Rebooting the Free Energy Principle Literature

Hello and welcome everyone. It is June 13th, 2022, and we're here in Acton Flab guest stream number 23.1 with Maxwell and Dalton. We're talking about rebooting the free energy principle literature and their recent publication. So I'll pass it to the two of you to provide just an initial introduction and some context for the paper before we jump into some specific parts. Maxwell first. Cool. My name is Maxwell Ramstad. I'm the director of research at the Versus Research Lab, where we specialize in probabilistic approaches to artificial intelligence. And of late, most of my research has been on the physics foundations of the free energy principle. And yeah, very, very much looking forward to having this conversation. Awesome. And Dalton? Sure. Okay. Well, I'm Dalton. I'm a mathematician and a physicist. So right now I'm at Stony Brook University in New York. I'm also at the Versus Lab. Where we're doing some work on the free energy principle. Right now my research interests are about formal approaches to biological physics and mathematical foundations of complex systems and these kinds of questions. One of the most interesting frameworks in this sphere is the free energy principle. And that's how I've gotten involved in this literature. Awesome. So maybe in the same order, what brought us to this paper? What was the gap that this paper stepped into? And how did this team arise around the paper? And I'll bring it up on the screen as well. Good question. Well, I think the paper does a bunch of different things. The first, I mean, we've presented this as rebooting the free energy principle literature. I think, yeah, over the last year, we've presented this as rebooting the free energy principle literature. I think, yeah, over the last, it's been almost two decades now since the FUP has been a thing. I think the first paper was circa 2005 ish. And the framework, or the field of study that is emerged around the free energy principle has changed a lot over the last two decades, no small part in terms of the self understanding of the free energy principle. And the understanding that we have as a community of practitioners working with these techniques. And I mean, as Dalton pointed out a while back, I think the last time that really, the FUP literature had been surveyed in a systematic fashion to kind of present where we were at, where we are currently like the state of the art, I was probably called the FUP monograph from the FUP monograph from 2019 January 2019. I mean, you know, both of you were part of this international physics reading group that we had, this was not, this was not a simple piece to read. And yeah, since then, there hasn't really been basically a summary of where the literature is. So on the one hand, we were aiming to reboot the literature. And to basically summarize the ways that the free energy principle had been applied in the literature and to also present a lot of the progress that had been made over the last three years, a lot of which is due to Dalton. So I think that segues nicely into the Dalton. Well, too generous by far as usual. But yeah, so Maxwell raises a good point that there hasn't been really an effort to tie together all the different threads since probably 2019. And one of the reasons why, I mean, that's, that's a long time, but it's not overly long. However, in the last couple of years, there have been some pretty serious advances in the state of the mathematics and the physics behind the free energy principle. So now, you know, three years later, we're in 2022. It's not a long time, but nevertheless, there have been big developments that really beg this kind of a survey to be done. And so that was one of the aims, at least of the paper was to draw together all the different threads, to unify them, make them a bit more cohesive, and present the free energy principle as we're conceptualizing it today, in a very top to bottom fashion. So before we jump into the sections and the arguments and…