Morphogenesis as Bayesian inference: A variational approach to pattern formation and control in complex biological systems

[Music] [Music] all right hello and welcome everyone to active lab live stream number 39.0 it's february 25th 2022 welcome to the active lab we are a participatory online lab that is communicating learning and practicing applied active inference you can find us at the links here on the slide this is a recorded in an archived live stream so please provide us with feedback so we can improve our work all backgrounds and perspectives are welcome and we'll be following good video etiquette for live streams if you want to learn more about coms which is the organizational unit that puts on all these live streams and many other products or any of the other activities in the active lab go to activeinference.org all right well today in active stream number 39.0 the goal is to learn and discuss this really awesome paper called morphogenesis as bayesian inference a variational approach to pattern formation and control in complex biological systems it's by franz koochling carl firsten georgiegiv and michael levin from 2020 and just like all the dot zero videos and indeed all our videos it's just an introduction to some of these ideas it's not a review or a final word that being said we're going to go over the aims claims abstract roadmap keyword etc of the paper and then with a focus on the first parts of the paper and less so on the formalism and more on the big ideas we're going to go over the paper and the figures and that will put us in a good position cognitively or morphologically we might even say for the discussions in the coming weeks 39.1 and 39.2 when we'll get to unpack this so if you would like to it'd be awesome to have you participate live or if it's past 39.2 you can still ask questions all right we'll start with introductions and warm-ups we can each say hi and maybe one thing that was exciting or interesting about the paper which all reserved for after you but i'm daniel i'm a researcher in california and dean thanks a ton for joining uh thanks natalie i'm dean i'm here in calgary and what really got me excited about this was uh the idea that they talk a little bit later close to the end we may not even talk about it today is the uh role that epigenetics might play in terms of how cells behave and and what sorts of things we might be able to turn turn in terms of simply um what we see in biological form into some sort of static statistical prediction device so i'm really excited about that awesome yeah it's a complex paper about complex systems so we'll see what we can get done today but i'm really excited to bring active inference into this domain at least as far as our discussions go into the morphological and the morphogenetic areas and it's just bringing like another lens another way that we can apply active inference as a filter another set of phenomena that we're bringing into this active inference realm so we'll just go right into the big question so i'll read this and then feel free to give a thought the big question or at least one way to put one of the questions is how can we find an integrative path between math and morphogenesis morphogenesis means form like physical form morpho and genesis meaning how it arises so how does physical form arise and how is that related to math and to kind of unpack that here's some quotes the molecular mechanisms which are like signaling pathways of all different kinds underlying development and regeneration in biological organisms have undergone a tremendous amount of knowledge gain in the last several years due to genomics and biotechnology advances so that's kind of the one side with the biological and then from the mathematical and the formal the emerging field of the free energy principle in pattern formation not always morphogenetic patterns but can be cognitive patterns rhythmic patterns provides an essential quantitative formalism for understanding cellular decision making in the context of embryogenesis regeneration and cancer suppression so if that's the if then how…