Textbook Group meeting for Parr, Pezzulo, Friston 2022 .

all right welcome everybody it's November 14th and we're in cohor 4 first discussion on chapter 10 so who wants to begin with some thought or question or any reflection about 10 any can raise their hand or just go for it but what they thought 10 was going to be or some component of what they remembered of it or just some quote that we could start with or question that they already wrote sure uh I mean just kind of at a cursory glance at this chapter it's just they're basically going through a variety of of other fields that may or may not be related to active inference and kind of comparing and contrasting uh I think it helps to understand what kind of um kind of trend or or or body of knowledge in which you know active inferences has its roots or where it's starting to assert itself as a as a distinct field um it's interesting learning a little bit more about for example uh the helm Holden view of like um unconscious inference as being like one of the key underpinnings of um active inference here um seeing more on the Basi and brain hypothesis and reinforcement learning and other fields that we see mentioned through the textbook but it's here that we get like a direct kind of comparison um and in addition to that I think one of the key overarching themes that they're trying to make is that active inference combines a variety of kind of traditionally separate or separated um cognitive functions like perception action planning attention and and so on that's the the title of the chapter is active inference is a unified theory um makes a lot of sense nice very nice so I um um there's something about the textbook overall um that um I found myself wondering about when I was reading chapter 10 um which is uh that there are many places in the book where it's not really clear if we're talking only about how the human brain functions versus how cognitive systems function and so there are places where um where it's almost uh it's almost it feels like a a tease like let's let's explore this is not just about the human brain this is about other cognitive systems but I think for people who uh the uninitiated and of course I'm one of those people at the moment but um it's it's tough right because I've created certain expectations about looking for how does this generalize to all kinds of cognitive systems but then in the last chapter the focus is and the wording is used for the rest of the chapter it's almost like we're going to introduce these Concepts like you would for a psychology textbook um and so they you know those various uh terms that are used in Psychology are addressed and how do we think about them from an active INF point of view then the section on social and cultural mechanisms I think needs to be either deleted or completely rethought um so when I kept going back to the figure in um chapter one I think it's figure 1.2 where it has a high road and a low road and in the center it has active inference and it has autop poesis and nich construction well Auto Poes and inch construction are brought up very infrequently throughout the textbook and I think there's an opportunity for chapter 10 to to go back to other places and each construction and and there are articles out there that I'm finding fascinating uh on the wording I'm still learning new words but what is this one called um joint agent I love this this article by ruinberg I don't know if this is a one that's um cited in in the book it might be uh but um joint agent environment systems and I think that that's the place where really cool stuff can be laid out uh for people who want to take this FR Market into the social sciences and anthropology thank you any other like thoughts on 10 or overall whether it's someone's like first time at 10 or repeating well I had I have another thought and kind I'm curious as to how others you know feel about this observation I don't know yet how where I would suggest to include this somewhere in the book but um if you know if most of the…