A free energy principle for generic quantum systems

All right. Hello and welcome. This is ActInfLab livestream number 40.0. It's March 10th, 2022. Welcome to the ActInfLab. We're a participatory online lab that is communicating, learning, and practicing applied active inference. You can find us at the links here on the slide. This is recorded in an archived livestream, so please provide us with feedback so that we can improve our work. All backgrounds and perspectives are welcome and we'll be following video etiquette for livestreams. Check out activeinference.org to learn more about the lab. All right. In today's number 40.0, the goal is to learn and discuss this very cool paper that was published on Archive on December 30th, 2021, A Free Energy Principle for Generic Quantum Systems, by Chris Fields, Carl Friston, James F. Glazebrook, and Michael Levin. And just like every video, it's going to be just a conversation going over some parts of the paper. It's not a review or a final word. And if anything, it's a cry for help or at least a cry for participation because there's so many areas where somebody with different experience or more knowledge about any of these domains could connect some dots or give some useful comments or critiques. So especially with this video, though Blue and I had help from our colleague Jason Larkin with many of the details, there's just so much to unpack. So we'll try to make this a useful dot zero and then we're really looking forward to the dot one and dot two and so on when we'll be able to really go into some of these directions. So I hope if you're watching live or between now and the dot one, check out the paper and listen to this discussion that we'll have now and ask some questions because this is just the beginning of a few new threads, probably more than the answering of questions, especially to any desired level of like completeness or applicability. So it's just the beginning. That's what the dot zero is about. It's a new decade, 40.0. So we'll just introduce yourself and then go through a bunch of the paper. And yeah, thanks again to Jason for a lot of help and Blue for awesome work on the slides too. Okay, so I'm Daniel. I'm a researcher in California and I'll pass to Blue as facilitator. I'm Blue Knight. I'm a researcher in New Mexico and I have to shout out to Daniel too because you're always saying thank you to me, but you know, we all have to say thank you to you for providing the affordances to be here and, you know, discuss these awesome questions. Big paper. I am excited to delve into this. I think it will, you know, start a lot of new trails. So I think, and also, to bring back Mike Levin and to bring back Chris Fields and to bring back Carl Friston back to the active lab to discuss the dot one with us, hopefully. Okay. So is there anything particular that you are excited about, Daniel, or do you want to just power through it? Daniel Let's jump in. All right. So this paper really was trying to unite the quantum principles and the free energy principles. So quantum mechanics and kind of delving into that. And we will see some threads carry over from the last time that we had Chris Fields on here. Maybe the last time we had Mike Levin on here also. So how is the free energy principle related to quantum mechanics? What does the FEP gain from quantum? What does quantum gain from the FEP? Are we using the FEP now to model quantum systems? And why are we pursuing this intersection? So this was kind of like the big questions kind of maybe we can start to answer with this paper. So we are here. Daniel, what's this map about? Daniel, what's this map about? So it's a question we are going to probably ask ourselves multiple times so we can insert it like a little emoji, but we can think of among the axes of variation or variability that we are going to explore or where are we are going to tune our regime of attention or what perspectives we're going to take, it's going to be like along two axes, ranging from on the right side, FEP, ACT,…