts scripts associated with grandmothers, bakers, counselors, and prophets, which Neo would be familiar with and instantly recognize. In The Matrix Reloaded, she says “We’re all here to do what we’re all here to do. I’m interested in one thing, Neo, the future. And believe me, I know – the only way to get there is together.” Like her, we predict the future by inferring which scripts to enact, trying to guess which would best synchronize our minds with each other and the world around us.
Scripts reflect the context, relationships, and telos from which they emerge. They combine both “journey and destination” elements into a single social construction. This defines one half of their utility. The other half lies in the degree to which they can be consistently predictable and yield roughly deterministic results. The combination of trying to capture complexity while making simple generalizations means that scripts are more often a loose heuristic than a strict algorithm. Their resemblance to a computer program is only insofar as they describe a predictable series of steps or actions, which may or may not yield the desired results in application. There are potentially innumerable scripts. The tension in the Matrix film revolves around which script(s) the characters ultimately enact to resolve uncertainty. Sometimes, even though they follow all the steps, they don’t achieve the desired goal, and other times they achieve the desired goal by following a variant series of operations. The script concept allows for these divergent possiblilities by including a strong form (which is more programmatic) and a weak form (which is less focused on process and more goal oriented).
Mahault Albarracin and coauthors recently published two excellent papers on the topic of “scripts”. If you've heard about "roles" and "narratives", they you already have an idea of what this concept entails, as it draws upon the dramaturgical metaphor as well. I've mentioned roles before. That idea is a common part of colloquial speech, and formally used by Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont Jr. in their books and articles about Confucian role ethics. They used the idea to criticize the hyper-competitive individualism of Western consumer capitalism and described the possibility of a more cooperative and harmonious social alternative that could emerge from perspectives in Eastern philosophy. Returning to Albarracin, the utility of scripts as a concept is that it further refines the notion of roles, and illuminates new ways for understanding social relationships, particularly when combined with the active inference process theory. Below I’ll quote large sections from several papers to show why this is important. In "Gender Fluidity as Affordance Negotiation" Albarracin provides a very good definition of scripts, using the example of gender roles. In Albarracin’s paper we read:
“A script is a form of knowledge structure about the sequence of events to be expected in a given setting. A social script can be thus seen as a meaningful script an individual has constructed from living in society, and having to exploit its group dynamics. Scripts fashion our perception of the world, and our understanding of social spaces. Scripts surround conceptual spaces and render the world intelligible... Nested social scripts create identifiable roles for agents to embody. Roles simply define clusters of scripts that an individual will embody to guide their behavior in different settings in relation to socially sanctioned goals. A role acknowledges that individuals are positioned in the world, and do not simply perceive all possible affordances equally [as these are constrained by their position in society]. Certain affordances, based on the script clusters the individual embodies, will be made more salient, and allow for normative social scenes to unfold predictably and relatively smoothly… Agents with a larger variety of available scripts have a greater capacity for adaptation to most situations. It is thus highly adaptive for agents to have a greater capacity for change in their repertoire and be less constrained while staying intelligible.
“If an individual, socially recognized through associations as signifying a role, fails to embody the scripts of that role according to social expectations, they are punished or ostracized by the group. Derogating from a role is risking to be socially unintelligible, and thus, unpredictable, affording “the wrong” actions. This lack of predictability can be bothersome for other agents for a host of reasons, including the generation of prediction errors, the breakdown of cultural sensorimotor loops, and the social threat to hierarchy and functioning.”
“What enables social agents to act in situationally appropriate ways is a shared set of instructions or normative prescriptions for situationally appropriate behaviour. In order to act as a cohesive social group in which every agent knows and enacts their role, agents must share a common body of knowledge1 (i.e., a script) that prescribes situationally appropriate modes of being. This is metaphorically akin to actors sharing a dramaturgical script, hence the name of the construct. Scripts are used in scientific theories to shed light on how internalized psychological models are integrated with externalised social models, by drawing on a pool of common styles of performance and cognition through contextualised acts (e.g., speech acts) and their ensued actions driven by goals.”Sequencing is a property that is shared with policies (i.e., beliefs about action sequences), which also connect past, present, and future events into an integrated whole. With this relationship between scripts and narratives we can now look at the paper “Narrative as Active Inference”, where Bouizegarene and coauthors write:
“Active inference is an interesting candidate framework to develop a model of the dual nature of scripts, as internal schema, and as external social order… We leverage the dual aspect of active inference (i.e., its appeal to dynamics internal and external to the agent) to dispel the tension and apparent contradiction between internalist and externalist renditions of the script construct. Active inference can be used just as well to account for the structure and function of externally realised cognitive functions (e.g., extended cognition), as it can be used to describe the internal dynamics of agents; and it provides the requisite flexibility to accommodate the representation of both explicit scripted sequences of events (strong scripts) and typical event type features (weak scripts).”
“From the point of view of active inference, adopting a script allows an agent to minimize its free-energy both by enabling them to avoid spending limited resources sampling elements of the environment at random to figure out which social goal to conform to, and also by limiting the occurrence of errors when trying to achieve that social goal. Technically, scripts play the role of empirical priors that, in effect, simplify belief updating by constraining the degrees of freedom used in modelling exchanges with the (usually prosocial) econiche… Scripts come to be widespread by creating sensitivity to deontic cues and promoting social coordination.”
“Observation of the actions of another agent can help an agent infer their role in a script, and predict the next actions… By clearly identifying the formal role of internal and external script elements—as well as what weak scripts and strong scripts entail in a cognitive and ecological structure—we can begin to leverage the model to identify the moment-to-moment dynamics of interactions between social agents in a given context. We can identify how narratives influence expected behaviour and contextual framing… Scripts are similar to narratives; their proximity comes from the causal relations between events. Sequencing of the events in the scripts entails a progression over time—a narrative.”
“In social and personality psychology, narratives are conceived as a kind of cognitive schema, or a form of thought instantiated in the brains of individuals, and used to imagine, interpret, reason about, plan, and evaluate actions and situations. Two main kinds of narrative schema have been the focus of research: narratives of specific events and general or associative narratives that organize information about personal lives into meaningful themes, developmental arcs, and self-depictions, thereby increasing the coherence of our identity… The coherent grounding of the future in the past also helps to ensure the maintenance of goal pursuit. The Narrative Practice Hypothesis (NPH) argues that storytelling and other ways of giving narrative accounts of experience (to oneself and to others) are fundamentally social practices that derive their meaning from particular social contexts and that have instrumental functions: generating or conveying expectations, regulating self-presentation, negotiating relationships, and generally serving to position the narrator vis-à-vis others in the environment. According to the NPH, human agents learn to provide reasons for their own and others’ actions over the course of their development.
“The capacity to build and share narratives evolved largely because they provide group members with the ability to engage in cooperative action by avoiding ‘unexpected’ states of uncoordinated or contextually inappropriate action; i.e., ‘this is how we do things here (and not in other ways)’. Having access to a variety of meaningful and coherent narratives, such as general events, lifetime period, and life stories, is positively associated with adaptive functioning (i.e., elevated psychological well-being and absence of psychiatric disorders). Narratives provide hypotheses that enable inference to the best prediction; e.g., ‘what would happen if I did that’ or ‘what would happen if I am the sort of person who…’. They provide a way to generate the right kinds of hypotheses to navigate socially-constituted and encultured worlds.”
