Applied Active Inference Symposium 2025 part 3

Hello everyone. Welcome to the fifth applied active inference symposium day 3, November 14, 2025. My name is Zorera Manad. I'm honored to introduce the first presenters of today, Steph McCertie and Andreas Kuloscos. Uh, presenting money and the free energy principle. Okay, the stage is yours, please. >> Thank you. Uh, thank you to the active inference institute for hosting this symposium and having us give this talk. This is money and the free energy principle. My name is Steph McCertie. I'm the head of blockchain research and education at Wolam research and my collaborator is Andrew Kulicowskis, PhD in mathematics who runs maths for wisdom. In this presentation, uh, we thought it would be a good idea for me to share a little bit about my story and how I arrived at the active inference institute. And I'm going to share a connection that I see in um that I believe is is true in um free energy principle and money. and then I'm going to give it to Andrew to speak a little bit more about the math of energy, entropy, and free energy and pull back the curtain a little bit. So my story begins around 2014 when I read these two books back to back and they kind of set the stage for the next decade of my two approaches of research. Um, one direction and was cosmic evolution by astrophysicist from Harvard, Eric Chaisan, which kind of said something along the lines of um how much free energy is flowing through a physical system normalized by mass and time. And it points to this evolution across the universe in a direction of complexity. And in the other direction on the other end of the spectrum was this book called why information grows by Cesar Hidalgo statistical physicist from MIT. And that kind of gave me another way of seeing a similar story which was how do you measure and determine order and structure in systems and that kind of painted a picture of information growth or entropy minimization. So, this colored a spectrum or two two roads for me and I'm going to just fill in some personal events over the past 10 years that helped color this in. So in 2015 I found Bitcoin and while I didn't understand it completely technically at the time I became fascinated by the consensus mechanism called proof of work which to me really was the connection between energy computation and value. And it was interesting because while reaching this distributed consensus in a new way, we could organize uh economies or economics or money and in different ways and and that gave me just a sense that we could be looking at either ends of the spectrum. In 2017, I had a a another question that I really wanted to answer, which was uh about solar energy. So, I went to work for Tesla in 2017 to understand a little bit more about the proliferation of solar energy and solar panels. And it was obvious that in nature, the sun provides ample free energy. And I expected the same to be true for our economy that more of our energy production would come from the sun. Um Tesla had an interesting approach which said there are constraints and limitations on the current electrical grid infrastructure. Uh to get around that one needs high free energy density of batteries. So that colored in another kind of two points on my spectrum here. Then in 2020 I learned about Wolram physics and this was Steven Wolram's fundamental phys physics project and Steven Wolram has an approach to physics which is deeply computational and it's computation with a capital C. It's how do you look at simple rules and how do that how does that lead to emergent complexity and that filled in a couple more gaps in my understanding of the major pillars of physics general relativity quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics or he calls uh the second law of thermodynamics. So I was seeing this happen. I joined Wolffrram. I was tasked to lead the research team at Wolram Blockchain Labs and there I studied many blockchains, many consensus protocols and many cryptocurrencies and I learned about a new uh…