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Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, and welcome to our Weekend Book Review 🎙️📚
Hey everyone, I’m so glad you’re here. Today I’m cracking open Mathematical Models of Meaning: A Dynamic Systems Approach to Possible World Semiotics by Paul Kockelman, published by MIT Press on 19 August 2025. 🔬🧠 This book asks the questions that keep me up at night: What is meaning? How do information, value, and purpose braid together when agents make choices in real time, grow over developmental time, and evolve across phylogenetic time? I love that. Short. Sharp. Then bigger. Then wide as the sky. 🌌
Kockelman builds a bridge where others build borders. He blends Bayesian inference with statistical mechanics and evolutionary game theory, then walks us across to the semiotics of Peirce, where signs meet objects, interpretants spark, and consequents ripple into action. ♟️🌀 He puts possible worlds and social relations at center stage, turning abstract equations into living drama, where distributed agents learn, coordinate, compete, and sometimes invent codes that feel like language growing roots in the soil of interaction. 🌱🤝
What I admire most is how the math never forgets the life inside it. Predator and prey teach strategy. Reinforcement learning becomes a biography of attention. Meta-semiotic processes let agents revise their own models, folding knowledge back onto itself like origami thought. And those equations? They are not just numbers. They are choices rehearsed, futures weighed, worlds compared. 🎲🔭
And the guide through all of this is Paul Kockelman, anthropologist at Yale, whose books range from The Art of Interpretation in the Age of Computation to The Anthropology of Intensity to Last Words: Large Language Models and the AI Apocalypse. He writes like a theorist who has lived with code-switchers, coders, and codes themselves. He listens to systems the way fieldworkers listen to stories. Then he rewrites the map. 🧭✨
So here’s my promise for this episode: I’ll keep the rhythm lively and the details grounded. Short lines for spark. Longer lines for texture and depth. We’ll wander possible worlds, but we’ll come back carrying tools you can use. Because meaning is not just what a sentence says. It is what an agent can do next. 🚀
🙏 Thank you, Paul Kockelman, and thank you, MIT Press.
🎧 If you enjoy this, subscribe on Spotify and on our YouTube channel Weekend Researcher. We’re also available on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcast.
🤩 Now tell me, when an agent updates its model of the world, is it discovering meaning or inventing it?
Reference
Kockelman, P. (2025). Mathematical Models of Meaning: A Dynamic Systems Approach to Possible World Semiotics. MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/15645.001.0001
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