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I am a doctoral researcher in Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, under the supervision of philosopher Andy Clark and AI researcher Chris Buckley. In 2020, I graduated top of my class from the demanding Complex Systems masters of the École Normale Supérieure Lyon, with a specialty in physics. Last but not least, I am a normalien [what is it?]\n from the École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay, where I studied industrial engineering, electronics and automation from 2014 to 2016.
I have more than 6 years of experience in data analysis, which at different points of my cursus I had the opportunity to apply in diverse context such as signal processing, behavioural experiments, biological processes and social dynamics. My background in complex systems physics gives me unique insight into the analysis of complex data, a topic I am currently helping teach at the University of Sussex. Indeed, I have extensive training in the reproduction in silico of the dynamics of articial, biological, and social systems, as well as in the design of computational experiments capable to uncover the structure underlying available data. Finally, I am one of the very few experts of the application of the neuroscientific framework of Active Inference (see more here!) to the social sciences. Want to know more about it? You can take a look at the course I teach at the Active Inference Institute, or at my latest talk at the moment of writing!
In addition to my research, I am offering consulting services in data analysis and complex systems modeling. As you can imagine, I am equally comfortable working on industrial, biological, or social data. For illustration, you can visit the website I’ve built to present my work on reproducing and analyzing gene regulatory networks using an asynchronous Gillespie algorithm, and on analyzing geographic and economic data to inform policy on the public investment. However, my edge is on especially complex projects where available data do not allow a clear grip on the system, and further work is needed to model and instrument it. So feel free to send me your hardest problems!
I am also open to discussing more specialized services relating to my research and teaching. Do you want to design fail-proof human-machine intelligent systems? Do you need someone to teach your workforce about data analysis and their mathematics? Do you want to design user interfaces or working spaces using the latest developments in neuroscience? Do you need a private consulting session to assess the realizability of your own projects? Do you want a private conference on how our brain hallucinates our reality and what it means for motivations? Then write me here: avel@kairos-research.org
Normalien is a special administrative status associated to integration of one of the École Normale Supérieure through the competitive exams. See more \nhere!
", "author": { "name": "Avel GUÉNIN" }, "tags": [ ], "date_published": "2021-04-14T18:01:17+01:00", "date_modified": "2023-09-21T14:43:59+01:00" }, { "id": "https://avel.kairos-research.org/creation/", "url": "https://avel.kairos-research.org/creation/", "title": "Creation", "summary": "I have spend the last few years weaving the outline of an uchronical fiction on spirituality, power, and history. It focuses on the…", "content_html": "I have spend the last few years weaving the outline of an uchronical fiction on spirituality, power, and history. It focuses on the rise to geopolitical hegemony and following demise of the Temple of Tyr, a gnostic warrior cult born from religious feuding on the marging of the Byzantine, then Ottoman Empire. The fiction is constituted by a web of related multimedia stories conveying the perspective of particular agents in the world shaped by the Temple, each seeking to capture specific aspects of the broader historical dynamics at play.
The central goal of this project is to illustrate the nature of political power, as well as the degree to which historical dynamics escape the control of any given agent. The ethics and institutions of the Temple are progressively exposed to reveal an underlying philosophy of power beyond control, accepting the natural flow of the world but recognizing the ability to shape it as the only kind of spiritual virtue. Yet, although the Temple succeds in weaving characters into their expected roles, its internal imbalances come into play and unleash a bloody internal war.
Exerpts will be published as I see fit.
", "author": { "name": "Avel GUÉNIN" }, "tags": [ ], "date_published": "2021-04-13T12:24:33+01:00", "date_modified": "2022-12-08T17:28:47+00:00" }, { "id": "https://avel.kairos-research.org/mediation/", "url": "https://avel.kairos-research.org/mediation/", "title": "Mediation & Teaching", "summary": "Mediation & synthesis articles Guénin–Carlut, Avel. 2026. “Illness, Trauma, and Cruelty.” Kairos Research, January 11. https://kairos-research.org//illness-trauma-and-cruelty/. “On Cliodynamic Realism.” Kairos Journal, December 31,…", "content_html": "My research investigates how human minds are integrated in, and mutually constituted by, the socio-material organization we build for ourselves.
This starts from a simple observation: the material and cultural world we inhabit is not a pre-given stage for mental activity, but something we actively bring about through engagement with the world. The concepts which define our existence as cognitive agents, from the percepts that guide a hunter’s tracking to the constitution of a political community, are themselves defined by the complex ecology of socio-material practices by which we engage with the world.
