A tale of two architectures free energy, its models, and modularity

Welcome Blue, I'm about to play the theme song. Hello everyone, welcome to ActInflab livestream number 35.0. It is January 4th, 2022, so also, Happy New Year to everyone. Welcome to the ActInflab. We are a participatory online lab that is communicating, learning, and practicing applied active inference. You can find us at the links here on this slide. This is a recorded and archived livestream, so please provide us with feedback so that we can improve our work. All backgrounds and perspectives are welcome on these livestreams and will be following good video etiquette. If you go to activeinference.org, you can find out more about how to contribute or get involved, because anyone who is curious and wants to learn more will have a niche for you, and you will surely learn and create all kinds of awesome affordances. So, if you're curious or you want to learn by doing, please come get involved with ActInflab. Today in ActInflab livestream number 35.0, we are going to be learning and discussing this paper, A Tale of Two Architectures, Free Energy, Its Models and Modularity by Majid Beni in December 2021, but kind of published in 2022. Today in ActInflab is a series of videos that we have a series of videos that we have in the past. We are going to be looking forward to the two upcoming weeks when Majid may join us, and hopefully many of you will join us, and we are just going to have a good time, talk about the paper, what have we learned from it, and what are the implications. Today we are going to be more focused on the aims and claims, the abstract, the roadmap, the background, the keywords, and there aren't any figures or formalisms, but we will go through some of the key arguments, which are very provocative and very salient. So, if you want to get involved, just get in touch, and we will let you know how to participate. Let's begin with a little bit of an introduction and a warm-up. So, feel free to say hello and maybe just one thing that made you excited to discuss this paper. So, I'm Daniel. I'm a researcher in California, and I was excited to read philosophical work by Beni, who always writes very interesting things, and just understand how architectures of physical systems and their functional descriptions are related to the FEP. Dean? Thanks, Daniel. I'm Dean. I'm here in Calgary. It's really, really cold and snowy, but that's not why we're here. My real question was, so what do we do about this seeming philia or attraction to the ability to categorize? And so, the question is, do we model up? And yeah, so reading the paper, I kind of tried to figure out the answer to that. I'll pass it down to Blue. So, I like this paper from the perspective of multi-scale dimensionality and also modularity, like modules at different dimensions, the scale-free aspect of the Markov blanket, or the not scale-free aspect of the Markov blanket. And anyway, I thought it was just really neat and a cool way to fit the pieces together. Excellent. So, we have some slide with things that we want to discuss in the dot one and the dot two and beyond. So, at any point, feel free to add information there and we'll be writing things there. So, we're not going to get to it all. We're not going to make this an 11-hour video. We'll get things down to discuss in 35.1 and two. But we can lead in with the big question, a big question, which is, how do we think about modularity of different kinds, like functional, effective, and anatomical, which we'll be discussing later, in active inference and free energy principle? And why does that matter? Why does it matter how we think about modularity of different kinds? What does it mean? Here on this slide are some images related to just different uses of modularity. Just modules like Lego bricks. Other times, modularity can refer to like part of a network that's more densely connected, like a click. Other times, modularity doesn't refer to hot-swappability, but rather to a larger structure that's composed of…