Modelling ourselves: what the free energy principle reveals about our implicit notions of representation

all right hello and welcome everyone it is actinflab live stream number 36.0 and it's january 13 2022. welcome to the actinflab we are a participatory online lab that is communicating learning and practicing applied active inference you can find us at the links here on this slide this is a recorded and an archived live stream so please provide us with feedback so that we can improve on our work and also if you're watching along live please write any comments or questions you have in the live chat all backgrounds and perspectives are welcome here and we'll be following good video etiquette for live streams and thanks blue for helping a lot with the slides and for coming on because this will be a fun confo go to active inference.org to learn more about how to participate in any of the lab activities or bring some new idea to the lab okay here we are in live stream number 36 in the second half of january 2022 and the goal is to learn and discuss this paper by matt sims and giovanni pizzulo from 2021 the paper is called modeling ourselves what the free energy principle reveals about our implicit notions of representation and as with all dot zero videos the video is an introduction for some of the ideas and a hasty review so it's not a review or a final word we're going to have the upcoming two weeks to talk more about this paper and hopefully talk to some of the authors or any other people who are interested in this idea and get involved if you want to talk about the paper so let's just start with saying hello and an introduction and then what we were excited to read about the paper i'm daniel i'm in california and was excited to read yet another paper on representations and the fep because it feels like we had a stretch back there of five in a row or something what about you blue i'm blue i'm in new mexico and um i really enjoyed matt sims paper on symbiosis that we did a while ago and i thought this paper was really neat and um really a clear elucidation of the different categories of representation and how like there's overarching like representation and non-representation and then several different layers within that so i thought it broke it down in a really clear and concise way um even though it's a lot of material to digest you want to ask the big question sure the big question of the article was can the free energy principle help us advance or even resolve the long-lasting debate on internal representation in philosophy of mind it's a long lasting debate so this is like the dot zero of dot zeros because it's clearly a topic you could spend a lot of time on so that's our disclaimer is uh it's a long-standing debate but here's kind of a meme slide so it's a the first section of this paper right below the title it has this quotation from walt whitman and it says hold it up sternly see this it sends back who is it is it you and uh then here are several different images and just think about your perception of these images and the cultural significance that you might attach to them or the way that black and white pixels or gray pixels on a screen give the illusion of depth or remind you of an experience that you've never had so that's kind of trippy and representation gets at some of those issues that's one non-philosophical take on it what are they going to aim to do in this debate which we're going to sketch out the sides of in uh this talk or i guess this discussion um do you want to read it blue or do you want me to sure so the authors argue that even if the fep can't solve this long-standing debate it can play an invaluable role in revealing our hidden assumptions about the very notion of representation and can create some common ground to discuss and negotiate them so they say our general strategy is to use the fep for conceptual clarification of different notions of representation we work backwards from representational or non-representational interpretations of the fep's constructs to the various notions of…