Dr. THOMAS PARR - Active Inference

Thomas Parr and his collaborators wrote a book titled "Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain and Behavior" which introduces Active Inference from both a high-level conceptual perspective and a low-level mechanistic, mathematical perspective.

Active inference, developed by the legendary neuroscientist Prof. Karl Friston - is a unifying mathematical framework which frames living systems as agents which minimize surprise and free energy in order to resist entropy and persist over time. It unifies various perspectives from physics, biology, statistics, and psychology - and allows us to explore deep questions about agency, biology, causality, modelling, and consciousness.

Buy Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior
Thomas Parr, Giovanni Pezzulo, Karl Friston
https://amzn.to/4dj0iMj

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Pod: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/sh...

TOC:
00:00:00 Intro
00:05:10 When Thomas met Friston
00:06:13 ChatGPT comparison
00:08:40 Do NNs learn a world model?
00:11:04 Book intro
00:13:22 High road low road of Active Inference
00:17:16 Resisting entropic forces
00:20:51 Agency vs free will
00:26:01 Are agents real? non-physical agents
00:35:54 Mind is flat / predictive brain
00:44:23 Volition
00:50:26 Externalism
00:51:57 Bridge with Enactivism
00:53:27 Bayesian Surprise
01:01:47 Variational inference
01:05:47 Why Bayesian?
01:12:04 Causality
01:17:35 Hand crafted models
01:26:45 Chapter 10 - bringing it together
01:28:58 Consciousness
01:33:10 Humans are incoherent
01:35:25 Experience writing a book

Interviewer: Dr. Tim Scarfe