Textbook Group meeting for Parr, Pezzulo, Friston 2022 .

right welcome everyone to the active inference Institute uh this is week one of uh running through cohort 7 uh we're starting with chapter six of the textbook this is beginning the second half of the textbook as we know in the first half we're covering a lot of the fundamentals of active inference uh you know we started with an introductory chapter environments looking at a lot of basic fundamental principles behind ideas regarding uh behavior of of you know sentience organisms and so on we're looking at uh neural process theories and so how is it that neuronal populations perhaps function in a way that leads to different kinds of inferential processes such that uh you know beings kind of get around the world they update their beliefs uh they they make particular decisions and kind of wait those decision amongst one another uh they have things like attention we've been introduced to terms like prec and precision modulation that in the literature gets related to the idea of something like neurotransmitters and and and transmission and uh variety of other topics that that you can you know have a look at uh we tend to publish these these textbook reading chapters like these um sessions that we do and so you can review those on on YouTube under the active inference Institute Channel Chanel and then uh we'll start quickly here this is the cohort for anyone who's uh new this is the cohort uh seven uh page of the Koda so we use Koda is kind of like this open uh platform and forum for anyone who's not familiar with it um you can like actually just go in here and depending on like as long as you've registered for the textbook you should be able to like edit particular things you can place um you know there are Pages for for communications we have page that involve like you know different equations figures that are within the textbook for quick lookup and reference being able to index them to like a natural language description of what each of them are uh which has been incredibly helpful for people to just like you know rather than being stuck within a single chapter it helps to get a a broader holistic sense of what's going on in the textbook and then um let's see this course yeah questions these are are sort of like major ongoing questions this is kind of an overview this is not specific to any particular cohort right and so that allows for this kind of nestedness of you know intercohort communication and kind of leaving each other uh uh in a stigmergic fashion uh notes for one another different things that people have been contending with in their minds like what you know what what is surprise minimization what are these things like the high road and the low road active inference that we get introduced to in chapters 2 and three um why are we phrasing things this way all the way down to like deeper you know a lot a lot of topics in this book are kind of thought-provoking for a lot of people it brings up a lot of questions about what is consciousness and what is life and you know pan psychism and all kinds of interesting you know kind of additional topics that we may not cover directly in the textbook group but it it kind of begs the question for a lot of people some of these things so so it's a it's a very interesting full kind of historical archive almost of questions about you and then sectioned into each chapter so that way you can kind of like see what else is you know going on in other people's minds and thoughts so um we also we previously were running a math learning group I believe it's still ongoing with um someone who go goes by the Alias octopus but they're um you know very smart and this has been very useful to to a lot of people because a lot of people are coming into to active inference not necessarily having a background in in mathematics they don't necessarily have an intuitive sense of Matrix Matrix operations or or what a tailor series approximation is and things like that so it's very useful to have kind of like…