In their paper "Deep Neurophenomenology", Ramstead et. al write that "Active inference explains the mechanics of enacting the policies that compel us most. But the deepest structure of conscious experience is summarized in concern or care: our conscious experience is directed towards, and motivated by, events and things in our world, including other humans, which have meaning and significance to us. Things do not leave us unaffected, and we are constantly affectively regulating one another... We exist in an incredibly complex social world that would be impossible to navigate and manage today without participating in (and having confidence in) the vast network of social-technological weaves that help us to manage the day to day complexity and volatility. A consensual commitment to a shared narrative (and generative model) makes the prosocial world easier to navigate and is essential to interpersonal coherence. If we become estranged from that narrative, if we become estranged from that world of meaning and the others who are first and foremost a source of that meaning, then the volatility could be overwhelming." If having access to a variety of scripts (and the narratives they compose) is associated with greater adaptive functioning, then perhaps a virtual (augmented/mixed) layer over our social world could make those scripts more salient, and thereby highlight existing and new affordances. But even without that, current social-technological capabilities should be able to realize this goal with just a simple smartphone "script app".
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| Source: Bryan Duggan |
In another paper titled “Losing Ourselves: Active Inference, Depersonalization, and Meditation”, George Deane and coauthors note that “the more we identify with our specific concerns or roles, the more intense the motivation to bring about those states in the world”. This is one reason why understanding scripts is important – not so that we identify with them, so much as that we utilize their ability to motivate action to address specific concerns and bring about states in the world necessary for social health and allostatic functioning. As Deane put it, the “opacification” of mental processes, such as those identified by Albarracin, “opens the way for a new perspective of the self and a new layer for control to emerge”. (Phenomenal transparency and opacity, according to Thomas Metzinger, can be placed along a gradient of phenomenal “epistemic reliability” or “realness”: transparency is experienced as mind-independent (external) reality while opacity is experienced as mind-dependent (internal) abstraction.) Although Deane and coauthors restricted their level of analysis primarily to the individual level, it is certainly possible, like Albarracin, to apply this to a multi-level context and the suprapersonal level of society. Furthermore, the choice blindness paradigm serves as another reminder that people can demonstrate flexibility in the attitudes, positions, and scripts they hold, opening up additional perspectives for understanding across political divides.
Workforce Scripts
In “What’s the Future and Why It’s Up To Us,” Tim O’Reilly wrote: “Systems we have built to serve us no longer do so, and we don't know how to stop them. Financial markets have become a machine that its creators no longer fully understand, and the goals and operation of that machine have become radically disconnected from the market of real goods and services that it was originally created to support.” Contrary to what fundamentalist ideologies assert, global processes (whether economic, political, or environmental) are changing in ways that challenge earlier categorizations. The rules we devised to model and influence human behavior produced mixed outcomes, to put it mildly. But once we become aware of how and why this occurred, we can build better models, we can rewrite the rules, and we can change the scripts. Logistics planning and analysis can integrate numerous processes (scripts) in real time and at scale to ensure efficient operation. For this reason, there are fewer barriers to providing everyone with universal basic services (UBS), which are premised on a growing understanding about the "basic needs" of societies for public health.
Due to their existential implications, basic services form a core subset of all social processes. Re-imagining economic activity in terms of these basic public health functions gained national attention in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time the dialogue centered on this notion of basic needs and critical services carried out by essential workers. But we are now able to reconceive this at the lower level of critical skills (critical scripts). These are the specific skills/ scripts/ subroles/ subroutines that are combined in various ways by workers to provide essential services and make essential goods. And so, instead of training people for a specific job or role in the economy, we can train them in active inference. Active: Workers must be able to perform critical scripts that are applicable for a wide range of jobs and roles. Inference: Workers must be able to infer which scripts (or combinations of internal and external scripts) are necessary to maintain allostasis under any set of conditions; there is rarely a time when we do not use them. Clearly, the ability to use one's mind and body in this manner is already a function of education and training. And a resume is intended to prove this by communicating an individual's skills and track record of inferential experience. The typical career path of a worker today will take them to many different jobs (for which remuneration may not correlate with the social value they provide), so focusing more on lower level scripts and inferential capabilities, and less on the higher level job titles and increasingly irrelevant categories, enables the flexibility and adaptation our emerging "smart world" circular economy requires. To be more specific, what will these scripts focus on? On the ability to grow and make things, to develop and maintain things, whether those things are our bodies, our dwellings, or our ecologies. We will see how the nurse and the mechanic have functionally similar work scripts. And we need the "meta-scripts" that show how appropriate inferences are made and position a larger corpus of scripts in a continuum with "the totality of things" (per Braidotti). The critical mind-reflective arts and humanities contain many such meta-scripts.
The perennial complaint of all high school students is "When will I ever use this after I graduate?" There are several possible responses. We do know that school derives from a Western cultural script, often fails to reflect multiculturalism, and despite this still doesn't adequately prepare young people for a rapidly changing job economy. This is true to a greater or lesser degree, and we know Foucault wrote far more scathing critiques of the school system. We can ask whether school helps to prepare students to recognize and reject the rampant spread of conspiracy theories in politics and health care, and denialist propaganda regarding history and science. This much is needed at a minimum. But what we want from our education is to gain familiarity with a "common pool of information" that provides a useful starting point to engage others in dialogue, and then begin to outwardly expand that pool with the intention of improving our ability to synchronize our lives with each other and the world. To do all this, one way or another children must begin to actively acquire a "corpus of scripts" while they are still young. School is a place where this should be pursued, though it happens in the home and everywhere else as well. We must work with our children, help them think critically about which scripts are useful, how and why they might help us later in life, and which we can improve or uncover where missing. In a positive sounding move, Finland mandated that "phenomenon-based learning", a process where new information is applied to the phenomenon or problem, be provided alongside traditional subject-based instruction. Could this be considered a step in the direction of "script-based learning"?
External Scripts
It is very difficult to merely act, or persuade others to act, regardless of how nuanced one's physical understanding of Earth systems may be, or how noble, in intention, one's appeal to a sense of interbeing or humanistic values may be. Instead it may be more fruitful to create an environment, a milieu, in which action can take root and from which it emerges. When behavioral therapists attempt to change individual habits, one of the most effective strategies (among others) is to prevent the problematic situation from occurring to begin with by taking steps to separate a person from the triggering conditions and replace those conditions with healthier alternatives. (Or perversely, make them more available, if addiction and maladaptation is one's goal.) Adaptation that relies primarily on conscious behavioral interventions (will power alone) can be slow, difficult, or impossible, especially at larger scales. Behavioral change involves making corresponding changes in our environments, our ecological niche/ schema/ external scripts, so that new habits have a supportive context within which to take root and grow. "And no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish. But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both are preserved." (Luke 5:37-38)
There are several important ideas within the external script concept described in "A Variational Approach to Scripts". An external script is a list of explicit instructions for "situationally appropriate behaviour implicit in conventions maintained by the institution" (the institutional norms). In other words, the individual has an ecology of contextual cues that directs their behaviour and allows them to perceive affordances or possibilities for action. This ecology of cues are embodied in "externally realised cognitive functions offloaded to the niche". These cues "constrain social possibilities and experience by harnessing institutional norms of allowable behavior". Constant et al. note that learning how to leverage these epistemic cues enhances performance (e.g., memory recall, reaction times, etc.). We can now think of the environment as a model of the social script, which physically offers patterned observations (regimes of attention that indicate the most reliable channels of information) to guide our actions. The niche can predict a certain pattern of behaviour, provide only the relevant and salient tools, offer feedback on whether the role is enacted properly, and enable us to infer what the proper policy to adopt is in order to maintain a social script.
