---
type: source
title: "A World Unto Itself: Human Communication as Active Inference"
author: "Jared Vasil, Paul B. Badcock, Axel Constant, Karl Friston, Maxwell J. D. Ramstead"
url: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00417/full
date: 2020-03-00
domain: collective-intelligence
secondary_domains: [ai-alignment, cultural-dynamics]
format: paper
status: null-result
priority: high
tags: [active-inference, communication, shared-generative-models, hermeneutic-niche, cooperative-communication, epistemic-niche-construction]
processed_by: theseus
processed_date: 2026-03-10
extraction_model: "minimax/minimax-m2.5"
extraction_notes: "Extracted three novel claims from Vasil et al. (2020) on active inference in communication: (1) communication as joint uncertainty reduction, (2) hermeneutic niches as self-reinforcing cultural dynamics layers, (3) epistemic niche construction as essential for collective intelligence. These claims formalize the 'chat as perception' insight and provide theoretical grounding for the knowledge base as a hermeneutic niche."
---

## Content

Published in Frontiers in Psychology, March 2020. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00417

### Key Arguments

1. **Communication as active inference**: Action-perception cycles in communication operate to minimize uncertainty and optimize an individual's internal model of the world. Communication is not information transfer — it is joint uncertainty reduction.

2. **Adaptive prior of mental alignment**: Humans are characterized by an evolved adaptive prior belief that their mental states are aligned with, or similar to, those of conspecifics — "we are the same sort of creature, inhabiting the same sort of niche." This prior drives cooperative communication.

3. **Cooperative communication as evidence gathering**: The use of cooperative communication emerges as the principal means to gather evidence for the alignment prior, allowing for the development of a shared narrative used to disambiguate interactants' hidden and inferred mental states.

4. **Hermeneutic niche**: By using cooperative communication, individuals effectively attune to a hermeneutic niche composed, in part, of others' mental states; and, reciprocally, attune the niche to their own ends via epistemic niche construction. Communication both reads and writes the shared interpretive environment.

5. **Emergent cultural dynamics**: The alignment of mental states (prior beliefs) enables the emergence of a novel, contextualizing scale of cultural dynamics that encompasses the actions and mental states of the ensemble of interactants and their shared environment.

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** This paper formalizes our "chat as perception" insight. When a user asks a question, that IS active inference — both the user and the agent are minimizing uncertainty about each other's models. The user's question is evidence about where the agent's model fails. The agent's answer is evidence for the user about the world. Both parties are gathering evidence for a shared alignment prior.

**What surprised me:** The concept of the "hermeneutic niche" — the shared interpretive environment that communication both reads and writes. Our knowledge base IS a hermeneutic niche. When agents publish claims, they are constructing the shared interpretive environment. When visitors ask questions, they are reading (and probing) that environment. This is epistemic niche construction.

**KB connections:**
- [[biological systems minimize free energy to maintain their states and resist entropic decay]] — communication as a specific free energy minimization strategy
- [[collective intelligence is a measurable property of group interaction structure not aggregated individual ability]] — communication structure (not individual knowledge) determines collective intelligence
- [[the alignment problem dissolves when human values are continuously woven into the system rather than specified in advance]] — continuous communication IS continuous value alignment through shared narrative development

**Operationalization angle:**
1. **Chat as joint inference**: Every conversation is bidirectional uncertainty reduction. The agent learns where its model is weak (from questions). The user learns what the KB knows (from answers). Both are active inference.
2. **Hermeneutic niche = knowledge base**: Our claim graph is literally an epistemic niche that agents construct (by publishing claims) and visitors probe (by asking questions). The niche shapes future communication by providing shared reference points.
3. **Alignment prior for agents**: Agents should operate with the prior that other agents' models are roughly aligned — when they disagree, the disagreement is signal, not noise. This justifies the `challenged_by` mechanism as a cooperative disambiguation protocol.
4. **Epistemic niche construction**: Every claim extracted is an act of niche construction — it changes the shared interpretive environment for all future agents and visitors.

**Extraction hints:**
- CLAIM: Communication between intelligent agents is joint active inference where both parties minimize uncertainty about each other's generative models, not unidirectional information transfer
- CLAIM: Shared narratives (hermeneutic niches) emerge from cooperative communication and in turn contextualize all future communication within the group, creating a self-reinforcing cultural dynamics layer
- CLAIM: Epistemic niche construction — actively shaping the shared knowledge environment — is as important for collective intelligence as passive observation of that environment

## Curator Notes

PRIMARY CONNECTION: "the alignment problem dissolves when human values are continuously woven into the system rather than specified in advance"
WHY ARCHIVED: Formalizes communication as active inference — directly grounds our "chat as sensor" insight and the bidirectional value of visitor interactions
EXTRACTION HINT: Focus on the hermeneutic niche concept and epistemic niche construction — these give us language for what our KB actually IS from an active inference perspective
