Stochastic Chaos and Markov Blankets

hello and welcome everyone to actin flab live stream number 32.0 at the actin flab the paper we're discussing is going to be stochastic chaos and markov blankets and it's november 7th 2021 let's play our theme [Music] welcome to the actinft lab everyone we are a participatory online lab that is communicating learning and practicing applied active inference you can find us at the links on this page this is a recorded and an archive live stream so please provide us with feedback so that we can improve on our work all backgrounds and perspectives are welcome here and we'll be following video etiquette for live streams at this short link you can see our past and upcoming live streams and here on the main tab the live stream calendar for 2021 we're here in early november we had our fourth quarterly lab round table summarizing the kinds of projects that you can get involved in and what we had done in the previous year what we're looking forward to next year and then the first two weeks of discussion are going to be on november 9th and 16th for this paper that will be discussed tonight in stream number 33 we'll have abel's paper thinking like a state and we haven't set the papers yet for 34 and 35. the goal of 32.0 is to learn and discuss this paper stochastic chaos and markov's blankets 2021 by carl firsten connor hines kai oldhofer lancelot decosta and thomas parr and just like all the dot zeros this is just an introduction to some of the ideas it's not a review or a final word and especially if you have any experience or you want to learn more about any of these areas and help improve our presentation or understanding of it that'd be very helpful you can join a live stream or just come get involved in some of the aspects of the lab because these are things that we want to understand but also there's a lot to learn and in the coming two weeks we're going to discuss this paper so i'm daniel and i'm in california the big questions of this paper are related to the general discussion in the active inference and free energy principle literature and beyond what is a good model of thingness in a chaotic dynamic and dissipative world so do we think of things as as they are in the snapshot or do we have to think of them through time at what spatial or temporal scale or with what kind of measure stick does it make sense to talk about things and then how does the result of that first question this model or approach to thickness speak to system sentience which is going to be a word that is used in this paper and notably this is not being defined in terms of feeling like experiencing it's defined in the paper as where internal states look as if they're inferring external states so perhaps closer to what dennett would call the intentional stance but this is sort of just pragmatism meets anti-dissipativism third point what is a markov blanket and how is one modeled and identified or defined statistically this is going to be the technical bulk and contribution of the paper so if anyone wants to learn more and help us present some of the technical details which we're going to go through in this lecture but total disclaimer if it's not accurate or it's an incorrect generalization a word that wasn't a key word per se but maybe is just a qualitative entry point is this idea of flow and here we have people flowing like a long time exposure in a subway station and there's water flow which has several aspects the water itself is moving but also there's the flow of energy there's information flow and then there's this psychological concept of flow and so different aspects of these could be said to be flowing in different ways and people jump across these different areas so wouldn't it be cool if there were a quantitative model that kind of incorporated some of what was meant by all these concepts including a science of perhaps perception cognition in action so the big picture is how are we going to connect kind of physical flow models to potentially…