The importance of external scripts within Albarracin's papers may be difficult to fully appreciate. Two years ago I wrote an article titled "Governance through Milieu" that dealt with that subject, though not from this more comprehensive perspective of active inference. That article began by summarizing Jennifer Gabrys' paper "Programming Environments: Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City". Similar concepts such as those of affordances and "pleasurable troublemakers" might be grouped under this heading. Many of Gabrys' insights were echoed by others. In the field of architecture, Christopher Alexander's concept of a "feel for the whole" captured how the act of designing the structure of our ecosystem also shapes the quality of social interactions and the mental health of society itself. Rosi Braidotti noted that “The conventional Humanities suffer from a lack of adequate concepts to position subjectivity in a continuum with the totality of things.” Looking back now, this is of course exactly what the dual aspect of active inference (i.e., its appeal to dynamics internal and external to the agent) can help provide. Braidotti has referred to herself as a neo-Spinozist, and according to Spinoza all things are modes of a common substance, and every mode is in turn a mosaic of simpler parts; all things can both mod(e)ify and be modified by others. This fractal perspective is shared by Karl Friston, but also famously Anaxagoras and Buddhist philosophers. Jane Bennett in "Vibrant Matter", chapter 2 "The Agency of Assemblages” agrees, and persuasively argues that we need a conceptualization of the part-whole relationship that reflects this “mosaicism" and the continual invention, and formation of alliances, assemblages, and synergies it entails (Peter Corning, "Synergistic Selection"). Donna Haraway sees this process unfolding even now, in letting go of the dictates of bounded, possessive individualism, human exceptionalism, and zero-sum games, and replacing these with a world of holobionts, holobiomes, and symbiogenesis within an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (“Staying with the Trouble,” chapter 3 “Sympoiesis”). Without naming them as such, N. Katherine Hayles also describes internal and external scripts when she said "I am experimenting with the idea of biosemiotics and overlapping (never entirely coinciding) umwelten of humans and computational media. Yes, there are profound differences in embodiment, but there are also functional homologies." For her, these umwelten combine to form a "planetary cognitive ecology", an idea that David Grinspoon explored with his notion of "Terra Sapiens", borrowing as it does from Vernadsky's noösphere, among other progenitors. Hayles' "computational media" and Gabrys' "environmentality" are functionally equivalent terms for the "external scripts" of Albarracin's variational approach. Active inference provides a means for integrating the idealist and materialist perspectives, which is necessary if we are to maintain allostasis. If we only use internal scripts, we will be frustrated and fail. If we only use external scripts, we will likewise be confused and fail. They must be used together.
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| "All the world's a stage" - Shakespeare |
There have been several syncretic ecological attempts to unify the sciences and humanities. To name just a few: Howard Odum's inherently semiotic energy quality (embodied labor) calculus, about which Stanley Salthe wrote: "The thermodynamic need to specify work implies semiotics, and energy quality is inherently semiotic. Work requires information." This has been recently pursued by Sholto Maud who tried to see "all the myriad pathways of our complex natural and socio-economic environment", and Corrado Giannantoni's "thermodynamics of quality". Another attempt to find consilience is found within the biosemiotic unification of mind and matter (as pursued by Eduardo Kohn, Almo Farina, and N. Katherine Hayles), and more recently the Free Energy Principle's description of generalized synchrony, which offers several advances over the former two (as pursued by Maxwell Ramstead, and others). The notion of signification (semiotics) is relevant to all three, and it's possible to describe a concentric relationship between semiotics, semantics, and scripts, and how scripts integrate semiotics and action. We can create scripts for a eudaemonic life, for greater compassion, and for balancing what Lisa Feldman Barrett calls the "body budget", whether that is on the individual, social, or global scale. Scripts function using environmental cues that are connected to certain "schemas of anticipated lived experience", per Catherine Legg's paper "Discursive Habits: A Representationalist Re-Reading of Teleosemiotics". A common example of this is the importance of having good "sleep hygiene" and arranging evening habits, triggered by cues such as dimming light and lower activity levels, so that they lead to progressive relaxation before going to bed. By intelligently arranging cues one can influence behaviors toward any desired end, shifting lifestyle patterns from those that are harmful to those that are healthy.
There are many scripts that are good and useful, for negotiating relationships, for apologizing, for courtship and mating, for improving emotional health, our sense of embeddedness, and extending the field of care (as with the sustainable compassion meditation scripts that Condon and Makransky wrote). There are scripts for the cyclical daily/weekly/annual rhythms where energy and activity levels dwindle before rising again. Karl Friston, for example, has remarked that he sticks to a regimented daily routine. Notably, in the age of acceleration this sort of script has been increasingly replaced by nonstop scripts that lead to early exhaustion and burnout.
Scripts need "stopping cues". Without that they get caught in a kind of infinitely repeating, never ending loop. As Adam Alter noted, "One of the reasons we spend so much time on smartphone apps that make us unhappy is because they rob us of stopping cues. Stopping cues were everywhere in the 20th century. They were baked into everything we did. A stopping cue is basically a signal that it's time to move on, to do something new, to do something different. But the way we consume media today is such that there are no stopping cues. The news feed just rolls on, and everything's bottomless: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, the news. And when you do check all sorts of other sources, you can just keep going on and on and on. ...We're really bad at resisting temptation. But when you have a stopping cue that, every time dinner begins, my phone goes far away, you avoid temptation all together." When stopping cues are not present to children, parents need to enforce them with, for example, set times for going to bed and waking in the morning, a few of the many scripts used daily to help regulate the behaviors and health of ourselves and others.
This recalls what Hassenzahl and Laschke called an "aesthetic of friction." It's an important idea; something we need to understand better. Jerome Groopman writes: "The path to breaking bad habits lies not in resolve but in restructuring our environment in ways that sustain good behaviors... The central force for eliminating bad habits, according to Wendy Wood, is "friction". However businesses all around us try to reduce friction. A cashier taking an order at McDonald’s is scripted to ask, “Would you like fries with that?” This simple question encourages us to eat more fat and carbs. Binge-watching on Netflix or Hulu is facilitated by the way that the next episode starts automatically as the credits roll on the previous one. Wood talks to M. Keith Chen, a former head of economic research for Uber, who explains that the app was designed to minimize friction. “The phone’s GPS knows where you are,” he says. “You don’t even need to think about it... You get out without handling cash.”
Before starting anything that has no stopping cue, whose scripts may surreptitiously lead us where we may not consciously wish to go (a fair description of social media scripts), it's important to be aware of what we are getting ourselves into and first ask ourselves what we are there to do. Social media companies, especially those funded by advertising revenue, have refined a very effective delivery mechanism for parasitizing and brainwashing minds by derailing individuals from the scripts they originally initiated and replacing them with alternative scripts that instantiate new desires and beliefs.4 Be aware of which friends you follow on social media, whether Facebook or Twitter, and which newsfeeds, such as Pocket, you subscribe to. Understand the value of common pools of information that we share and seek greater synchrony, consensus building, and healthy, balanced relationships. Combined weekly usage should not be excessive and only to the extent that it helps to infer the scripts worth our time and energy to engage with.
There are several other scripts that are particularly harmful and pernicious, and science denialists predictably return to these whenever they seek to undermine progress in addressing a problem that has widespread social consequences, often with the hidden intent to avoid responsibility and its associated costs and continue exploitative practices. Michael Mann, Dana Nuccitelli, and others have outlined what has been called the "stages of denial" in regard to climate change, and Nuccitelli recently highlighted how this script was adapted to COVID-19 denial as well. He summarized these:
1. It's not happening.
2. It's not our fault.
3. It's not that bad.
4. Solutions are too costly.
5. It's too late.
Sean Carroll wrote that there are "six principal plays" in the denialist playbook:
1. Doubt the Science.
2. Question Scientists’ Motives and Integrity.
3. Magnify Disagreements among Scientists.
4. Exaggerate Potential Harm.
5. Appeal to Personal Freedom.
6. Reject Whatever Would Repudiate A Key Philosophy.
If there is one thing we can almost always count on, it is that due to how effective they have been, these scripts crop up again and again whenever someone is motivated by greed. However, we can learn to recognize and stop them, and replace them with scripts that value health and sustainability, which serve to protect us from harm rather than expose us to greater danger. Recently we have seen political parties and members of the media enacting a familiar social script on the national stage, Rebecca Solnit called it the “coercive control” script, and for whatever reasons, we’ve become so inured that we don’t widely recognize it. “It didn’t work in marriages [and] it is not working as national policy either.” By identifying the script, Solnit has provided us with the ability to see more clearly and, one hopes, break free from it. It also removes much of the appeal of bothsidesism or false equivalence. How blind must a person be to claim that both parties in an abusive relationship should be viewed as functionally equivalent and treated more or less equally?
