Textbook Group meeting for Parr, Pezzulo, Friston 2022 .

All right, welcome everyone to cohort four of the textbook group. It's June 6, 2023. So appreciate hearing everyone's introductions in that first section. I'm going to share the screen and we'll look at the the platform, which is our shared work space and has all the information. And it's also a work in progress and one that you can edit or comment. So please feel free to raise your hand whenever you have a thought or a question. And also you can write into the chat in Zoom. And in this first meeting, we're going to like go over a lot of the sections of the the platform and also just like take questions and have discussions on how the textbook group will proceed. So the top page on the the platform is on the top left. Just to give a little bit of some overview of the platform overall, you can hide the sidebar if you want to focus on a page. You can also collapse the nesting of pages. When you're within a page, some pages are not editable, like just because they're kind of static content. But you'll find that editing on editable pages is roughly like any other kind of online text editor. And we're going to go through the sections and see more about what they all do and how they come into play and so on. So the top page gives some information on the Active Inference Institute and on the textbook group overall. And then also there's the textbook itself, which can be just right-clicked and downloaded. So it's an open source textbook, which is really awesome. It came out about one year ago in 2022. So it's early days for this first version of the first textbook of Active Inference. And we also can have a lot to do to fill in the dots and add questions and context, extra resources. It's quite a work to have made a pocket-sized book that covers Active Inference. But you'll also find that in these discussions, especially as people look towards the applications and philosophy and so on, that we bring in a lot of other resources and questions. So it's not like strictly just the textbook, but that's our attractor. Directory gives... And also in the platform, you may want to switch between light and dark on the top right if you want it to look different on your computer. Directory provides just a few sections of this the platform and what they're for. Live meetings... Here in Cohort 4, probably be most interested in Cohort 4 itself. So just as a kind of like who we are or where we're at, I yesterday brought in a few different visualizations. Just anecdotally, we heard in the introductions people's backgrounds, different like educational larval stages. But this graphic is just a snapshot of the forms when people have registered. So this is across cohorts, just to get a better sampling. The x-axis is self-assessed familiarity with active inference. Not familiar, zero. Highly familiar, 100. And then computer science, biology, and maths familiarity in green, blue, and red. And it's awesome to see that there's basically a painting of the canvas. So that's the fun. We have people with a lot of different backgrounds. And as we leave this interdisciplinary conversation where there's going to be math and analytical equations coming into play, there's going to be computer science and pseudocode and computational architectures coming into play. There's going to be biology and mammalian neurophysiology coming into play. And also all these other domains that people mentioned, like clinical setting, logistics and supply chain, music perception, et cetera. Like those, even more. You know, there could be more colors. But this is also to say, like, everyone's journeys and backgrounds are really welcome. It's not that everyone is highly familiar with any of these topics. We're all learning these topics. And even those who have more familiarity, hopefully slash actually want to teach and share it. So we want to just highlight the accessibility and also the rigor and the applicability of all of this coming together. And then also self-described people's synchronous and asynchronous time commitment on a…