Variational ecology and the physics of sentient systems

all right hello and welcome everyone this is the active inference live stream i am daniel friedman and this is the active inference live stream double o 7.0 welcome to team com team com is an experiment in online team communication learning and practice related to active inference you can find us on twitter at inferenceactive you can find us at activeinference gmail.com via our public key based team or on youtube this is a recorded and archived live stream please provide us feedback so that we can improve our work all backgrounds and perspectives are welcome here video etiquette for live streams is that you want to mute if there's any sound in your background raise your hand if you want to speak so you can be added to the stack use respectful speech etc today in act imp stream 7.0 i'm going to try to set the context for 7.1 and 7.2 which is going to be a discussion of the paper variational ecology and the physics of sentient systems by ramstad at all 2019 in physics of life reviews this video as the other dot zeros are is just an introduction to some context it's not a review or a final word the goal is to provide context for the ideas philosophical threads and vocabulary of that ramstead at all paper go through some other points as well and the punch line is that ecosystems are multi-scale systems with implications for how we study ecological organization and the sections of 7.0 will be as follows first we'll go through the keywords and talk about some of the publication context go through the goals of the paper the abstract of the paper and the roadmap of the sections go through some key quotations and then talk a little bit about ergotic systems some critiques of the free energy principle the simulations and historiosity and how that influences how we think about ecosystems and also the cog ergo sum then in 7.1 and 7.2 we're going to discuss this paper with whoever wants to participate so you can also save and submit your questions or get in touch with us if you want to participate also and thanks for the suggestion to uh feedback was to how to relate this to previous discussions so if you want previous discussions to listen to that relate to this conversation one would be active stream two is the free energy principle a formal theory of semantics because this discussion and paper was asking can we use the fep to study meaningful systems so both the ones that matter for us the meaningful systems for us but then also the meaning making the autopoetic systems another discussion was 5.0 and the 5.1 and 2 discussions which are the context for this question about internalism and externalism which is a question about how and where action and perception occur are they internal to an organism or do they occur in this space that's mediated between the external environment and the internal environment and then also this most recent 6.0 and following discussions where we talked about tale of two densities active inferences and active inference because there we talked about how inactive or ecological approaches are broadly linked with computational approaches like does one have precedence over the other all right so there's a lot going on in this variational ecology paper so we're going to start here with the keywords so there will be pages for each of these but here's the keywords that were on the paper niche construction so niche construction is when some system of interest like an organism over developmental or ecological or evolutionary time scales modifies its environments it's pretty broad and we'll talk more about it in a bit variational ecology they're using variational in a sense here to mean just broadly multi-scale and then akin to the processes of variational bayesian methods which are kind of like general multi-scale methods so they're thinking about ecology from a multi-scale perspective with a sort of flexible computationalist aspect as we've seen from those previous discussions evolutionary systems theory is uh…