Distrusting the policy: how inference over action shapes our experience of temporality in flow states and life more broadly

hello and welcome this is active inference guest stream 68.1 it's january 23rd 2024 and we're live with darius parvizzi wayne it's not a podcast i am confused but it will be fun thank you darius for coming on feel free to uh introduce yourself and the work looking forward to the presentation and discussion thank you daniel yeah it's a bit it's a bit odd of an experience to be on this side of the camera and also for it to be live because i'm used to having the benefits of uh of sort of post-talk editing although i don't do very much of that um so i'm darius parvizzi wayne i finished my master's at ucl last september um i'm currently working at royal holloway in a cognitive neuroscience lab in my own private work i work in active inference you may have seen me on the active inference insights podcast that i do with the institute and i've recently written this paper um called distrusting the policy how inference over action shapes our experience of temporality and flow states in life more broadly this is kind of a follow-up from a paper that was submitted earlier last year with lars samber smith really pitley uh yakub lamanowski miles tuft and karl friston um and this is a follow-up piece to that before i start i'm aware that it's a punchy title uh and i just want to clarify that i am not proposing to explain temporality or the experience of time entirely because it's an extremely rich um area of study in which physics and philosophy and cognitive science converge and i do not have the time the effort or the energy to really tackle all of those problems so it's going to be rather specific but i'll make clear where i'm purposefully missing stuff out okay excellent so there's kind of a central question before we even get going which is what is time and i want to clarify that i'm not talking really about so-called objective time now i know that's itself a tendentious and tricky claim to make because of relativity but we can have a kind of simple definition given to us actually by some wonderful researchers um bogotá and jabara who have also worked on active inference accounts of subjective temporality they define objective time as the temporally sequential development of worldly processes bound relatively to space and so that will incorporate space time as a as a concept in physics so it's spatial in the sense that it follows spatial laws and it's indivisible and then it's directional now this is a little bit more controversial uh but this ties time to thermodynamic entropy which goes up in close system stays the same what goes up in closed systems second law of thermodynamics and this is the so-called thermal time hypothesis uh carlarelli lee smolden um those are the sort of researchers to go to i as i said at the beginning there are obviously diverse accounts of time especially in physics uh philosophy of time and the physics of time so three main contenders are presentism um which states that only the present exists the growing block universe which states that the past and the present exist and the future is yet to exist and internalism which says that basically they're all happening now so dinos uh you know i believe that there are dinosaurs is still true um i don't really want to delve into those if people do um i would start with the work of someone like john mctaggart who was very instrumental in developing the philosophy of time and of course there's a lot of work being done by carlo revelli uh among others on the physics of time but what i'm more interested in today is subjective time time is experienced time as a phenomenon in the sense of being phenomenological now it seems to me when i started writing this paper uh but everyone made the assumption that it flows that there's a what's called a passage phenomenology um and my account is predicated on the idea that time flows that said there is a question mark after that because turns out there's a fair uh dose of skepticism about this notion that time flows even within…