Most work will involve identifying the differences among scripts, whether they are healthy, and if so inferring the conditions for their appropriate use. There are also "anti-script scripts", which can be useful too. Laukkonen and Slagter write: "Some meditators can volitionally enter states that gradually deconstruct self-representations, including the narrative self and the minimal self, and through more advanced practices may be able to collapse the subject-object distinction. According to the "many-to-one" model, this gradual deconstruction of the self-hierarchy is a natural consequence of resting in the here and now, because as meditation ‘prunes the counterfactual tree’ (flattening the predictive hierarchy) it necessarily also prunes one’s sense of self, from a narrative form of selfhood all the way to selfless awareness."
If we ask which scripts are meaningful to ourselves alone, but go no further, the real value and potential is lost. The question is, which of all these scripts are most meaningful to others? Which of these are meaningful within our larger associations? Where do they coincide and where do they diverge? Only by carefully studying and learning these things, only by seeing through the eyes of another, by viewing the world as those who have cared for us and whom we care for in return, will we discover what is truly meaningful. So here's an experiment: identify the scripts we use, what they consist of, where these coincide with and diverge from each other, and how they influence our relationships. We can begin by trying to characterize the body of scripts2 (with stopping cues) that might encompass a typical day from dawn to dusk for a single family, as played out over the diurnal cycle of rising and falling physical energy levels. Each family member must infer and attend to the scripts that are shared and those that others follow, and assist where these may be difficult, both in the present and the imagined future. There are the scripts for basic daily household chores, the maintenance scripts, etc.
Situating scripts in a broader context
Wendy Wheeler wrote: "It seems clear that we are living through a shift, or development, from an Age of Mechanism to an Age of Information. The latter will, I believe, eventually come to be expanded and better understood as a Third Age of Systems and Semiosis which is characterised by relational and semiotic ontologies.” Maurice Conti believes this new age will include a more circular economy: "I think we're going to see a world where we're moving from things that are fabricated to things that are farmed. Where we're moving from things that are constructed to that which is grown. We're going to move from being isolated to being connected. And we'll move away from extraction to embrace aggregation. I also think we'll shift from craving obedience from our things to valuing autonomy." In this context autonomy implies sharing control (and capacities) with proactive systems. Why should we do that? The task of restoring a circular economy is too big for any of us to do unaided. This is a very important point, because sharing control means forming cooperative, trusting relationships, and that, I would argue, requires a realist perspective.
Realists and nominalists3 characterize two main lines of thought on how to engage with complex systems. As Cornelis de Waal wrote: "Whereas the nominalist claims that only individuals are real, the realist holds that relations are as real as the individual objects they relate." Wendy Wheeler pointed out that environmental consciousness has been fighting the “nominalist turn of mind” for a long time. While no one fits neatly into either category, we can still hazard a guess as to who the most promising nominalists and realists are today. Among the nominalists I might place Alex Pentland’s “social physics”, Harari’s “dataism”, and various computational social sciences and algorithmic approaches to governance. Among the realists are biosemioticians (Peirce), ecological psychologists (Gibson), and the community of researchers developing the free energy principle (FEP) and active inference framework (Friston). As I see the distinction, nominalists are concerned with causal relations, but, as Wheeler perceptively wrote, “Under a nominalist dispensation there is no morality or ethical principle discernible in the world that is distinct from human impositions of fictions, not even the principle of natural and cultural flourishing or the obviously telic behaviors of living things.” This marks the division clearly, and it's notable in this context that the FEP is a normative (ethical) principle that attempts to answer the question “What is life?” and in doing so arrives at a realist, relational, conclusion: life seeks to maintain a non-equilibrium steady state of allostatic balance.
I believe that understanding the differing emphases, implications, and research agendas associated with realists and nominalists puts us in a position to best utilize the products of each. In particular, I think we can translate nominalist algorithms/computational science/social physics into realist social scripts. Scripts are at the level of daily human interactions, and are prima facie relational - it's how people naturally think about the world around us. And when we ground these scripts in the deeper understanding of agents and generative models that operate with a telos of holistic synchronization (the FEP/active inference perspective), a general theory of entire ecological systems emerges into view. Where do we go from here? Combining the work of biosemiotician and cultural anthropologist Eduardo Kohn with the NRM research of Almo Farina and the ecological cognitive work from an FEP/active inference perspective, such as that of Mahault Albarracin, suggests that "ecological scripts" could help shed light on the possible policy implications of reports like last year's "Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services" and lead to new ways of approaching the various climate action plans whose development they inform.
Another paper titled "Is the Free-Energy Principle a Formal Theory of Semantics?"
appears to be fully committed to a relational view of life and not far
removed from Rosen's 'relational biology'. Section one hits all the high
notes: "The primary aim of cognition is not internally reconstructing
proxies for the structure of a hidden world, but rather to adapt to and
act in an environment." Again: "More precisely, if the supposed
representational content cannot be determined without appealing to what
we know about the cognitive activity itself, then it is the cognitive
activity that has explanatory power." The authors write, this is "a
nuanced form of realism that is apt to provide a naturalistic basis for
the study of intentionality".
Almo Farina and Eduardo Kohn: Ecological Scripts and Epistemic Cues
When Confucius was asked what he would do if he was a governor he said he would "rectify the names" to make words correspond to reality, a doctrine that originated with Mozi (470–391BC) and the Chinese school of logicians. Without such accordance between designations and relationships, it was argued that social harmony would collapse and "undertakings would not be completed." He said "If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success." (Analects, Book XIII, Chapter 3, verses 4–7, translated by James Legge). Terence McKenna said “The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.” So how do we know that actions will be completed successfully, and that we can exercise agency in the world? Confucius and McKenna expressed nominally semiotic concerns, but words are, in fact, fractals encoding relational, processural, narrative action(s). They are essentially scripts, each a small fraction of a greater story, and like all fractals, as above so below.
Almo Farina, in his paper "A Biosemiotic Perspective of the Resource Criterion: Toward a General Theory of Resources" describes how many nonhuman 'agents' ascribe value to goods and services. As the title indicates, semiotic relationships, and webs of relationships, hold the key to understanding value. If we further develop his thesis, we can see how these webs form identifiable ‘ecological scripts’ that define roles and relationships, and extend meaning, planning horizons, and predictive capacity. They hold the key to how reliable inferences for synchronization are made, and how successful interventions are introduced when necessary. Describing ‘resources and their relationships with organisms’ as a body of ecological scripts may be a useful way to approach to a ‘unified ecology’ of natural and human oriented processes. This could also be an important tool with which to justify and address the new proactive behaviour that humans ought to adopt to reduce the growing risk of an irreversible deterioration in the entire Earth system. It may be that our greatest problems aren't caused by any overtly malicious intent, but rather a reliance on maladaptive ecological scripts (resulting from ineptitude and/or a misapprehension of reality).
