Textbook Group meeting for Parr, Pezzulo, Friston 2022 .

Hello, everyone. It is September 30th, 2022, and we're in Cohort 2, meeting number 5. We're having our second discussion on the Chapter 2 of the textbook. So we'll jump in shortly to the questions, but first just wanted to highlight a stream that will be happening later today, which is number 49.0, and I'll share it in the chat here. Or you can find it through the live stream page. This is with Ali and Jakob, who are here, and the upcoming two weeks we'll have Dalton Soktyavidevel coming to discuss the paper, and this paper is quite an opus, and we had a lot of fun preparing for it. All right. So, we'll go to the questions, and I think these are all just great beginning points. Is there anyone who wants to point to a question that they're interested to begin with, or a question that they asked or one that they feel has like a natural starting point? Otherwise, I can pick one. Daniel, the question on thinking between cognition and thinking was one that I put there. It was just from the beginning of the chapter, the little quote, my thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing. It's just when you read, I always get confused between cognition and thinking and knowing and all those sort of words and their relationships to each other. So, I was just wondering if we could just sort of clarify that a little bit. All right. What does anyone think? Are these terms synonymous? Or are different things being pointed at with different terms like this? Well, I would maybe say that thinking could be interpreted as action. And knowing maybe could be a consequence. Well, knowing could be the specific representation of beliefs in the brain. And then cognition is, I see that as the kind of overarching blanket. Well, thinking is, Ali. Yeah, well, actually, there are many different angles that we can tackle the conceptual differences between these three terms. I'm going to start from the last term, knowing. Well, in epistemology, the standard definition for knowing is justified true belief. So, if we take that as a definition of knowing, then we can go to thinking as the act of gaining that justified true belief. As Jacob has mentioned, some people describe thinking in terms of action. And then cognition is a kind of conscious state in which the thinking happens. I mean, if it's not the action of thinking per se, it's the situation or the state in which these kind of thinkings and knowings happen. But obviously, this is a very simplistic distinction between them. There are very nuanced discussions going on in the philosophy of mind about the differences between and whether are these three concepts mutually exclusive or they can be related in a kind of hierarchical way to each other. So, awesome. Very deep answers. One other take would be thinking is a gerund verb. It's a process, whereas cognition is a noun. And just from a sentiment perspective, thinking seems to imply like a process and perhaps the experiencer, like the subconscious regulation of blood pressure might not be considered thoughtful or thinking. Whereas, especially as cognitive theories are kind of pervading all areas in a type of pan-cognitivism, then cognition is a bit more neutral with respect to phenomenology and awareness. So, one could say a computer is doing a type of cognition. The sand pile is doing a type of cognitive process. This membrane is doing cognition. It's equalizing the temperature. Those can all be described cognitively. And especially as we take active inference, which is a framework derived in the neurosciences, where these terms might have the least space between them. But then the question of whether a computer is doing thinking or knowing is perhaps further afield, whereas to say that a computer is doing cognitive process or information processing might be less controversial. Like extended cognition. But then I guess we just don't hear as much about extended thinking or extended knowing. But when they're all in our body, then these seem…