Textbook Group meeting for Parr, Pezzulo, Friston 2022 .

Hello. It is September 23rd, 2022, and we are in meeting four for Cohort 2 of the Active Inference Textbook Group. We're having our first discussion of the Chapter 2 of the textbook. So, before we jump to the book and assess where things are at with questions, does anyone want to provide any overview, thoughts, or experiences that they had while reading or rereading Chapter 2? Just overall, anything about Chapter 2? There's a lot of math. Okay, Blue, thank you. Anyone else? Okay. We have this questions table, and none have added any questions specifically for Chapter 2, or if someone did and put them somewhere else, just let us know. These are really important. We hope and expect and prefer that people do have questions while they're reading the text. And this is a really essential learning practice, and it helps improve our epistemic niche. It also contributes to future cohorts and future learners when we can have, again, every single kind of question. From the directly related, what does this word mean here, to the tangential, every kind of question that people have, it's a huge service to actually just add several of them to this table. So we don't have any for today, and that will free us up to give an overview of Chapter 2, walk through it, and kind of connect a few dots, perhaps. And then it'd be awesome in our second discussion of Chapter 2 for people to have noted down a few things that they were curious about, including during this discussion people can add directly or write down somewhere else and add later. But this is a really important way to structure our learning individually and collectively. So we're going to go into Chapter 2 and walk through it, paying attention to the formalisms and also to a lot of the work that has been added through the Math Learning Group and through various people's efforts to improve the legibility of the math, because it'll be like either a first coat of paint or a refresher for truly everyone. So everyone's going to be approaching this and trying to learn the math in different ways. Let's start with Figure 1.2. This is the high road coming from the top and the low road coming from the bottom. Chapter 2 is going to be leading with the low road. Chapter 3 is going to be presenting from the high road. So Chapter 2 is going to begin with an overview of Bayes' theorem, Bayesian statistics, and then make its way up through some of these terms described here and reach that kind of common meeting point with active inference. Before we flip to Chapter 2, does anyone have any just general comments on the low road? Chapter 3 is going to be leading with the low road. Okay. The chapter begins with this quote from William James. My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing. What does anyone think that means or how does it reflect on them? Why is it here? Why is it here? If anyone can just unmute an address or raise their hand. Sean? I suppose it's making the connection between perception and action there with the thinking and the doing. which is important in chapter two awesome as the name active inference would have it there are going to be many connections between cognition and inference and action like the embodiment of maneuvers in the real embodied world as well as even ways of thinking about mental or cognitive behaviors as actions like attention as action so that will be a thread that continues as we continue to build on active inference the introduction paragraph is first providing a historical view that even qualitative and pre-1900 views encompassed perception as an unconscious inference and as something that was being generated subliminally and updated and then kind of presented to awareness and then the authors place the bayesian brain hypothesis as a kind of formal realization of some of those models of perception and action and explain how active inference is going to be extending those ideas by doing several things not just considering perception as…