In "Honeybees, Communicative Order, and the Collapse of Ecosystems" Harris-Jones wrote "Gregory Bateson argued that any condition of ecosystem collapse would be characterized first by a collapse in its communicative order... The ‘pattern which connects’, Bateson’s phrase, is vital to our understanding of mutual causality. If he is correct,‘the patterns that disconnect,’ are equally important to understand. For it is these which will bring about ecosystem degradation - perhaps collapse - even before the slower biophysical effects of global warming become apparent." There are many examples of ecological scripts that have been impoverished and desecrated by the disruption of agents or other features of the ecosystem essential to their successful enactment. In some cases, through ecological restoration, wilderness engineering, deliberate rewilding, and other strategies for directed ecosystem transformation, these scripts have been successfully restored. In an evolutionary sense, there are trees that don’t yet realize that the megafauna are gone. Without the megafauna, seed dispersal became far less efficient. Recently, the addition of nonnative horses, cows, and other proxy herbivores helped return these plants to their earlier range of distribution. We can see this in terms of ecological scripts (semiotic webs of relationships). The plants follow an ecological script, encoded in the form of a generative model, in which megafauna eat their fruit and disperse their seeds. After the megafauna were removed that script was no longer enacted. But the later addition of horses and cows filled that role once again, and the script functioned as originally intended, more or less. The critical aspect, as far as the trees are concerned, isn’t the particular megafauna species per se, so much as the ecological processes that the script assumes will be carried out.
As Donna Haraway noted, communication always, to some extent, involves communion with and a "becoming with," others. "Beings do not preexist their relatings." Life is of fundamental necessity inherently communicative and social. Because organisms live in communities and not in isolated hermetically sealed worlds, communication processes structure and organise individual behaviour and the larger community. According to Eduardo Kohn, what we share with nonhuman living creatures is not just our physical bodies, but also the fact that we all live with and through these ecological scripts and epistemic cues. He pointed out that the Western world is seeing a rise in political figures like Trump in part because demagogues can exploit aspects of the larger ‘ecology of scripts’ that we haven't been able to fully account for (cf. Bateson's "ecology of mind"). And so our job is to provide a better account for how our ecology of scripts becomes (or fails to become) attuned to the world. To paraphrase Matteo Colombo, "There are many scripts that are maladaptive, harmful, morally abhorrent, or just lack any value or social function. In order to change or restore scripts, significant public policy efforts are being made to intervene and target people’s expectations and conditioned preferences for following those scripts. Let's evaluate the prospects for real-world interventions.”
We need to incorporate significance into a climate action plan and make that significance explicit for all members, rather than just having a laundry list of items that may only be loosely integrated together, appear incongruous, or have little relevance to members. We can do this, to use Dennett and Levin’s turn of phrase, by combining smaller parts of relational significance into larger aggregates, “scaling tiny, local goals into more grandiose ones belonging to a larger, unified self.” To paraphrase Karl Friston, “when you can write down the semiotic relationships/ generative models/ ecological scripts, you can create the kind of steady state system it describes". A website could feature scripts relevant to social problems/goals, like those applicable to a Green New Deal, or identify a problem area and the scripts relevant to addressing it. This may assist in identifying unmet needs and possible organizational improvements, spot inefficiencies, anticipate disruptions before they occur, facilitate adaptive changes, or simply offer a descriptive analysis of existing conditions with possible recommendations. Heuristic diagrams or flowcharts are another popular tool for delineating relationships and showing how everything is connected to everything else (for example, the feedback that exists between monitoring, infrastructure, policy, and resources). This approach was used to good effect in Fig. 2 from the IPBES report (5/6/19).
Applying A Variational Approach to Scripts
Almo Farina and Eduardo Kohn expressed the hope that, through using the tools of biosemiotics, they could, in fact, delineate the relevant elements and relationships, and find a foundation upon which to create equitable policy to preserve social and ecological health. I'm not aware of how successful they have been in reaching this aspirational goal, but I think that applying active inference to script theory (for the reasons outlined in Albarracin et al.) might get us closer. Where do we begin? Should we try to start with translation? If we translate a sample set of policies into the terms, concepts, and organizational structure suggested by a variational approach to scripts, what would it look like? Would we need to clearly identify specific internal and external script elements? Where scripts cluster into roles and narratives, and correlate with goals? Would we want to identify certain deontic cues and affordances? How will the niche provide relevant and salient tools, offer feedback, and, in general, enable script maintenance? What level of detail is useful? Most existing policies do not include the majority of this contextual information, but assuming script theory is able to characterize most behavioral interactions, we should be able to either collect or infer it at some level of resolution. Eventually this translation process, applied to many policies, might reveal a ‘corpus of scripts’ and certain repeating patterns and variations (or weak scripts). This data would be very useful - filter and categorize policies, sort them by element, goal, tool, or script. Multiple policies may share some features while otherwise differing in the majority of elements. Identify the similarities between scripts not normally associated with one another, for example between disparate occupational skills, or, applied to ecology, which elements of an econiche are functionally interchangeable with others. In short, anything Facebook or LinkedIn wanted to do with their ‘big data’ to create social and economic hypergraphs - big data on social scripts could replicate with possibly greater contextuality.
There are other interdisciplinary possibilities that immediately suggest themselves. Arran Gare is a very productive philosopher and biosemiotician who has authored "The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization'', which includes a section on biosemiotics. In my opinion, he rightly views semiotics (and it's roots in philosophical realism) as necessary to the overall project of an ecological civilization. If we can say there is a connection between these three (active inference, semiotics, and an EcoCiv project), the possibility of creating environmental policy through the lens of variational (eco)semiotics would be exciting. A policy, in the legal sense of the term, seems at least superficially similar to a 'behavioral script' of the kind described in Albarracin et al. or alternatively we might substitute the appropriate terminology from semiotics (see Catherine Legg's paper "Discursive Habits: A Representationalist Re-Reading of Teleosemiotics", as presented at GIBS2020). Biosemiotics hasn't been able to rigorously define a functional behavioral script until now, I would argue, without the significant explanatory toolkit provided by FEP/AI and, most critically, the development of the notion of "generalized synchrony", which again, has the potential to lend much more philosophical support to EcoCiv and, where my interest lies, the creation of a rigorous framework within which appropriate environmental policy can be developed and communicated to stakeholders.
A variational biosemiotics could motivate interdisciplinary investigations, particularly within environmental ethics and policy when extended to higher order beliefs and spatiotemporal levels. Jesper Hoffmeyer, one of the principal figures in the development of biosemiotics, was always an environmentalist first and foremost, so I can't help but imagine his immediate integration of these ideas and approach. This is the sort of approach that cultural anthropologist (and Indigenous rights activist) Eduardo Kohn would benefit from, particularly as described in his book "How Forests Think" and well as subsequent papers and presentations. Although not biosemiotician initially, he later worked with Deacon and others during the writing of his book, which extensively incorporated those ideas, and likely would welcome a more rigorous treatment. Additionally, Almo Farina, who has struggled (with some notable success) to articulate a 'General Theory of Resources' under a biosemiotic framework would likely also benefit for similar reasons. N. Katherine Hayles, who has written some very interesting criticisms of posthumanism and new materialisms (while appraising their many virtues), has some very interesting work on "cognitive ecologies". You likely encountered her already? This would certainly be of interest there as well.
