Autopoietic Enactivism and the Free Energy Principle - Prof. Friston, Prof Buckley, Dr. Ramstead

Top Quotes! (times are estimates) "The important thing to point out is that just definitionally, the Markov blanket comprises the set of degrees of freedom that separate and couple systems together. It's it's it's not the the veil, it's the interface." - Maxwell Ramstead, 00:17:38 "You can think of the state based description as sort of the asymptotic limit of the path based description, the 2 are kind of like deeply connected, in in some sense." - Maxwell Ramstead, 00:31:52 "The free energy principle is a model. ... and it's a map, and it turns out to be the canonical way of modeling systems that are engaged in modeling." - Maxwell Ramstead, 01:25:38 "I would, you know, distinguish ontology from metaphysics." - Maxwell Ramstead to Tim Scarfe, 01:23:13 "I think there's a kind of there is a or a message is to take from an activism on the low road, which are super important for cognition, right, without kinda going into the depths of the, or, autopoiesis." - Chris Buckley, 00:08:56 "What is operational closure? That would be quite nice." - Karl Friston, 00:18:38 "The goal ness, if you like, is is, inherent in the characteristics of the particle or person that you're trying to describe." - Karl Friston, 01:18:38 "I mean, I would agree that we shouldn't conflate them, And I would, you know, add that we don't. There are distinct constructs that map onto these things." - Maxwell Ramstead, 00:30:28 "I drink a lot of coffee. And if you were to sample me at random during the day, I would say there's a 1 in 25 chance." - Maxwell Ramstead, 00:36:58 "And I think that that, you know, there there is a lot of, if you like, work to be done from the point of view of free energy principle theorists in consolidating the links to what has gone in terms of things like maximum principle, and what has to come in terms of, say, quantum blue gravity or Chris fields, quantum information, theoretic treatment of holographic screens in the Markov blanket." - Karl Friston, 01:33:45 "The main difference is just, an enacted ecological psychologist, sorry, would say that we perceive things directly, but then they appeal to this, these notions of, like, resonance, and whatever, which, you know, to us is just sending in for inference." - Maxwell Ramstead, 01:05:06 "I wanted to challenge it and then eventually fell in love with it and now think it's the right way to go for it for too. So, yeah, I came as a skeptic, you know, and then I'll be bashed into into into place." - Chris Buckley, 00:03:12 "This isn't to, you know, bash anyone specifically, but, like, this is a complete nonstarter mathematically." - Maxwell Ramstead on enactivist critiques, 00:36:58 "We're talking about the same thing. We're talking about the way that, like, a set of structured dependencies generates a thing that's able to sustain itself over time." - Maxwell Ramstead, 00:28:48 "The free energy principle is a principle. ... that leads to a modeling method. And, ..we make some assumptions, and we're able to say some things, but the the principle itself doesn't rest on on any of these assumptions" - Maxwell Ramstead, 00:31:52 "Systems at different scales will behave as if they had a model, even if they don't necessarily have a model in the sense of a person" - Keith Duggar, 00:39:21 "The free energy principle just is that. It is just a constrained maximum caliber principle or maximum entry principle." - Karl Friston, 01:31:08 "It looks like she has goals. It looks like she plans. And then a few years later, if I develop a sense of self, well, perhaps I'm a thing like mum, and that perhaps I have goals" - Karl Friston, 01:18:38 "The free energy principle is a map of the boundaries you can think of. And and a map of what happens when things have boundaries." - Maxwell Ramstead, 01:25:20 "The enactivists need there to be a bright line in the universe, like a bright red line." - Maxwell Ramstead, 00:58:55 "I don't really understand the nature of this fork" - Karl Friston, 00:15:02 (Dynamical vs Information Processing) "It's always been about counterfactual futures. It's and it's difficult to argue that, like, you don't account for historicity when literally the core construct that you're deploying is, like, probabilities of different histories" - Maxwell Ramstead, 00:36:58 "I think that kind of particle starts to now show the the deep intention, you know, it looks as if they are in they are doing this because they intend some outcome." - Karl Friston, 01:18:38 "The free energy principle is a theory of observer ness, you know, the the sort of the it from bit Right? Like, the it it's it's thing this, but from another perspective, it's observance, which which are kind of the same thing." - Maxwell Ramstead, 01:28:21 "The free energy principle started off as a path based formulation. I think this is absolutely underappreciated in the literature." - Maxwell Ramstead, 00:36:58 "This isn't saying like once and for all, these boundaries are here and crystallized and just, you know, are are are there independently of, you know, the way that we are are experiencing or sampling or interacting with the world." - Maxwell Ramstead, 01:23:13 "I wanted to understand just enough to be able to to know for sure that I don't need to understand this, actually." - Maxwell Ramstead on originally approaching FEP, 00:55:21 "The enactivists in in the auto poietic, tradition really want to go hard on this and say, well, what you really need to do is map a set of constraints such that the system kind of self generates." - Maxwell Ramstead, 00:28:48 "I mean, I was frightened. You were going to ask me, well, you know, if I had anything to add about in enactivism, because I haven't. I'm here to find out whether I'm an an enactivist or not!" - Karl Friston, 00:12:35 "This, split between dynamics and information theory is mostly in people's imaginations, there's no mathematical basis for it." - Maxwell Ramstead, 00:31:08 "I mean, all interesting information theory read as probability theory. That is used, in physics, inherits from dynamical systems." - Karl Friston, 00:15:02 "I mean, I think, you know, some really nice dialogue between people in activism and what we do in the act in active inference and the free energy principle." - Chris Buckley, 00:11:01 "The free energy principle at core is a metrological statement, where metrological means measure theoretic or relating to measure" - Maxwell Ramstead paraphrasing Karl Friston, 01:28:21 "You have, this interesting situation of these very precise dynamics and they're precise just because we are big." - Karl Friston, 01:18:38

Hearing Professor Friston speak always reminds me just how incredible a gift intelligence can be (and how relatively little I seem to have 😅) Excellent discussion, thanks!

