Season Finale // Reflection

all right it is july 8th 2024 and it is active inference insights number 24 a reverse insight so welcome darius how are you doing very well i apologize everyone also for my stupid headband i'm currently in el salvador um it's very warm and my hair is going everywhere so i've just decided to strap it in so um it's a bit of it's a bit of a look i'm very well how are you daniel good well as we just briefly discussed this is sort of the season finale slash pivot point or next jump and we will discuss some of the inception and journey of insight series though one through 23 main episodes what is next for insights what is next for you and just however long that is so let us begin with yep insights how did it come to be and what were the beginning steps like well firstly it's annoying that we never made this to 25 you know it would be nice to have a nice square number but 24 that's life i guess um how's it come about well firstly thanks to your generosity um in many ways and the institute's generosity so i'm very grateful for that um i'd done podcasting when i was at university a little bit after but i think i just noticed there was a there was a sort of gap at least in the institute's offerings uh the live streams not like this one but the other ones that can be quite technical and i don't think necessarily offer a way in and a way to see how active inference exists exists in the sort of context of theories of biology or neuroscience or philosophy or whatnot so there was a space airport and i just i guess i guess it was also this idea that it was a way for people to learn alongside me um and i think that's always quite an efficient and effective way of podcasting uh because i don't you know there's one thing that where people know nothing and it's very difficult to have a conversation with an expert and there's another way that's two experts speaking and it's inaccessible for the audience so it was um i think we hopefully found a kind of sweet spot where i was sufficiently knowledgeable albeit to a quite limited degree at the beginning i'd say uh but enough that i could ask insightful questions and be curious the way it came about really was i did my masters at ucl in 2020 from 2022 to 2023 and about halfway through i sort of discovered active inference probably through predictive processing because obviously carl is at ucl and it's a big hub for active inference although i think there's an interesting relationship between active inference and ucl because not everyone's necessarily on board and then i started attending i got on the discord so miles who we just mentioned before miles tufty was my supervisor at ucl was also and is also interested in active inference and he recommended the discord and the institute so i started doing that started attending the textbook groups and then i think i just messaged you uh when would that have been sort of september october and it all came together quite nicely and rather quickly and then again just people to thank carl really first and foremost to be the first guest um a good three hours with carl was like a very nerve-wracking experience but i think a pretty you know throw yourself in the deep end and then i think hopefully it's just gone from strength to strength um and i'm sure we can sort of talk about how it's evolved one thing about that certainly by view count which is not everything the most popular videos on our channel over the last year have been basically chris fields is 2023 physics is information processing and your series and now i'm kind of reflecting on that and uh when we have a presentation like a guest stream that can get technical or a live stream with a paper focused third people there it's human however it's also like a conversation with the literature and literature in conversation with other topics whereas in chris fields's case with the course like format that's a uh similar to a professor to audience and then what you kind of brought into play was like also the…