Discussion 1 — Course information

Hello and welcome everyone. It's June 3rd, 2023. We're in the first discussion section for Physics as Information Processing course with Chris Fields. So welcome to all who are here on and off camera. Really exciting to see so many people joining for this participatory discussion section. So in this first interval, we're going to go to anyone who raises their hand and it would be awesome to hear from everyone who would like to share what excites them about what they heard in the first lecture. How has their background and journey led to them joining? What are they hoping to learn and do in this course? So first hand, we'll get to go. Maybe, Ander, you can actually start first, just speaking as a normal participant. And then meanwhile, anyone is welcome to raise their hand. That sounds good. So I am a mathematician by training, professor of physics. But I've always been interested in the more physics side of things. And in particular, you know, I followed Chris's work pretty closely since probably 2019. And I don't know, I'm just very interested in the whole ontology of quantum measurement, what it means. I feel like, you know, very often when it's taught in physics classes, it's hand-waved away. And even though I myself subscribe to the philosophy of, you know, shut up and compute, sometimes, you know, not everything. You need to do a little bit of philosophy maybe. And this may be one of the things where you need to do it. And you need to address it from first principles, right? And I think Chris is interested in that. So I'm just here to learn more. And yeah, that's basically it. Awesome. I'll just go from the top left, because I'm not necessarily watching like what order, but Ross first. Hi, I'm interested in the kind of overlap between cognitive science and physics, physics, and seeing if there are any panpsychist implications of the observation that physical processes seem to follow the same kind of principle that we see applied to brains and cognitive systems. Awesome. Thank you. Avel? Hi, I'm Avel Guénin-Carluge. I have mixed backgrounds, mostly physics and cognitive science. Right now, I could be qualified as a philosopher of physics and cognitive science. And I'm interested in basically formalizing participatory realism, the idea that the observer participates in creating reality. I did some work in formalizing that in the case of social norms, and things like language. And I met a block based on my lack of knowledge of quantum physics and the mathematical tools that I used for that. So I'm here in a course to get those formal skills. Awesome. Thank you, Avel. Blue? I think Alex was first. Okay. Alexi, go for it. Oh, sorry. Hi, I'm Alexi. I'm a clinical psychologist in Maryland, in the States. I work with patients, do psychotherapy mostly. My interest came through Mark Solms, who is the creator and leader of Neuropsychoanalysis. And he has been collaborating with Friston on heart problem of consciousness. And he's now working on AI with emotions. And so he, you know, I blame him, I say it with respect and love that for introducing mathematics into our field, which was mostly devoid of mathematics. And people started looking at these partial differential equations and Markov blankets. So I wrote a paper about a possible extension of their model to include chaos theory. And I just want to understand deeper concepts involved. And I have some understanding of them, but perhaps not enough. And I'm enjoying this course a great deal. I mean, I think Chris, among other things, a fantastic teacher, and he is able to express things very clearly. And it just, I have all, I have goosebumps. So I'm very grateful to everybody. And thank you so much. Cool. Blue, then Francesco. Hi, everyone. I'm Blue Knight. I'm with the Active Inference Institute. So I've been tracking this work of Chris's, you know, connecting quantum information and active inference for, I don't know, a couple of couple of years now through through that thread.…