“The Math is not the Territory: Navigating the Free Energy Principle”

hello everyone welcome to the active inference lab the active inference live stream this is active inference live stream number 14.0 and i'm looking forward to today's discussion welcome to the active inference lab everyone we are an experiment in online team communication learning and practice related to active inference you can find us on our website on twitter our email address on our youtube channel our key base public team and our shared username active inference this is a recorded and an archived live stream so please provide us with feedback so that we can improve our work all backgrounds and perspectives are welcome here and as far as video etiquette for live streams please mute if there's noise in the background raise your hands so we can hear from everybody who wants to speak and we will use respectful speech behavior for the regularly scheduled active inference streams during 2021 all group discussions are going to be on tuesdays from 7 to 9 00 a.m pacific time and that will be a regular weekly time slot and we also do special sessions if you go to this link with the red text you can see some information about participating in future streams and definitely get in touch with us if you want to participate in 2021 or if you have an idea for an event or somebody we could invite for a live stream if you go to that spreadsheet you will see these um columns that cover the date of each active inference live stream that's scheduled and what we'll be reading and anything else about it we just finished up 13.1 and 13.2 which were really fun and this dot zero video is heading into active infrared stream 14.1 and 14.2 reading the math is not the territory by mel andrews and mel will be joining us for these discussions so we're really looking forward to that today in active inference stream 14.0 the goal is to set the context for 14.1 and 14.2 which will be group discussions and the paper under consideration in all three of these live streams is the math is not the territory navigating the free energy principle by mel andrews 20 20. the video is just an introduction to some of the ideas and some of the context it's not a review or a final word and a punchline for this paper is all models are wrong but some are useful and some are the free energy principle which ones are which that's what we're here to talk about in the sections of 14.0 today first we'll go through the aims and claims of the paper talk about a little background represented by the keywords go through the abstract and look over the roadmap then we'll pass through a few key topics and key quotations from the paper and end up with a couple questions that are remaining in 14.1 and in 14.2 we're going to be discussing this very same paper so save your questions post them as a comment on this video and definitely get in touch if you want to participate live in this conversation or in a future or different conversation okay here we are in the paper which is the math is not the territory navigating the free energy principle by mel andrews which was put up on a philsai archive pre-print server on october 8th 2020 and the aims and the claims of the paper are as follows quoting mel with respect to the demarcation problem i defend the position that the fep free energy principle can be taken to belong properly to the domain of science and we're going to talk more about the demarcation problem in a few minutes but that's the question of what is science and what is not science mel writes the fep is certainly not anything like a theory a law a hypothesis or a research program as these have been classically understood in the history and philosophy of science so this is a claim that what the fep is or what it does how it's enacted in the world is different than some of these classical history and philosophy of science terms like theory law hypothesis or program in order to see how the literature on scientific models this is a claim accords with the fep however we will first need to…