Is it possible to take a specific problem area, identify the particular behavioral script and schema/niche that applies in that context, then metaphorically remove the harmful elements from that script/schema and replace these with corrective measures? Could a form of biosemiotic 'surgery' on behavioral scripts define the process of creating legal policy, via de-construction and re-construction in a more adaptive form? Is it furthermore possible to take a list of proposed policies, reveal the self-organizing dynamics and hidden structure that they are seeking to make explicit (or alternatively, have dismally failed to reflect, as the case may be), and use this knowledge to categorize them according to a 'variational ecosemiotic' phylogeny that interrelates each to the others and perhaps exposes a scalar hierarchical structure related to the dynamics of AI and the maintenance of allostasis/synchronization/ecological grip? This is somewhat similar to Almo Farina's intentions. Ernst Mayer's paper "Behavior and Systematics" also described how behavior traits may be specific characters in a taxonomic sense, though this here may be something more fundamental. If we can meaningfully do these by referencing an ecosemiotic perspective underwritten by the FEP/AI framework, and use such a process to inform administrative policy generation, would we see an intelligible structure of some sort emerge that is comparatively more useful than the loose congruity that, I might argue, defines the elements of many existing policy lists? And could this form a kind of 'lingua franca' among projects that value goals that are ostensibly aligned with an allostatic/general synchronization imperative, in other words those projects that seek to incorporate sustainability or multi-level NESS dynamics? Here I am thinking in a more political vein, projects pursuing social justice/welfare such as the 'Basic Needs' or 'Universal Basic Services' concept used by Peter Corning, Ian Gough, and Andrew Percy (which I understand is actively discussed in the UK), or the related 'Doughnut Economics' model proposed by Kate Raworth.
Organizing policies into several arbitrarily defined categories with ad hoc definitions does next to nothing to help communicate the need for policy change to a skeptical public or government body, nor does it facilitate policy implementation. I'd like to see a more unified, thoroughly systematic approach that would allow us to better leverage this understanding. In the absence of this, today the process is more piecemeal and accidental. Translating written policy from its current form does nothing to change the specific policies. The potential benefit however, as I see it, would lie in improving the implementation of existing policy, exposing inadequate policy, and potentially improving efforts to communicate the need for change. We already have an abundance of environmental policy suggestions, plans, reports, and strategies at the federal, state, and local levels of governance, so we are certainly not at a loss for good policy ideas. But these remain inadequately utilized because, in my opinion, to a significant degree we haven’t leveraged the social sciences to encourage the adoption of science based policy. Translating existing policy (regardless of level) could also expose its strengths/weaknesses. We can ask of any policy: Does it in fact provide a list of explicit, goal oriented instructions and contextual cues for agent-environment systems so as to direct situationally appropriate behavior, etc.? Coming from an ethnographic perspective like that of Eduardo Kohn, the best place to begin is at the local ground level, with a description of the existing dynamics using the conceptual tools of script theory. Once we understand where we are starting from it is up to stakeholders to decide whether, and if so how, the dynamics thereby exposed should be altered, or alternately, preserved. The nested structure of scripts might make describing higher level dynamics far more challenging. Critically, information must be presented in a form that stakeholders and elected officials (at any given level of governance) would typically operate with. That is to say, the mechanisms by which it operates and interfaces with existing social/environmental structures would need to be made salient to them (one of the chief virtues of script theory). In actual practice, we almost never entirely delete existing scripts, nor add scripts de novo, but typically modify existing scripts through a process of adaptive cultural evolution. How do we amend new elements or pathways to currently used scripts in order to intentionally shift the agent-environment dynamics in the direction of greater synchrony (as existing dynamics have tended to depart)?
Albarracin et al wrote: "Scripts may share similar clusters, or event sequences. These may be linked into tracks or decision trees, which inflect at script gates." The appearance of a braided river (a metaphor also used in evolutionary diagrams) comes to mind. It is useful to identify whether a policy element is a gate or not, because if it is avoidable then selection is driven by cultural values. In the context of policy and governance issues with a focus on social/ecological health and the post-fossil-fuel transition selection is more likely to be driven by necessity and basic needs fulfillment. Highlighting the similarities among clusters and event sequences makes policy creation easier and more modular. And pointing out which gates are avoidable provides stakeholders with greater freedom of choice and individual expression in the paths they take before they approach the unavoidable gates that constrain action. Since different scripts intersect with each other and share elements, there needs to be some way to indicate these modular and intersectional features, possibly using semantic graphs (semiotic networks). Some problems are easier to correlate with specific activities while others (such as those resulting from the overall increase in atmospheric GHG) may not be. Can we organize the policies used to address problem areas according to short/long term goals, or local/regional scales? How is causal or correlational information incorporated and effectively communicated? Some policies, such as a market wide revenue neutral carbon fee and dividend approach, have notably been criticized for being structurally problematic because they insist on the path of greatest resistance instead of finding a path of least resistance, though its advocates would likely suggest the opposite.
There are likely to almost always be more than one alternative scenario that can meet multiple policy objectives, and make some headway addressing the 'interpersonal utility comparison problem'. (Alex Pentland and other computational social scientists alluded to these possibilities in their descriptions of 'social physics', which seems to me to be a semiotic web/semiosphere in a less generally defined sense, but like the field of biosemiotics, without the explanatory toolkit provided by FEP/AI social physics appears to be limited when it comes to evaluating prescriptive legal policy.) 'Ecosemiotic scripts' can explore the 'semiotic space' of behavioral scripts. How would an ecosemiotic script approach sufficiently capture the relevant influences and reconceptualize the human relationship to the planet (at least within Alaska), while at the same time remaining succinct and clear to all parties? Some elements will invariably be made more salient than others. Nested systems impose certain constraints upon each other dependent upon the relationships among them, and these constraints are not currently internalized within contemporary governing processes - the scripts that policymakers engage with typically do not reflect the spatial and temporal depth of planetary dynamics, for example, which are just ignored or heavily discounted. But the use of more Sophisticated Inference might help address longer term consequences and greater planning horizons, and work toward synchronizing the multiple scales at which individual, social, and global processes occur, as well as inform behavioral scripts that are appropriate to the multiscale context of environmental action. The active inference perspective on the Gaia hypothesis described in the paper "Future Climates" is fascinating. Today we are faced with the additional challenge of including anthropogenic effects that are destabilizing Earth's non-equilibrium steady state. Recall that planetary astrobiologist David Grinspoon described "Terra Sapiens" and the "Sapiezoic aeon" (which could also benefit from an FEP perspective). In his book he explored various geoengineering scenarios that would introduce further complications.
After characterizing existing social/ecological dynamics within a coherent framework we can ask the "What if?" counterfactual questions. There should be full disclosure of this process and the anticipated results. If, after all that, changes are adopted that do in fact improve the synchrony between social and ecological systems, that would be the desired outcome. No top down imposition, manipulation, or deception, but full transparency that operates via agent empowerment where more possibilities for action/affordances are disclosed, etc. Through that process, former options that may have been harmful are no longer as attractive by comparison. If anything is altered by means of these tools, it is the agent's awareness, via new epistemic cues, of it's niche and social dynamics. Rather than manipulating narratives, there is instead an expansion of alternate narrative versions and substitutions for script elements. (See also Hassenzahl and Laschke's aesthetic of friction/convenience, Foucault's governmentality, and Thaler and Sunstein's "Nudge Theory" or "choice architecture".) Given the reality and magnitude of environmental problems, if we can demonstrate the possibility of improving agent-environment relations, that should do the work of communicating the desirability of particular adaptive changes and associated policies. (The incorporation of such recommendations into governance structures is a separate issue, however not unrelated nor intractable, at least in principle.)
