“Free-Energy Principle, Computationalism and Realism: a Tragedy"

hello everyone welcome to the active inference lab the active inference live stream today it is active inference live stream 15.0 and it is january 27 2021 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 at our website twitter email youtube key based team also with the discord now and this is recorded in an archived live stream so please provide us with feedback so that we can improve on our work all backgrounds and perspectives are welcome here and this is going to be fun because it's a dialogue which i'm not sure if it's a format we've tried before but we'll abide by good video chat etiquette with blue and i so just to introduce ourselves before we jump into everything i'm daniel friedman i'm a postdoctoral researcher in davis california and i'm an insect biologist mostly what about yourself blue my name is blue knight i am an independent research consultant based out of new mexico and my background is mostly in neuroscience cool well this is going to be a fun conversation these conversations are related to the active inference live stream group discussions that we do regularly and these discussions are every tuesday from 7 to 9 a.m pacific and if you go to this red link you'll find a spreadsheet and the spreadsheet shows the two participatory group discussions that we spend the time on with each paper and so for february 2nd and 9th 2021 for active stream 15.1 and 15.2 we're going to be talking about this paper that we're going to discuss in 15.0 with a bigger group as well as with the authors in s and thomas so this is going to be a cool opportunity to hear a lot of perspectives of people who are just learning and also have the authors on for some long form discussions with time to digest so the dot zero videos um which is what this video is has the goal of setting the context for these group discussions because these are research papers and they're basically the form of the ideas as they're being worked with by researchers so it is something that might take a lot of background reading or thinking about to catch up with so the goal is maybe these videos in the dot zero can prepare someone to feel more comfortable participating in point one or point two even participating as a listener so the paper we're going to be discussing for today and for the next two weeks is called free energy principle computationalism and realism a tragedy it's by thomas van ness and in s hippolyto and the link is provided here the video is just an introduction to the context of the ideas it's not a review or a final word especially if you knew how much time we spent preparing for this and the punchline of the paper if we could put it this way is that realism is a tragedy and instrumentalism is no joke either the sections of today are going to go as follows in the introduction we're going to go through the aims and the claims of the papers then the keywords the abstract and the roadmap then there's one figure one table and a few key topics and quotations that really stand out as far as summarizing some of the bigger ideas that we've been talking about but also really crystallizing the arguments of the paper so good things to catch on to if you didn't highlight it or draw a circle around it when you were reading it earlier and then we'll close with a couple questions that we had just while making the slides and these aren't ones that we're going to address today but they're things that we're curious to hear what people think about and what other questions and methods they connect them out to so in 15.1 and 0.2 we're going to be discussing this very same paper so just submit your questions through the live chat or through a youtube comment or twitter however and then if you want to um participate live in these or a future discussion then you're welcome to join okay let's so let's talk about the aims and the claims of the paper um blue do…