Drawing primarily (but critically) from the Active Inference Framework, I attempt to demonstrate how cognitive and social science generally fail to make sense of the mutual constitution between mind and world; and to draw the conceptual and methodological consequences of this approach. I develop this question across three interlocking lines of work.
Unfolding landscapes of cultural affordances - Credit to Iona BRENAC
The philosophy-physics of creative evolution: Existing formal approaches to cognition and life, including the Free Energy Principle, presuppose the space of possibilities that cognitive systems evolve in. I argue that this fails to account for the construction of novel norms and concepts by human sociality, which are brought about as structuring entities of our experience and activity through our engagement with the world. I account for this through contextuality, the property of systems where observation brings about (rather than reveal) physical states, emerging from the thermodynamic irreversibility of measurement in multi-scale biological organization. In turn, the conceptual framework this suggests for reality as we experience it is participatory realism: the concepts through which we understand the world are real, but they is brought about through the very cognitive processes and socio-material practices by which we enact them.
The social organisation of cognition: Human cognition is not merely fed cultural content, but constituted by the socio-material context in which it develops. Under Active Inference, we can understand shared expectations over typical behaviour as social constraints: causal forces that canalise perception and action in the same sense that biological constraints do. Given the physical background of contextuality, we can further understand such constraints as contingent outcomes of our own engagement with the world rather than prior properties of our world or cognition taken in isolation. I argue that this process is a general property of cognition, but is characterized in its human form by the existential stance, our capacity to attend reflexively to our own activity and understand it as meaningful expressive acts. Social organisations then emerge from the closure of constraints in the shared socio-material landscape, thus grounding Wittgenstein’s intuition of sociocultural lifeforms in contemporary definitions of biological autonomy.
Applications across disciplines: Because this framework locates the structure of cognition in the socio-material practices that enact it, it has direct consequences for how we study mind and culture. In psychology, the contextuality argument implies that stimulus-response laws cannot hold for cognitive systems in general, motivating a cognitive frame analysis that studies how agents’ implicit frames constitute the meaning of experimental situations. In cultural evolution, Active Inference provides a computational foundation for modelling the open-ended reconstruction of social norms, rather than abstracting cognitive agency away from evolutionary dynamics. In the philosophy of history, the contextuality of social constraints motivates a cliodynamic realism that treats historical structures as real but irreducibly contextual, resisting reduction to dynamical laws. In the philosophy of mind, the framework grounds a process-ontological account of the extended mind (developed with Andy Clark), where cognitive boundaries are multiple and shifting rather than fixed. And in political theory, the biological autonomy of sociocultural lifeforms implies that social organisations cannot be redesigned from above, motivating an ecological redirection built on contextual knowledge rather than high-modernist planning.
My research develops a radically integrated understanding of life, cognition, and culture, grounded in the physics of information and organization in natural systems. I argue that cognitive agents do not passively represent a pre-given world, but actively bring about the categories and norms through which they engage with it. This brings my research at the interface of mathematical physics and philosophy, although I remain focused on the concrete implications of those consideration for cognitive and social systems. In particular, I reformalize the study of socio-cognitive dynamics in terms of the construction and erosion of systems of social constraints embedded into socio-material practices.
I currently work as a PhD student in cognitive science at the University of Sussex (Department of Engineering and Informatics) financed by the XSCAPE project, focusing on the co-evolution of the human mind and material culture. I am also a research advisor for the Active Inference Institute, and the Vice-president of the French Society of Cliodynamics. Finally, I’m a founding member of Kairos Research, a participative research & scientific mediation collective which focuses on developping a “complex systems” approach to historical dynamics which helps us navigate ongoing socio-historical dynamics.
I have a broader commitment to reveal what’s below sensible reality and beyond the means of our linguistic grasp. This is why I’m interested in various ways to convey meaning without the need for formal language, from (classical) graphical design to creative ventures. I am especially interested in exploring the ethics of impermanence through graphism and fiction. I write stories exploring how actors struggling to impose meaning onto a shifting and ultimately inaccessible reality, and how this process ultimately shapes the evolution of human societies.
You can find me on OSF, Github, or contact me by mail or Matrix. If you like my work or I helped you in some way, please consider making a donation via LiberaPay or Ko-Fi (as I am currently employed, those donations will serve for the development of Kairos Research or be redistributed to fellow travellers in need).
", "author": { "name": "Avel GUÉNIN" }, "tags": [ ], "date_published": "2021-04-13T12:24:17+01:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-17T11:14:45+01:00" } ] }