The Markov Blanket Trick Debate

hello everybody and welcome back to the seventh episode of active inference insights I your host darus PV Wayne and today I have for the first time two guests to bring you Vicente Raja is a research fellow at the University of meria and affiliate faculty of The rotman Institute of philosophy at Western University in Canada his research lies at the intersection of philosophy cognitive science neuroscience and the history of the Sciences of the Mind in 2021 he was the first author of the paper the mark of blanket trick on the scope of the free energy principle in Act of inference which argues that quote the Fe is not the general principle it is claimed to be and the act of inference is not the all-encompassing process Theory it is purported to be either we also have Jeff Beck Jeff is a computational neuroscientist studying probabilistic reasoning in humans and animals he is also the senior machine learning research leader versus and is a critical contributor to the active inference field writing among others the the paper Mark of blanket and Mark of blankets and basian territories guys thank you so much uh for joining me it's an absolute pleasure um you know we're talking off camera there may well be some points of Divergence but we are four days away from Christmas at the time of recording and I think the baby Jesus would want us to find some conciliation so we will do we will do the most we can to strike at differences and elucidate differences and see uh but all in the spirit of hopefully collaborative science and uh collaborative thinking so in that with that in mind I think where we could start is actually where we have no issues with one another so looking at that paper where are the kind of points of just neutral classd this is like a good starting point vient I don't know whether you want to start given you wrote the paper but where do you see where Jeff's work or the other key contributors active influence where do you see that you know some of the stuff they say is actually pretty uncontroversial good question um so first of all thank you for for for having me here um um I think I could start with a very brief detour on why I wrote this paper or why we wrote uh this paper on or even why the paper is the way it is uh first of all I wrote I started writing it to actually to make sense of the FP and active inference for myself right to to try to see how it was Drive the steps and actually section two of the paper remains there just as that right as starting with a random dynamical system and just trying to go step by step there so this is I think one of the points in which we converge is at least from my point of view as a a person who works in the philosophy of the cognitive science and the cognitive science themselves that dynamical systems is a good way to look at cognitive systems so that's I think we are in kind of the same camp then uh maybe the modeling strategy that people like me that comes from radical embod ctive science and ecological psychology to model dynamical systems and the basian twist of it that you find in active inference are slightly different right but you know the this first step this first point I think is a is a is a point of er conversions to um but then after after we we made sense we think of of of of the of the free energy of the free energy principle and active inference ER we our point was okay let's accept all these form ism is good right we don't challenge it we just accept like this is right but even accepting that uh we have some questions about it that how that those question have to do more on how different bits of the formalism relate to different aspects of cognitive systems and their relationship with the environment right um so and I think this is where the Divergence is stronger so I think the convergence has to do with the with the Primacy I don't know if the premacy if if if is the word but you know the attributing importance to a dynamical systems take on all these issues…