Many cultural beliefs/attitudes are purely instrumental, and often exchanged for others when they lose comparative value. What some researchers have described as "basic needs", that is to say the social and physical requirements for allostatic regulation, are far less negotiable. The main problem we face are existential threats to what Peter Corning characterized as our "collective survival enterprise". If the planet were modeled as an agent, then we might say that allostatic processes at the global scale are not functioning properly based on what we are seeing. It seems that when each of us pursues individual self-interest the collective interest is not thereby automatically realized (contrary to popular political/economic opinion, and yes certain individuals play an outsized role here). The question is: Can we use the active inference formalism to (1) model existing scoioeconomic and cultural contexts and governance structures and (2) suggest possible path-of-least-resistance intervention strategies such that individual and collective interests might be brought into greater alignment? Can we model the operating space for nature and social interactions to occur? If so, what would those scripts look like? If not, what compromises are involved? I suspect cultural anthropologists would confirm that, due to the instrumental nature of many beliefs, that individual interests are more malleable than we'd admit, that when hypothetical changes to scripts that address existing problems are transparently presented they will not (always) be greeted with overt antagonism (so long as they enhance access to basic needs), and that there are in fact multiple pathways to general synchrony/alignment.
Cultural Anthropology and Decentralized Coordination
John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry in "The Major Transitions in Evolution" wrote that the inculcation of proper behavior is often achieved by ritual and myth (scripts). So that "throughout their lives, in speech, story, and song, all people sing the same tune" (Plato, Laws). In a sense, this was the genesis of religion, philosophy, and the humanities. Scripture, of course, has many scripts, it tells people how to live a good and honorable life, how to interact, and outlines prescribed ways for showing appropriate deference and humility before a cosmos that inspires both fear and wonder. Rituals, ceremonies, traditions, etc. within cultures function to provide an orienting cosmology which structures the physical and social lives of large numbers of people. So much so that when we sever ties to established traditional scripts, we also disrupt the beneficial regulation and cooperative capabilities that they have enabled. As Julian Huxley wrote in New Bottles for New Wine, "Evolution operates in humans overwhelmingly as a cultural process, through the accumulation, organization, and application of experience in a system of shared material, mental, and social constructions [scripts]." Joseph Henrich noted that culture arises from genetically evolved psychological adaptations for acquiring such scripts from others (such as fire, cooking, water containers, plant knowledge, and projectile weapons) that in turn drove our genetic evolution, altering our physiology and psychology. These shared scripts were the earliest sort of intelligence outside our own minds. On a daily basis we interact with them, are affected by them, and can even be destroyed by them.
How did these adaptations evolve? Cultural anthropology describes the significance of "mindreading" in the evolution of our species. "According to the 'Deep Social Mind' theory, humans have become cognitively adapted to reflexivity and intersubjectivity: as a species, we are well-adapted to read the minds of trusted others while at the same time assisting those others in reading our own minds. I read your mind as you are reading mine. Therefore, between us, we can gain an awareness of our own minds as if from the outside: my mental states as these are reflected in yours and yours as they are reflected in mine. In that sense, if this argument is accepted, our minds mutually interpenetrate. 'Mind' in the human sense is not locked inside this or that skull but instead is relational, stretching between us." But why this "enactive" process of co-production? Some have speculated a deceptive, indeed "Machiavellian" purpose behind this evolved capacity to read minds, which would improve our ability to manipulate others. But the cooperative benefits are equally apparent. The implications for interpenetrating models and shared scripts are profoundly important, and should be made more explicit for applications of cultural anthropology to contemporary global issues.
An ecology of scripts and deontic cues could combine our existing 'ecological cognition' with a distinctly ‘stigmergic cognition’, which distributes control without centralization and still obtains the benefits of planning for goal achievement. Stigmergy (or sematectonic communication) provides a useful example of how to achieve global coordination through local action. Originally the concept was used to solve the "coordination paradox" between the individual and the societal level. Individuals interact indirectly: each affects the behavior of others by indirect coordination. By following a simple decentralized set of rules or scripts, the small actions of each person attract other people, who then build upon and modify their behavior choices, eventually constructing and modifying their niche to achieve "generalized synchrony". With a growing awareness of the body of stigmergic, ecological scripts we use, we could attempt the construction of a phylogenetic classification of scripts (heuristics/algorithms/subroutines/etc) that describe the relational, dynamic traits of each, such as the degree to which it is attuned to the environment, or the ways in which it participates in a larger ecology of scripts.5 Which specific characters (in a taxonomic sense) are exposed to selective pressures? These are all identified, scheduled, coordinated, and categorized, describing how they are comparatively similar/dissimilar, whether they proceed in sequence or parallel, temporal features like whether they require multiple iterations, and scalar features like how they are fractally embedded/nested in other scripts. The deontic/epistemic cues that accompany each could be described. The application of phylogenetic analyses to the constituent elements of a technology, has already proven useful, bearing in mind Melvin Kranzberg's first law of technology that "technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral." The same can be said for scripts, in a decontextualized sense.
A personal anecdote: Maxine
If "roles simply define clusters of scripts that an individual will embody to guide their behavior", then the role of a pet, like my dog Maxine, could be described by the numerous scripts that her behavior embodied. She barked at strangers, explored the world of smells, played with other dogs, dug holes in the dirt, eagerly ate her food (and ours as well, when given to her); she begged for affectionate caresses, and snuggled her soft, warm body against ours, taking evident pleasure and comfort in these experiences. These generalized scripts are common to most dogs, but the particular features of the way in which she enacted them made Maxine who she was - a small husky with a very alert and cheerful personality that showed clearly through her double coat of brown/black and white fur. Yesterday (11/8/20) she died. The strength of our relationship, and our ability to help regulate each
other in both sickness and health, postponed death for a time, but
eventually it came and took her body leaving us with one half of a
relationship. Her daily habits and routines shaped not only her life, but the lives of everyone she lived with, and we as her family came to expect and look forward to those shared activities. Participating in them together helped make us who we are today. Now that she is gone, many of those activities are as well, and those scripts are not followed.
Roger Ames is fond of telling the moral of the story of Kisa Gotami: "The wisdom in the Chinese tradition is that an isolated human being, a human being without roles, a human being that has had their most important roles severed, cannot function. So what the Buddha is saying to Kisa Gotami is "begin again, rekindle your roles". That doesn't mean you forget your husband and your parents and your children, but in order to grieve properly you have to reconstitute yourself as a relationally constituted human being. An individual has to rekindle relationships in order to be competent as a human being." This story comes to mind now, for people like myself and my family as we grieve the loss of our beloved pet dog. Maxine wasn't just a dog; a member of our family died. And no other dog will replace her. But death is an unavoidable part of the life of any family or community, and despite the fact that it will visit each of us eventually, we who are left must be able to reconstruct our relationships, sometimes in a new role, and teach our scripts to the next generation. Maxine taught us things about life and about love that we didn't know before we met her. What she taught us we will teach to others, and to a new member that we will welcome into our family some day. And hopefully they will benefit from her life just as we did. That is how we honor the memory of those we have lost, and keep their spirit alive.
I think Maxine did feel that she was very much loved, and that she was an important part of our family, like anyone else. Death is a challenging topic, for Americans in particular where many old and sick people are isolated and poor. Maybe this is because we don't fully appreciate how connected we really are to each other. This failure has become a "social cancer" in a very real sense that threatens the integrity of the body politic. But we are all one single body, and each of us is like a cell within that body, in that we depend on each other for survival. Even though a cell may die, the body can continue to live, grow, and adapt. Maxine was a part of our body, and insofar as she was a part of us, and we a part of her, so long as we remember what she taught us and continue to benefit from that, she is still alive.
