From the existential stance to social constraints - How the human mind becomes embedded in our social, cultural and material context

Contemporary social and cognitive science rely on the methodological separation between cognitive architecture on one hand, and the content of cultural norms and attitudes they integrate throughout their life on the other. Yet, a careful consideration of human development and of the deep history of human minds call into question the validity of this separation. We propose here a physical ontology describing the nature of social / cognitive structure, as well as as its relation to agency. Based on Active Inference, a computational and mathematical theory describing human cognition as a permanent prediction of one’s sensori-motor flow, we conceptualize the novel notion of social constraints. Social constraints formalizes the embedding of agent’s cognition in a shared social context, if those agents are prone to reflexively consider their own beliefs and actions as communicative acts in a cognitive attitude we call the existential stance. By analogy to gauge theory, the main foundational theory of contemporary physics, social constraints exist dually as formal symmetries over a system (here, prior beliefs over the causes of the agent’s sensation and actions) and as causal forces driving its dynamics (here, constraints over the agent’s cognitive activity, especially regarding the flow of their attention). But unlike the physical theories describing inert matter, social constraints are embedded in a shared material, social, and cultural environment which encultured agents must actively integrate and (re)produce through their activity. We consider the implications of this active process of integration and (re)production of social constraints, both for the underlying physical ontology and for the methodology of social and cognitive sciences. In particular, we provide a detailed account of the relation between social structure and cognitive agency, and we ground a description of social organization as bona fide biological organization embedded in the cultural and material context for human activity. Overall, our argument provides what is to our knowledge the first fully coherent physical ontology for the development of human cognition and the evolution of sociocultural forms of life.