End of 2021 Review

Thank you. Okay. It's December 23rd, 2021. Nice, Sarah. Cool. Ceremonial lighting. It's the end of 2021 paper review stream. So welcome to Active Inference Lab. We are a participatory online lab that is communicating, learning, and practicing applied active inference. You can find us at some of 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. All backgrounds and perspectives are welcome here and we'll be following good video etiquette for live streams. Interesting things that we've talked about this year. And just like a .zero is just an introduction, not a review or a final word. This is going to be just even more so because we're going to spend like literally two to three minutes, two to three memes per paper. And we talked about them for several hours. So this is just going to be kind of an off the cuff thought per paper, not a total rehearsal of the paper. And this should be really fun. So Sarah and Dean, thanks a lot for joining. Maybe if each of you would like to say hello and just what made you excited to participate today or what would be one kind of overall thought to lead us in here. Go Sarah. Go Sarah. Go Sarah. Go Sarah. Oh, man, the pressure. Okay, I haven't been around for a while. So like my brain is not fully dialed. But I actually was just reviewing some Michael Levin videos. And oh boy, my brain is about as exploded rewatching them as it was the first time. So you know, like looking at life through like an agential point of view versus looking at it through this like homeostatic, I'm just my brain cannot hold it all. That's where I'm starting. Thank you. Oh, yeah, my name is Sarah, by the way. Cool. Dean. Yeah, hi. I'm Dean. The reason why I wanted to do this is because when I was doing programming pre-retirement, one of the one of the things I found to be really, really, really helpful was what we call the learning exhibition where there was a timeline, a chronological review, and there was a lot of time given over in front of what we described as a significant audience to be able to give people a chance to take the entire breadth of what they've done and sort of go through it themselves and pick out the highlights. And then a lot of light bulbs went off in the learner's mind. And so for me, even though I haven't been participating throughout this year, I've only been about maybe 30 to 40% of the live streams. I still find that review process to be really, really helpful in terms of getting me some sense of where I am. Because as we said in the, I think it was the 34 paper. Yes, I think it was the 34 paper. It matters where you came from. So this gives me a chance to kind of look at that and give myself some sense of where the directions are going next. Great. Yeah, we don't have any papers at all selected for 22. So it'll be like a fun, fresh start. So yeah, for each of the papers, well, first, we're going to go just look at the videos that are not paper live streams, and just see if any we wanted to recall. But then for each of the papers, we're going to just talk about like, what were our memories, if we read the paper, or if we went to the discussion or listened to it? How did our perspective or generative model change from that discussion or the paper? And then third question, what ideas or themes happened in the paper that came up later, or touched upon something we went into later? And then also the last question, how does the paper or the concepts in it, or the claims change how you thought about something or did something? So we'll start with just looking through the non-live stream videos. So it can be total, either you can bring up one of these, if you want to highlight one of these guest streams, that you liked, we had 13 guest streams, or just total, we can both pass, but the guest streams are just research related to active inference. And so we hosted a really global range in many different…