# From Self-Evidencing to Global Governance: Active Inference and the Dynamics of Justice Presenter: Majid D. Beni Contribution: Livestreamed panel or group session Public ID: talk-284425605e4969fa ## Submitted abstract Active inference frames biological and cognitive agency as the imperatives of self-evidencing—maintaining systemic integrity by minimising variational free energy within an open, stochastic environment. Under this formalism, agents, from single cells to complex organisms, persist by regulating their internal states against entropic dissipation, enacting a Markov blanket that partitions self from world. This imperative entails sophisticated inference, balancing epistemic drives against pragmatic preferences, thereby constituting adaptive agency. This talk extends this foundational picture of selfhood to the domain of political communities and global justice theory, demonstrating that the same dynamical constraints that govern individual persistence scale hierarchically to structure collective organisation and inter-state conduct. Drawing on the Free Energy Principle, political communities are modelled as open, self-organising systems embedded within a nested hierarchy of interacting Markov blankets. Their stability is not intrinsic but relational, contingent upon continuous exchange of information, resources, and institutional constraints with their environment. Within this multiscale architecture, global justice emerges as an active regulatory imperative: a homeostatic constraint that maintains a nonequilibrium steady state across coupled societies. We formalise this through the expected free energy decomposition, where just policies balance risk—adherence to shared normative constraints such as human rights and non-aggression—against ambiguity—the active resolution of uncertainty arising from structural interdependence. The normative implications are acute. We identify a pervasive pathology of self-organisation, wherein dominant or insular political regimes mis-specify themselves as closed systems. By suppressing external coupling and attenuating sensory evidence, they optimise local coherence at the expense of systemic stability. Drawing parallels to oncogenic cellular proliferation and psychotic cognitive inference, we argue that such closure systematically underestimates global risk and propagates destabilising volatility. Ultimately, we contend that justice is not a static distributive outcome nor a single-level contractual procedure, but the dynamic property of a multiscale system that successfully synchronises its trajectories under persistent uncertainty. This offers a unified, first-principles framework for linking the philosophy of agency to the normative demands of a deeply interconnected global order. Source: [submitted source]() Abstract SHA256: 073fa89980e2ebdbf548e2d02ea735e4f48f373c625d3807d8eb611e3907e4ec ## Organizer review checklist - [ ] Confirm the submitted title, presenter, and abstract with the presenter. - [ ] Confirm contribution format and scheduling needs. - [ ] Confirm public permissions for any additional material before publication. - [ ] Prepare discussion questions grounded in the submitted abstract. ## Public learning resources These approved event resources are starting points; topic relevance and author identity have not been inferred. - Active Inference Ontology: https://github.com/ActiveInferenceInstitute/Active_Inference_Ontology - Cognitive Agent Modeling: https://github.com/ActiveInferenceInstitute/ActiveInferenceImplementations - GEO-INFER: https://github.com/ActiveInferenceInstitute/GEO_INFER - Generalized Notation Notation: https://github.com/ActiveInferenceInstitute/Generalized_Notation_Notation - pymdp: https://github.com/infer-actively/pymdp - Reproducible publication template: https://github.com/docxology/template OpenAlex discovery-only search (not a verified identity or literature match): https://openalex.org/works?search=From%20Self-Evidencing%20to%20Global%20Governance%3A%20Active%20Inference%20and%20the%20Dynamics%20of%20Justice