Textbook Group meeting for Parr, Pezzulo, Friston 2022 .

All right. Greetings, everyone. Thanks for joining. It is August 15th, and we're in our final discussion, recorded discussion for Cohort 3. Next week, we'll have a kind of unrecorded discussion. Also, this will be the day of the symposium, so a very auspicious day to have been concluded upon. But today, we're going to talk about 10 and probably anything else. So, Ali or Neil, want to leave with anything? And or we can go to Esmails' question first. Right. I've quickly put in the last three questions, but I think we can get through those. So, we can start with Esmails. All right. I'll just read it. And then happy to hear anyone's thoughts or more details. Since I believe in Occam's razor, I deny the meaning of awareness. My suggestion is accessible cognition and inaccessible cognition. It looks like we have an operating system and implicit memory that's not available, such as the procedural memory and emotional memory. I have some doubts about the rest of the words like consciousness and awareness. And this is about the question, the opening quotation of the chapter. Beginning of the end. In general, we are at least aware of what our minds do best. Neil or Ali? That touches on my last question, which was what is sentient about Active Inference. That's put in the chapter title. Well, I've suggested as a teaser. The chapter's really just summarising. uh it's it doesn't doesn't really say anything about consciousness I don't think and where Carla's it all seems to be getting more involved in discussions of consciousness but I think he always maintains a distance between that and and works with with uh people who are concerned with that but it's it's more something where active inferences is a framework for um well to help people who are looking at sentence and consciousness uh but doesn't really say anything specifically about it and so it seems to me awesome Ali want to add anything on that uh well yeah as far as I know sentience um inactive in principle literature is used uh in a rather technical sense in which um sentient beings are just uh are they're they're the beings that are responsive uh to the external stimuli so that's as simple as it gets uh and uh because of its simplicity uh it uh encompasses a whole array of things as being sentient and uh it's not necessarily uh restricted to biological sentience or uh I don't know uh any thing akin to uh to the level of human intelligence for human sentience and so on so uh it can basically be applied to uh include artificial sentience and uh everything even uh virtual sentience such as I don't know the kind of thing that's just been implemented algorithmically in the software and stuff so uh as it it it was a subject of a rather repeated debate a few months ago uh I mean the meaning of the sentience is used in active inference literature but in all honesty it's not a novel use either because uh this the same very definition of uh sentience that's used in active inference is almost exactly the same as uh one of the definitions uh from Oxford English dictionaries so uh it's not as controversial as it seems but about the other uh terms such as awareness and consciousness well uh I don't believe we have any sort of consensus around those words yet in active inference literature although uh in recent papers around um um or mum model of active inference uh Maxwell and others are trying to converge um a consensus um on the word on the notion of consciousness in terms of active inference um yeah what great topics and also how cool with chapter 10 published about a year and a half ago maybe written in the previous months leading up to one and a half years ago how how there are certain similarities and continuations of the discussion um yeah Neil I really like the um the point about having us how how um active inference how it stays it's unopinionated to the extent that it's composable as a describing system those properties are kind of like convex concave and there's a lot to say…