Textbook Group meeting for Parr, Pezzulo, Friston 2022 .

hello everyone it is june 9 2022 and it's chapter three week one and it's the first cohort of the textbook group we're gonna go to the questions uh there weren't any ideas added for three but if people have any key themes or any ideas that they picked up on with three they can add them here otherwise we'll go to the questions and [Music] also if people have questions in the chat or it would be also great just to take notes or add questions and continue to upload them and then next week we'll continue the discussion on three so this is just the opening set of questions maybe just the first ideas of the book turning two questions now that we've at least gone through chapter two once and part of chapter three or the whole thing of chapter three what is the high road to active inference what does anyone think about the high road to active inference or about this low road high road construct that is used in chapters two and three just broadly how did the approach of chapter three feel different than the approach or the topics of chapter two um jf and then ali well i i just want to make the bill comment that the the the the high road approach is what uh first grabbed me when i encountered the free energy principle that that what really fascinated me that there was an attempt at the a unifying answer to uh self-organization uh cognition um and that this could all be brought together uh around some relatively uh a sparse number of of concepts that's what grabbed me much more than the low road thank you ali and then ben well yeah uh reading chapter three actually clarified uh my previously held in fact wrong belief that uh i previously i thought that a low road was a kind of uh bottom-up approach and the high road is a top-down approach but uh now i see that low road was basically uh tackling the problem of active inference from the inferential point of view and from the statistical and inferential point of view but uh in the high road uh we have a much more general generalized and much more let's say all-encompassing uh view to tackle the problem of active inference namely uh by way of defining markup blankets and all the properties of living organisms and so on awesome thank you ben and then anyone else who raises their hand and also you can take notes on this ideas the book like high road generally ben and then mike yeah i think uh i think for me as well the height this chapter three in the high road has been um an easier road in and i the thing that i noticed about it was it seems to me so so they say in the introduction that active inference is a normative theory i feel like the high road to me feels there's much more normativity in the high road is that it's an account of what organisms have to do and i think compared to the previous compared to the previous chapter i think chapter 2 felt a lot more descriptive for me i'm not sure other people would maybe that's just the way that i was reading it but it it felt like chapter three was a lot more kind of it had a more normative force to it that i i really enjoyed thank you bye there we go sorry my computer was not responding uh so i went through a similar experience as ali described in terms of going into it thinking about bottoms up and top down and coming out of it thinking about it differently um but i feel like in chapter three there's still a lot to unpack around the markov blanket so that is still capturing this inferential nature of things it still has a bayesian quality like what we saw in chapter two um but it also for me at least it still feels a bit opaque at this point in terms of um this sort of indirect influence that's taking place across the markov blanket awesome okay any other comments otherwise we're going to go to the questions and and we'll approach many of those topics okay first question regarding the markov blanket explanation on page 43 and box 3.1 they write no additional information about the future is gained by finding out about the past assuming we…