The inner screen model of consciousness: applying the free energy principle directly to the study of conscious experience

hello and welcome it's June 19 2023 we're going to have a presentation and a discussion with Maxwell ramstead and Mala aburassen here so thank you Maxwell and Mal for joining looking forward to your presentation setting some of the context and then thank you to all of our guests you'll have an opportunity to introduce yourself and give some background when you first uh give Reflections so onto the slides Maxwell excellent well maybe we now and I can just briefly reintroduce ourselves for uh those of us watching at home um so hey folks uh my name is Maxwell ramstead I am the uh director of research at versus AI um I am a scholar in the tradition of active inference and an expert on the free energy principle um yeah and now would you please sure so my name is I work at versus with Maxwell and director director of product for research and development but I'm also doing a PhD in cognitive Computing I worked in social sciences and in artificial intelligence in the artificial intelligence field and I've specifically tried to apply active inference to more socially grounded questions and sometimes more abstract and representational questions diving all the way down to the philosophy that can be attached to it thank you Val um so yeah I'm very pleased to present this work uh today uh Mal and I will be discussing our new pre-print um called the inner screen model of Consciousness and it is about it is basically an application of the free energy principle to the uh problem uh the conundrum of Consciousness um so uh just to give a little bit of background and now I'll just be walking through the slides if at any point you want to uh jump in and you know add complete correct uh please feel free to do so um so the uh this is work uh that started in late last year um and continued throughout the year it's preoccupied us quite a bit actually uh over the last while um now and I are the lead authors on this uh what has now become a series of papers uh with uh one more pre-print coming out hopefully before the end of the months and another in the works hope Pro hopefully before the end of the year uh with the same Core group of authors uh so obviously uh Mao uh as well as Adam saffron Alex Kiefer Brandon Klein Chris Fields uh and Carl friston um and uh the follow-up papers uh include a bunch of other authors uh so we've been uh working with some uh pretty cool folks on this uh folks listed here uh and others um yeah and so the overall Lane across the uh two or three papers uh is to present something like a minimal unifying model uh of Consciousness premise on the free energy principle in the paper that we're discussing today uh we are presenting as I was uh intimating a moment ago a model of Consciousness that follows directly from applying the free energy principle to well understood human neurophysiology um the take-home message of today's talk is that uh well let me take one step back there has been a lot of discussion in the literature over the last decade uh about whether the free energy principle has anything uh unique to teach us about Consciousness and there have been responses Pro and Contra um and I think that the question up until recently was just unsettled uh we would like to suggest a positive response to that question um and so as such one of the take-home messages is that actually yes a model of Consciousness can be directly derived from the free energy principle uh applied to explain neuroanatomy and um I guess the the kind of technical message the technical part of the takeaway is that Consciousness has or um is isomorphic to a math a nested holographic mathematical structure um so uh this sounds like a mouthful might sound a little crazy um we are going to unpack this uh presently um I'll take some some now did you want to add anything to that no all good excellent um so uh the original paper uh that we wrote turned into like a 24 000 word monstrosity of a paper uh and it was uh elephant elephantine both in the sense that it…