Extended active inference: Constructing predictive cognition beyond skulls

All right. All right. Hello and welcome everyone. It's ACT-INFLAB livestream number 41.0 on April 2nd, 2022, 4 squared 2 comma 2 0 2 2. We're discussing the paper Extended Active Inference, Constructing Predictive Cognition Beyond Skulls. So welcome to the ACT-INFLAB, everyone. We're a participatory online lab that is communicating, learning, and practicing applied active inference. You can find us at some of the links here. This is a recorded and an archived livestream. So please provide us with feedback so we can improve our work. All backgrounds and perspectives are welcome and we'll be following good video etiquette for livestreams. Head over to activeinference.org to learn more about what is happening in ACT-INFLAB. We're here today in ACT-INF stream number 41.0 where we are learning and discussing the paper Extended Active Inference, Constructing Predictive Cognition Beyond Skulls by Axel Constant, Andy Clark, Michael Kirchhoff, and Carl Friston from December 2020. So long ago. And this video is an introduction for some of the ideas and some of the pieces of the paper. It's not a review or a final word. And the .1 is just us getting excited and doing our preparation so that the .1 and the .2, the participatory group discussions, we can start to unpack them more. We're going to go over some aims and claims, keywords, the abstract and the roadmap of the paper, address the big question, and then walk through some of the figures and formalisms. And the coming weeks we'll have the .1 and the .2, which of course are open to anyone who wants to join. So we'll just begin by saying hello and any thoughts we have. I'm Daniel. I'm a researcher in California. And on the topic of distributed or extended cognitive processes, Dean really appreciated co-stigmatically extended in space and time collaborating with you on the slides. I loved your first pass on the slides. And it just made me remark on how different it is to be involved in a distributed cognitive process versus the kind that can just play out in the quiet room within the school. And that's like just one example of what this whole paper and extended mind, extended cognitive area is about is actually, among other things, respecting those kinds of processes and thinking about how to frame them. So that is obviously something we'll be talking about a lot more. Over to you. Hi, my name is Dean. I'm up here in Calgary. And I think what I really liked about this paper is their ability to sort of say there's some ways that we've been looking at this question of how far does the process go. And then there's this paper which introduces a new way of maybe having a conversation around that. They talk about things like uploading entailing some of the more nascent features of offloading. And so that to me has the potential of morphing because we've done a lot of morphology lately from subject matter expertise to prediction matter expertise. If somebody can also hold up an egg and a chicken, for example. So I'm kind of excited about that. Okay. Excellent. Into the paper we go. So the paper link is provided here. And as stated, it's from 2020. I'll just. Well, why don't you summarize what you felt some of the key aims and claims were? Well, I'll summarize the aims. You can summarize the claims. For me, the aim was to be able to optimize organisms generative models, which a cognitive niche construction implies. But these authors essentially sort of put that out there in a, in a, they articulate that. It reviews generic predictive approaches to niche construction. It takes and looks at both the functional and the psychological components of what that active generation of a cognitive niche might be. And then they argue for, and I think this is the critical bullet, an extended active inference. Henceforth, AI based on our model of cognitive niche construction. So there's a model within the modeling universe. This is theirs. Excellent. Yes. As we'll explore, they aim towards reconciling some…