Is the free-energy principle a formal theory of semantics? From variational density dynamics to neural and phenotypic representations

hello everyone welcome to team com podcast number two this is going to be a journal discussion of ramstead at all 2020 and it is going to be a great discussion i'm really looking forward to it so before we start off the discussion of the paper could the other two panelists introduce themselves maybe sasha first sure hi my name is sasha i'm a neuroscientist and a free energy enthusiast andy vaughn hello my name is iran and i'm just interested in active inference stuff and today we got to read some soft book yes absolutely a tough book so does the screen look okay for sharing my slides all right here we go so the structure of this discussion will be as follows first we'll talk about some warm-up questions then we're going to jump into the paper discussion we'll go through the abstract and the big questions making sure that we really understand how the authors summarize their own work then we'll look at the roadmap of the paper which are just the section headers to understand how they kind of get from a to z we'll review some of the key claims and the aims of the paper so that we can evaluate later on whether the claims are justified or whether they end up achieving the aims that they set out to to achieve then we're going to go through each of the six figures of the paper and then um if not addressed during a through d we'll have extra time at the end to discuss any other questions about the paper or related topics and we have some other figures that we could put up if we need to so here we go with the warm-up questions first what is semantics or what does the word make you think of when you first hear the word semantics and you might want to think about logical and lexical semantics any thoughts there sasha um yeah i think this is uh kind of the getting into the confusing theme of the paper where you have to be extremely specific with the language that you use and so to me semantics means um how we use words and how we make meaning okay very nice and the way that we use words the meaning of words is often what people mean by semantics like syntax is how it's written and then semantics uh or at least the semantics of words is about how the words are related to each other and then also we have logical semantics which is just purely about logical statements and may or may not have any word representation behind it so there's that word representation and this is definitely one of the key words of the paper so maybe yvonne what do you think about or what does a representation mean to you to me as we can say yeah as as we as we are saying we actually represent in our mind different uh [Music] different things behind different conceptions so it's always hard to understand not always but usually have to understand what people saying when when they use one or another concept yep and that vagueness about the term representation is really one of the things that the paper sets out to clarify because a lot of times people will use the word representation assuming that one must exist oh if you're thinking of elephants there must be some neural state in your head that represents an elephant otherwise how could you be thinking about an elephant um and then this paper is going to really drill down what is the relationship between that conception and the neural representation um next question what is intentionality who or what has it so just kind of off the cuff because of course this is a big topic but what does intentionality mean or who gets to have intentionality either of you i think intention [Music] is became when when someone wanted wanted to do something yes intention it about the future so i will do it in the future any thoughts there um yeah another wonderfully vague word and um we often talk about uh in interpreting other people's actions whether or not we can infer their intent and of course that gets quite messy but with how vague the word is you could say that everything has intention because it um you know even a rock knows that…