Natural language syntax complies with the free energy principle

hello and welcome to the active inference lab today is april 14th 2021 and we're here in guest stream number 4.1 with elliot murphy so this is going to be a really interesting talk and elliot we appreciate you coming on so i'll just pass it to you to introduce yourself introduce the topic and then share some slides so anyone who's watching live or i guess later in the comments just ask questions and we'll have time during this presentation and at the end to go over some comments but thanks again elliot and looking forward to hearing yeah thank you very much and so i am a postdoc working at ut health uh in houston texas i work on intracranial recordings of epilepsy patients doing a bunch of language tasks trying to explore the neural basis of language and today i will i'm going to present uh some slides kind of reviewing um a recent preprint that is currently in review on active inference and the free energy principle so i'm going to share my screen yep looks good okay so yeah i'm going to give you an introduction to the topic and then talk a bit about linguistics and then try and wrap up um you know we'll make this more of an obvious conversation uh comments questions uh objections obviously uh more than welcome from anybody so yeah like i said this is the preprint that's currently uh in review uh with emma holmes uh carl first and ucl uh the argument is that natural language syntax complies in some degree with the free energy principle so just um outlining some kind of really cool uh you know basic principles i want to make this conversation a little bit more philosophical than than normal and obviously this is this this lab is i have influence lab so i want to kind of introduce some linguistic topics more than the fap topics and because the audience might be less familiar with the kind of synthetic theory so to begin with natural language syntax yields what linguists then call an unbounded array of hierarchically structured expressions unbounded meaning that they can potentially go on forever there's no upper bound on the limit of a sentence length right you can always make any sentence longer by simply adding john said that at the beginning of it and it gets longer the only thing that stops sentences going on forever is the working memory the age of the average human being and indeed the age of the universe you know sentences can't go on forever they have to stop at some point and but the generative component in principle could do that so that's the interesting part about language the fact that you could in principle generate an unbounded array of expressions so i kind of argued in this paper that these are used in the surface of active inference which is in turn in the code with the community principle so the general goal is to kind of align certain concerns of linguistics with those of the normative model for organic system behavior associated with the fpp so i'm going to be relying on theoretical linguistics with special analysis on syntax which is the system that look that determines the kind of order that words and go in the structure and organization relation the organizational relations between words and sentences so a lot of these design principles are kind of um general to the biological component of language not just for specific instantiations of language so they're not specific to english but french or swahili they're kind of general design principles um about how the language system seems to be like organized and so like i said i want to kind of emphasis emphasize more on the linguistics and uh topic more than active inference just reverb to the exposition and although the pre-print itself has all the kind of relevant details if you're interested in reading more but um yeah but kind of the brief historical background here is that since around the 10th century about 20-25 years ago lingus has basically been and developing theories of linguistic computation and which invoke economy principles so um basically the…