The Computational Boundary of a “Self”: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition

foreign go for it hello everyone welcome to acton flab live stream number 25.0 today is july 1st 2021 and we're going to be talking about this paper the computational boundary of a self developmental bioelectricity drives multicellularity and skill free cognition i'm blue and i'm here with daniel awesome so welcome to the active inference lab everyone 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 page this is a recorded and archived live stream so please provide us with feedback so that we can improve our work all backgrounds and perspectives are welcome here we will be following good video etiquette for live streams here at the short link you'll find all of the live streams and different series that we do in the communications unit of the active inference lab and today we're doing the contextualizing paper the dot zero video for two upcoming discussions in the first half of july 2021 on the 6th and the 13th when we have discussions 25.1 and 25.2 on this paper and hopefully the author joining today in active lab live stream number 25.0 we're going to be trying to set some context and give an introduction to the following paper the computational boundary of a self developmental bioelectricity drives multicellularity and scale free cognition by mike levin and this video is just an introduction to some of the ideas it's not a review or a final word it's kind of like a three-way intersection where we have people who might be within the active inference community looking to be exposed to some different areas like developmental biology or cognitive science and then another group of people who are coming from the developmental biology or cognitive science background and curious about active inference and then also we hope that this is exciting and interesting even for people who are not familiar with active inference or developmental biology or cognitive science we will hopefully try to connect it with some broader questions so we're going to walk through some of the aims and claims of the paper the abstract and the roadmap and bring a few big questions and some key points of the paper so that whether you read the paper or not you'll hopefully be in a good spot to ask questions and learn more and of course in the 1 and 2 videos in the coming weeks we'll be discussing the same paper so save and submit your questions and let us know if you'd like to participate or contribute in any way so here we are on the paper itself that's a screenshot of the cover and the aims and claims and i'll read them so that then daniel you can give a first thought on what you thought was cool or what you thought was important about the paper so the aims and claims of the paper first they define individuals themselves in a way that facilitates taxonomy comparison and communication with evolved created biological artificial and exobiological agents he says i propose a fundamental definition of an individual based on the ability to pursue goals at an appropriate level of scale and organization and suggest a formalism for defining and comparing the cognitive capacities of highly diverse types of agents second he proposes a plausible naturalistic framework for the evolutionary scale-up of cognition from the earliest origins of life hypothesizing about the forces that drove it and the major transitions along the continuum and the goal of this research program is to show how complex agency and goal directiveness evolves naturally from ancient mechanisms so daniel what do you think about that nice work well i thought the paper was pretty exciting because it touches on just so many big topics like goal setting and agency cognition in natural and artificial systems multi-scale systems and then it links it in a way that people might not expect which is through developmental biology and bioelectricity which are kind of like processes that these life forms or other…