The free energy principle: it’s not about what it takes, it’s about what took you there

[Music] [Music] all right hello and welcome everyone it's active lab live stream number 34.0 on december 3rd 2021 and we're discussing the paper the free energy principle it's not about what it takes it's about what took you there welcome to the actin flap we are a participatory online lab that is communicating learning and practicing applied active inference you can find us at the links here on this slide this is a recorded and an archived 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 cool diatic video chat etiquette today at this the platform site you can find our sortable searchable interactable and growing database of past and future live streams and if nothing else isn't this paper going to be about the past and the future and it's also our last paper discussion that we're kicking off for 2021 in number 34. so it's a pretty cool discussion and i'm really looking forward to it in actin stream number 34 we're going to be discussing the paper the free energy principle it's not about what it takes it's about what took you there by axel constant in 2021 and just like all the other dot zeros the video is a introduction to some of the ideas and the context for the paper it's not a review or an evaluation or a final word we'll go over the aims and the claims the abstract and the roadmap of the paper and then there's a couple keywords including some that we haven't seen before and then we'll walk through the key example which is the numerical example of a simple signal detecting bacterium and we'll kind of talk through that example and see where that takes us and i'll just note as with all the other dot zeros check out the paper if you want to learn more and axel's writing is really a pleasure to read and he has deep insight into the fep so we'll start with just saying hello and anything that we else wanted to say so i'm daniel i'm a researcher in california and what excited me about this paper and got me excited to discuss it was i think axel's provocative as well as grounded and respectful approach to dealing with what has and hasn't been done in the fep and the example is so minimal and paired down but also insightful that i think it lends itself to a jumping off point for many many other discussions dean yeah uh uh thanks daniel i'm dean i'm i'm in calgary and uh i think what excited me about this was that i um i didn't start out really understanding what the title of the paper even meant but then when there when there was a bit of a an inversion and a bit of a taking things inside out and i don't know if you want to describe that as a reversal of what is typically viewed as the time continuum or not um it just opened up a whole bunch of uh interesting ideas which i was contemplating as a as a program developer because i knew that um in order for the idea of being able to go from an inference i believed going from an inference which is a very small time frame through a prediction set and finally into being able to get to a place of modeling or understanding co-variation as a as collective uh this paper would probably help and then with each section i went through it was it was very helpful in terms of being able to sort of bring this idea just as an idea not in terms of its practical implications but just as an idea to life so [Music] okay i'm sure he'll rejoin i'm gonna just read through some of the big questions and again these are just the ones that we wrote down so all read the first two and then maybe say something and then dean you can take the second two so two of the big questions that the paper raises are what is the free energy principle about and what is the entailment relationship between life and the minimization of free energy or another way to read that is what is the entailment relationship between life and models that emphasize the minimization of free energy and i just love how the paper dances between both…