Textbook Group meeting for Parr, Pezzulo, Friston 2022 .

all right greetings thanks for joining all it's march 29th 2023 we're in cohort two in our first discussion on chapter 10. so let's head over to chapter 10 and um begin with any comments really about anything within the active area um several were voiced before we begun so perhaps terry feel free to begin with um what you wanted to point towards and let's just see where that goes thank you uh in essence my my question is about the concept of a um a system of volitional consciousness behind that sits behind the uh nodal active inference model and creating um uh i suppose uh making decisions about about the strategic direction of the organism and um i find just repeatedly within this chapter there seems to be this reference to you you know a a conscious entity behind the algorithm and my sense from trying to understand this material is that it's almost like um in meditation where you know the the the the experience is the experience that that that almost there is no eye behind the experience and that um it just jars with me when we're presented with a almost complete uh active inference model or that that where where our our actions in the world are actually experiments to gain information about the external state to um up ultimately update the model and what consciousness is as you said at the start is is a difficult concept but um it seems strange to me within the context of this model that we refer back to some sort of uh underpinning strategic conscious experiential driver of action when that seems out with this model uh or unnecessary for this model hmm uh michael or ali want to give any first thoughts on this yeah ali go for it uh uh yeah uh well uh actually i don't think uh they necessarily uh somehow uh i mean the active inference framework uh doesn't require any conscious entity in the sense uh of our anthropic sense of this word uh consciousness because uh what fp actually tries to model is a kind of uh quote unquote as if epistemology so by uh as if epistemology it doesn't mean that uh everything that uh can can be modeled with uh fp uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh from uh modeled so I'm sure you've encountered this word self evidencing throughout this book which refers to the same concept of as if epistemology so it's or one of I'm sure had Daniel's favorite figures in the book figure yeah 9.1 also captures this sense of perspectival view view of kind of the nature of this modeling is not that we have this sense of omniscience that that can be applied to the environment or that can be reasoned through with I mean reason through with and that can also be applied to our sensorium or perceptorium but it's like we have this model inside a kind of apparatus that can see its behavior as if following through a kind of trajectory in the probability density space so by volition that you're referring to it's my understanding that it's also another term that they've also used that's related to this self evidencing is they is the object or the agent tries to infer its environment through a kind of what was this term it wasn't something like indirect person no it wasn't um Daniel can you help me find the term for uh the indirect perception of the specific term that's used in the literature to refer to indirect perception uh sorry just a second I don't exactly remember okay I'll find it and I'll get back to you in just one second okay and I mean I I I I stop me if I'm going down some unnecessary rabbit hole um uh but it's almost as if uh this um um system uh active inference represents a model by which one could uh uh create a psychological zombie um in in in that you know by active inference without any um sense of internal self one could behave in the world uh by um you know minimizing um uh variational free energy uh in the way that we behave in the world and um Daniel Dennett…