Textbook Group meeting for Parr, Pezzulo, Friston 2022 .

All right, hello everyone. It's February 1st, 2023, and we're in cohort three of the Paradol textbook group, meeting number two. We're having our first discussion on chapter one. So would anybody like to just give any opening thoughts or comments, anything that they expected, preferred, enjoyed, remembered about chapter one? Like what was something they were expecting and got or didn't, or something that stuck with them about the experience of chapter one? You can raise your hand or just go for it. How about, oh, yes, please go for it, someone, or chance favors the prepared mind. Go for it. Awesome. Yes, thank you. And I'll copy your comment in, Jonathan. Yes, rereading, taking another look, and just letting it play out the first read and then coming back again and again and seeing more each time. And a lot of the formalisms are not in chapter one. So there is meat slash nutrition elsewhere. But also there's interesting insights within the chapter, and I'm sure it sparked people to think about different things. So anyone else, feel free to go for it. Like just any sections of chapter one or any framings that you remembered or you highlighted or that stuck out to you? John Luigi? Oh, thank you. John Luigi? Oh, thank you. In terms of what motivates or excites people about learning ACT-INF, they situate the question that ACT-INF seeks to address as how do living organisms persist while engaging in adaptive exchanges with their environment. Pretty interesting. Is that the question that people thought active inference was going to seek to address? Do they think ACT-INF may address another question as well? Okay. As always, just like feel free to raise your hand or write something in the chat, or we'll just keep exploring along. So I've not come across the neat Scruffy's dichotomy, so that was a nice perspective. Let's look at that. Does anybody want to summarize the neat Scruffy's dichotomy? Or give like what did they think neat Scruffy's means? Or what was it doing at this part of the book? And I think my take on it, so I'm a physicist originally, and so looking at it from sort of building from the ground up, you know, creating unified theories of things where everything is explainable within some framework versus those who try to look at the details and build from the details up to understand the phenomena. That was kind of my perspective on this. All right. Ali, and then anyone else? Yeah, well, actually, I recommend this essay each time because I really like it. In the book, Andy Clark and his critics, there's a beautiful essay by Karl Pristin, namely Beyond the Desert Landscape, in which he explains in a very beautiful prose the difference between the low road and the high road and the high road. And it goes into much further details about the significance of these two approaches and the pros and cons of which and also the importance of looking at the same phenomena, call it intelligence, sentience, or agency or whatever, from these two perspectives. And what can we glean from looking at it from those two perspectives. So I highly recommend reading this essay, which you can find a document for that essay on resources page as well. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. High road, neat, unified imperatives, scale-free systems. Low road gets scruffy. There's a lot of last miles in the low road because every generative model is different. And they're complementary roads to meet in the middle with active. Kate, or anyone else? This is still pertaining to the scruffies and needs. I was just, it just occurred to me as I was both reading the introduction and now listening to this, how many of us here would be self-described needs and self-described scruffies. I'm personally definitely a neat. I'm very much gravitating towards an underlying common explanation for everything. So which draws me to the active inference as such. So I'm just wondering in the group of us, where would we fall in that? Just out of curiosity. Awesome. Very fun question.…