ActInf GuestStream 122.1 ~ Radical Relation, Scaling without Hierarchies, Models without the Meat

Andrea Hiott: "Radical Relation, Scaling without Hierarchies, Models without the Meat"

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-025-10256-7 Andrea Hiott, "Radical Embodied Relation at any Scale, from Remembering to Navigating". 22 August 2025

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02054-6 Peng, JJ., Throm, B., Najafian Jazi, M. et al. Grid cells accurately track movement during path integration-based navigation despite switching reference frames. Nat Neurosci 28, 2092–2105 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-02054-6

Recent hippocampal neuroscience challenges traditional cognitive architecture: the same neural machinery subserves memory, navigation, and conceptual reasoning, refusing to respect cognitive/motor boundaries. A. Hiott (2025) argues that what we call "navigation" and "memory" are not two reconcilable phenomena but nested assessments of the same process—locomotion is already cognition. One exploratory way to consider it is through 'time' as if there is one process (movement through geographical space) that we assess as "navigation" at one timescale and "remembering" at another timescale. The point is: Moving through space is already knowing.

We explore how Active Inference—treating perception and action as unified processes minimizing prediction error—provides formal tools for this dissolution of boundaries. However, fully integrating these insights requires confronting a deep linguistic challenge: both Friston and Hiott recognize that generative models are not neural structures but patterns of organism-environment coupling, yet our inherited vocabulary constantly defaults to brain-bound language. This shared struggle against conceptual inertia embedded in scientific discourse demands new ways of speaking about models, hierarchies, and scaling.

Drawing on empirical evidence—including recent findings that grid cells operate in multiple local reference frames rather than as a global positioning system (Peng et al. 2025)—we show that models are not "in the meat" but are regularities in organism-environment-social coupling patterns. The hippocampus coordinates across constellations of reference frames at multiple timescales, not storing maps but participating in predictive dynamics spanning brain-body-world.

We develop the view that communicating is coordinated way-making through mutual prediction rather than information transfer. When people converse, they converge on shared attractors—stable coordination patterns where both agents' predictions are fulfilled. Meaning lives in these shared attractors, not in individual brains. Following Hiott's emphasis on moving beyond dichotomies, we show how analysis naturally extends from dyadic systems to multi-element constellations where organism-environment-tools-others-culture-history participate in joint free energy minimization. The challenge ahead is developing conceptual vocabularies and mathematical formalisms adequate to minds that are inherently embodied, embedded, extended, enacted—and always already constellatory.

Keywords: Active Inference, radical embodied cognition, hippocampus, generative models, constellations, language, prediction, way-making

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