Agency, Vision, Life

hello everyone and welcome back to active inference insights as always I'm your host darus PvZ Wayne and today I'm really excited to be speaking with Kate Nave Kate is an early career research fellow at the University of Edinburgh and her research focuses on developing a realist account of autonomy and agency grounded in the uniquely metabolic existence of living systems she has also just finished writing a book titled a drive to survive the free energy principle and meaning of life which I know the whole active influence Community is looking forward to reading and hearing about Kate welcome to the show thank you so much for coming on it's going to be really fun I hope yeah thanks for having me nice to meet you so there were a couple books as you know about active inference but um they're all quite text Booky and Technical so I'm kind of curious about just generally how did the book idea come about uh and what was it like writing this book and you know overall sure yeah it was I guess quite a securious process it kind of began during my PhD um when I was looking at actually began with looking at predictive processing and visual phenomenology from like kind of a perspective in hilan phenomenology trying to connect that to predictive processing which was interesting but um through that I got more into the frery principle um and I think I initially began with thinking that the frery principle was going to be a very useful way to kind of scale up in active accounts of purpose and intentionality and then like get through the course of kind of investigating that it ended up being kind of I guess the book came out of this to do two things for me um the first was to try and get through the kind of philosophical ideas of the FR principle in a way that doesn't sort of shy away from the formalism but doesn't rely on the formalism if you see what I'm saying because I think it's at the point which I was writing it was well pretty well commun being pretty effectively communicated to people with a mathematical background that wasn't perhaps initially the case um but the kind of communication of the mathematics I think had gotten a lot clearer but it was still the case that if you didn't have any kind of grounding in that there wasn't anything that was accessible to you I think in book form um so the first half of it is really trying to look into what is the what are the what are the formal aspects of the principle actually saying in a way that's explained non- mathematically and intuitively um not to say I mean you know to some people mathematics is intuitive but to some people it's not um and then the second part is I think through that kind of deconstruction of what is the mathematics actually telling you it started to become clearer to me that the kind of aspects that were supposed to account for purposiveness and agency weren't really there which I mean I think now is becoming now maybe doesn't seem that stranger thing to say I don't know I think there's been more papers and more discussion of this aspect at the time I would say there wasn't so that was part of it and the other part of it was sort of discovering a whole lot of really cool work on the physics of living systems that shows how much more complicated they are than we expect how difficult they are to pin down um how sort of pran and changing they are and I think all that stuff is really cool and I found that the fu principal is quite a good launch pad for getting into that work because it sort of of pushes how far can we go with this sort of mathematical formulism how far can we get in our description of leing systems and for me like butting up against those limits introduced me to a whole load of ideas in kind of organicist philosophy of biology um in particular that is that's kind of where the book ends I suppose with a here's what's kind of Beyond The Finity principle here's all this stuff that isn't I don't think for me not something that can be a part of this like very…