Thinking through other minds: A variational approach to cognition and culture.
The Behavioral and brain sciences May 30, 2019 Samuel P L Veissière, Axel Constant, Maxwell J D Ramstead et al. 362 citations
A unifying account of how humans acquire shared cultural habits, norms, and expectations is developed by integrating the variational free-energy principle from theoretical neuroscience with concepts of cultural evolution and implicit learning. Humans construct social niches that provide epistemic resources called cultural affordances. Through immersive participation in patterned cultural practices, agents learn by inferring what other people expect—a process termed "thinking through other minds" (TTOM). This makes information about others' expectations the primary statistical regularity humans use to predict and organize behavior. The model aims to resolve debates in cognitive science between internalist and externalist accounts of theory of mind and between dynamical and representational views of enactivism.