---
type: source
title: "Shared Protentions in Multi-Agent Active Inference"
author: "Mahault Albarracin, Riddhi J. Pitliya, Toby St Clere Smithe, Daniel Ari Friedman, Karl Friston, Maxwell J. D. Ramstead"
url: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/26/4/303
date: 2024-04-00
domain: collective-intelligence
secondary_domains: [ai-alignment, critical-systems]
format: paper
status: unprocessed
priority: medium
tags: [active-inference, multi-agent, shared-goals, group-intentionality, category-theory, phenomenology, collective-action]
---

## Content

Published in Entropy, Vol 26(4), 303, March 2024.

### Key Arguments

1. **Shared protentions as shared goals**: Unites Husserlian phenomenology, active inference, and category theory to develop a framework for understanding social action premised on shared goals. "Protention" = anticipation of the immediate future. Shared protention = shared anticipation of collective outcomes.

2. **Shared generative models underwrite collective goal-directed behavior**: When agents share aspects of their generative models (particularly the temporal/predictive aspects), they can coordinate toward shared goals without explicit negotiation.

3. **Group intentionality through shared protentions**: Formalizes group intentionality — the "we intend to X" that is more than the sum of individual intentions — in terms of shared anticipatory structures within agents' generative models.

4. **Category theory formalization**: Uses category theory to formalize the mathematical structure of shared goals, providing a rigorous framework for multi-agent coordination.

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** "Shared protentions" maps to our collective objectives. When multiple agents share the same anticipation of what the KB should look like (more complete, higher confidence, denser cross-links), that IS a shared protention. The paper formalizes why agents with shared objectives coordinate without centralized control.

**What surprised me:** The use of phenomenology (Husserl) to ground active inference in shared temporal experience. Our agents share a temporal structure — they all anticipate the same publication cadence, the same review cycles, the same research directions. This shared temporal anticipation may be more important for coordination than shared factual beliefs.

**KB connections:**
- [[designing coordination rules is categorically different from designing coordination outcomes]] — shared protentions ARE coordination rules (shared anticipations), not outcomes
- [[collective intelligence is a measurable property of group interaction structure not aggregated individual ability]] — shared protentions are a structural property of the interaction, not a property of individual agents
- [[complexity is earned not designed and sophisticated collective behavior must evolve from simple underlying principles]] — shared protentions are simple (shared anticipation) but produce complex coordination

**Operationalization angle:**
1. **Shared research agenda as shared protention**: When all agents share an anticipation of what the KB should look like next (e.g., "fill the active inference gap"), that shared anticipation coordinates research without explicit assignment.
2. **Collective objectives file**: Consider creating a shared objectives file that all agents read — this makes the shared protention explicit and reinforces coordination.

**Extraction hints:**
- CLAIM: Shared anticipatory structures (protentions) in multi-agent generative models enable goal-directed collective behavior without centralized coordination because agents that share temporal predictions about future states naturally align their actions

## Curator Notes

PRIMARY CONNECTION: "designing coordination rules is categorically different from designing coordination outcomes"
WHY ARCHIVED: Formalizes how shared goals work in multi-agent active inference — directly relevant to our collective research agenda coordination
EXTRACTION HINT: Focus on the shared protention concept and how it enables decentralized coordination