We draw from the recent enactivist literature to articulate an operational definition of Wittgensteinien forms of life as a self-productive collection of constraints over collective behavior. We propose that humans integrate and enact those account through the Active Inference of shared “regimes of attentions”, which are experienced as embedded normativity within direct engagement with a shared sociocultural niche. Given those elements, we discuss how sociocultural lifeforms “encode information” in the material niche, and discuss how this information may be recovered by cognitive archaeologists.

Issue Section:
Special Session: ALife And Society VII
This content is only available as a PDF.
© 2023 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license
2023
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.
Issue Section:
Special Session: ALife And Society VII