Homeorhesis — a tendency to return to a direction of flow after a perturbation. It is a generalization of homeostasis to a nonstatic system 39:00

Really enjoying this, although will take a couple of watches to grasp 😂

I asked Bard for information on the Free Energy Principle. He's Bard's response: The free energy principle is a theoretical framework that suggests that the brain minimizes surprise or uncertainty by making predictions based on internal models and updating them using sensory input. It highlights the brain's objective of aligning its internal model with the external world to enhance prediction accuracy. This principle integrates Bayesian inference with active inference, where actions are guided by predictions and sensory feedback refines them. It has wide-ranging implications for comprehending brain function, perception, and action. More formally, the free energy principle says that if a system has a "particular partition" (i.e., into particles, with their Markov blankets), then subsets of that system will track the statistical structure of other subsets (which are known as internal and external states or paths of a system). The free energy principle is based on the Bayesian idea of the brain as an "inference engine." Under the free energy principle, systems pursue paths of least surprise, or equivalently, minimize the difference between predictions based on their model of the world and their sense and associated perception. The free energy principle has been used to explain a wide range of phenomena, including: * Perception: The free energy principle can explain how the brain perceives the world by making predictions about sensory input and updating those predictions based on the sensory feedback it receives. * Action: The free energy principle can explain how the brain generates actions by selecting actions that are predicted to minimize surprise. * Learning: The free energy principle can explain how the brain learns by updating its internal model of the world to reduce surprise. * Consciousness: Some researchers have suggested that the free energy principle may be able to explain consciousness as a state of minimal surprise. The free energy principle is a powerful theoretical framework that has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the brain and mind. However, it is still under development, and more research is needed to test its implications. Here is an example of how the free energy principle might apply to perception: Imagine that you are walking down the street and you see a red ball. Your brain makes a prediction about what you are seeing, based on its internal model of the world. This prediction is that you are seeing a red ball. Your brain then compares this prediction to the sensory input it receives from your eyes. If the prediction matches the sensory input, then your brain is not surprised. However, if the prediction does not match the sensory input, then your brain is surprised. In this case, your brain will update its internal model of the world to reduce surprise. It will do this by increasing the probability of the hypothesis that you are seeing a red ball. This will make it more likely that your brain will predict correctly the next time you see a red ball. The free energy principle is a complex and nuanced topic, but it is a powerful framework for understanding how the brain works.

This is the best discussion with Karl regarding the free energy principle, I love his explanation about non-equilibrium systems being an interaction between sinoidal and dissipative flows. Thanks for posting this interview!

autopoetic autopoiesis of the autopoietic

I can simply say that this video connected a lot of dots that had been bouncing around in my head, and added many others to ping pong around. I have been back to this video on a few occasions to reflect and realign. TY!

Somewhere Prof. Friston wrote when he was young, he wanted to become a blend of Albert Einstein and Sherlock Holmes, and it seems to me he somewhat succeeded.

I'm happy to discover that what appear to be seriously "bad faith" pseudo-debates are a feature of much more logically/mathematically rigorous fields than those in the "social and cultural sciences/disciplines".

I particularly found helpful Maxwell's pointing to the importance of distinguishing ontology from metaphysics... "ontological boundaries means capturing features of the math; metaphorically, a map that behaves like a map (as opposed to/versus metaphysics)... all of this is a modelling approach, a physics, not a statement of reality" (typed from notes, may not be word for word). What struck me was how awesome the human mind is, that it can create its own maps from modelling experience, given that - as Chomsky said in a previous mlst - we can't introspect our way to understanding the underlying structures of our own minds. The wonder of this power of observation is I think why FEP holds such fascination for me. Thank you for hosting a thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening discussion. Lots to digest from this conversation.

Quick question, Ramstead, Kirchoff and Friston published a paper in 2020 arguing for an enactive, non-representational, interpretation of the generative and recognition models. Where is the gap in my understanding? It seems like Friston was arguing for an enactive inference in that paper but it more uncommitted here. The paper was called "a tale of two densities" for reference

Transcript and summary here - docs.google.com/document/d/1aDVM-WD1UvQ5BZINYcLrBx…

Excellent talk and deeply satisfied.

Absolute feast ahead of us here, wow. With all intent to savor will certainly be scarfed! buh duh tss ;D

Autopoietic*

If only I could have heard this discussion 20 years ago when I was trapped in the autopoiesis rabbit hole 😢

Fantastic discussion, all within the concept’s own blanket!

Consciousness is a process running in the brain. It takes input from external processes in order to track and predict what they will do. It generates outputs with the aim of being able to survive and replicate. This process becomes aware when it takes input summarising its own state, and tracks and predicts what itself will do - it recognises itself as a process. This includes measures of how well it is surviving and reproducing. Free will results from its outputs being available to it to inform future processing. 'Free' here means attributable to conscious decision-making, so that outcomes can drive learning that will improve future decision-making.

Anyone can please recommend any good sources / articles on structural learning? This podcast is great, just dont think it really touched the structural learning part. Thanks