Conclusion: Scripts and Schemas
Over the last 20 years Alaskans have created an abundance of climate policy suggestions, plans, reports, and strategies at the federal, state, and local levels of governance. (Is there a single library where these have all been cataloged and recorded for ease of access? That would be a valuable public resource.) We are certainly not at a loss for good policy ideas! What I most often see lacking is the social science orientation to encourage the successful adoption of science based policy. Several years ago David Victor wrote about this in regard to the IPCC, however I think it applies to Alaska as well. "The IPCC has engaged only a narrow slice of social-sciences disciplines... But if the panel engages the fields on their own terms it will find how societies organize, how individuals and groups perceive threats and respond to catastrophic stresses, and how collective action works best." I think we might benefit from the use of scripts and schemas. "Behavioral scripts allow people to make realistic assumptions about situations, places, and people. These assumptions stem from what are known as schemas. Schemas make our environments more approachable to understand, and therefore people are able to familiarize themselves with what is around them. Applied behavior analysts have used scripts to train new skills, and research supports script use as an effective way to build new social and activity routines. Scripts include default standards for the actors, props, setting, and sequence of events that are expected to occur in a particular situation." The dramaturgical language isn't meant literally of course.
In a metaphorical sense, ecology is a science of scripts and schemas. Ecologists study the behavior of wildlife and how organisms interact within the wider biotic community to maintain what ecological psychologists call "grip" on their ecological niche (or what is called "generalized synchrony" in Active Inference). So for example, when looking at a policy such as "walrus raft/marine mammal platform pilot projects" and various other habitat restoration or rewilding efforts, we are attempting to preserve or restore the behavioral scripts utilized by nonhuman members of the global ecosystem for achieving grip within their ecological niche.6 The critical aspect here is the process that the script describes, not the specific means by which it occurs, which is why in this schema a platform can hypothetically be substituted for an ice floe with potentially minimal disruption to the "haulout behavioral script" used by walrus. In a similar manner we might be able to apply this construct to the mitigation and adaptation efforts used by humans in the face of climate disruption. We could take a problem area, identify the particular script and schema that applies, then do the metaphorical surgery of excising the harmful elements and replacing them with corrective measures. More or less invasive steps could be taken of course. This serves the function of anchoring policies to the lived experience and cultures of people, making them more actionable, salient, and clearly highlighting their relevance to the problems or goals that matter most to stakeholders.
Can we move from theory to practice? Perhaps this sort of paradigm can be incorporated into existing policies by categorizing each into one or more basic scripts and schemas with which most people would have some familiarity. Of course, familiarity is, strictly speaking, not a requirement - novel situations would require new descriptive approaches - however in most cases analogous scripts and schemas should be available for use. In the end, this alone doesn't change the specific policies. The potential benefit would lie principally in communicating the need for policy change to a skeptical public or government body, and facilitating policy implementation. But that process and the support it might create could itself catalyze new, better policies and, more importantly, help develop a track record of success in addressing the environmental problems (and opportunities) we face today.
Sources:
"Gender Fluidity as Affordance Negotiation" by Mahault Albarracin, and Pierre Poirier
"A Variational Approach to Scripts" by Mahault Albarracin, Axel Constant, Karl Friston, and Maxwell Ramstead
“Narrative as Active Inference” by Nabil Bouizegarene, Maxwell Ramstead, Axel Constant, Karl Friston, and Laurence Kirmayer
“Losing Ourselves: Active Inference, Depersonalization, and Meditation” by George Deane, Mark Miller, and Sam Wilkinson
Notes:
[1] "The key dynamic that evolution discovered is a special kind of communication allowing privileged access of agents to the same information pool, which in turn made it possible to scale selves."
[2] A script is a list of explicit instructions, and contextual cues within the niche, for situationally appropriate behaviour. The niche/ environmentality/ cognitive ecology should be able to predict a certain pattern of behaviour, provide only the relevant and salient tools, offer feedback on whether the role is enacted properly, and enable us to infer what the proper policy to adopt is in order to maintain a social script.
[3] Paraphrasing "The Emperor’s New Markov Blankets", which outlines this issue of nominalism versus realism (though instead of nominalism the authors use the equivalent term "instrumentalism") in regard to the topics discussed here: "There is a broad debate in philosophy of science about whether it is justified to believe in the reality of scientific unobservables (‘realism’) or whether they are auxiliary constructs helpful for explaining scientific observables (‘instrumentalism’). Most notably, the FEP denies the distinction between scientist and model: an agent does not have a model of its environment that it uses to perform inference, but rather an agent is a model of its environment. In this more realist fashion, Markov (Pearl) blankets can be called Friston blankets, and used as an ontological construct demarcating actual boundaries ‘out there in the world’, such that inferential processes also become something to be see seen ‘out there in the (physical) world’. If the framework presupposes some kind of more fundamental Bayesian graphical ontology, then the philosophical bounty is potentially large. The project of ‘inference within a model’ is to define what it is to be a system, where to draw the boundary between agent and environment, what it is to be a sentient and conscious being, and what is required for an agent to have a representation; it is to clarify the boundaries of the mind, of living, and even social systems. These are all hotly contested philosophical questions. ...The difference between inference with and inference within a model, here roughly corresponding to the use of Pearl and Friston blankets, shows why the potential payoff of the latter construct is much larger than the former. In inference with a model, the graphical model is an epistemic tool for a scientist to perform inference. In inference within a model the scientist disappears from the scene, becoming a mere spectator of the unravelling inference show before their eyes. Here the (Friston) blanket specifies the anatomy of inference: it is a formalization of what it is to be a cognising living system, and defines the boundary between this system and its environment. It is a realist reading where the blanket becomes a literal boundary between agent and world."
[4] Culture constrains the behavioral paths for its individual members, generally because its practices and narratives have shown to be efficient free-energy reduction vehicles, for “agents like you”. Ideas and practices that reduce free energy more efficiently tend to spread and become dominant in a culture. Heylighen explains: "Indeed, internalized and environmentally anchored cultural expectations (behavioral scripts) often take on a life of their own, not necessarily benefiting the individual that follows them, but rather maintaining the very system of social ideas and practices they are part of. Luhmann has argued that social systems should be seen as autopoietic, organism-like agents that, via their human constituents, actively counteract any deviation from their organization, so as to ensure the continuation and self-regeneration of the system. Hence, these social systems seem to also reduce their free energy, consistent with a multiscale formulation of the FEP. On the one hand, the relationship between individual and social system is one of symbiosis or mutual benefit, with social systems providing means for reducing free energy to the individual through coordination of action and prevention of conflicts. On the other hand, social systems, via TTOM mechanisms, can also veer into dogmatism, radicalism, and mind control that suppresses individual expression, creativity, and well-being."
[5] Ernst Mayer's paper "Behavior and Systematics" describes how there is a close correlation between behavior patterns and systematics. In other words, behavior traits may be specific characters in a taxonomic sense. As biologists have constructed phylogenetic trees on the basis of morphological characters, it should not be surprising that ethologists have similarly attempted behavioral phylogenies. ...If new behaviors precede new morphologies (and by extension new genetic combinations), such attempts gain greater significance. To wit, how do the behaviors expressed by a specific population tend to expose it to unique selective pressures that further shape it's continued evolution? This is the question behavioral phylogeny is in a good position to help bring into focus.
[6] “At the ecological level biosemiotics requires us to extend our concept of an ecological niche to embrace the semiotic niche, i.e., the totality of cues around the organism (or species) which the organism (or species) must necessarily be capable of interpreting wisely in order to survive and reproduce. ...This implies that the relative fitness of changed morphological or behavioral traits become dependent on the whole system of existing semiotic relations that the species finds itself a part of and, accordingly, the firm organism-versus-environment borderline will be dissolved, and a new integrative level intermediate between the species and the ecosystem would have to be considered — i.e., the level of the ecosemiotic interaction structure.” - Hoffmeyer, Jesper, Epilogue: Biology is immature biosemiotics (2008)
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