The Free Energy Principle approach to Agency

We have launched an MLST substack - get subbed! Tim goes into a tonne of detail here about some of the arguments about agency and FEP: mlst.substack.com/p/agentialism-and-the-free-energ…

These are the conversations i wish my friends had

Love the attention to language and agents. I had been wondering if words can be considered as agents with markov blankets, and this conversation helps me think more

As undergrad biology major some 50 years ago, I cracked open that Shaggy-Dog story of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, went forward and back in my readings of Russell, Whitehead, Kuh, Popper, etc. Moved to Japan40 years ago and went on to grad school at Temple University Japan (linguistics) and matriculated into the doctoral program. This discussion is what I had imagined would be taking place at the doctoral level. Far from it ... I now believe that "institutional education" is an oxymoron. A lot of the language of this podcast is beyond me, but I especially like Friston's dismissal of language as having an agency of its own ... but fascinating to imagine agency emerging in LLMs. This discussion is a great entry into reconsidering the foundations and assumptions of science and A.G.I. Will have to hit the slow speed option and listen to this a few times. Particularly interested in what Pitliya has says at about 31:10 because I have experienced and seen so much marginalization of individuals by tightly knit in-groups in Japan, and members of those groups seem to be particularly drawn to rule driven behavior (institutions) at the expense of empathy-driven behavior (communities). I can't help but cringe a bit when hearing the word "explain" used for the relationship between computational models and psychological phenomena. Might as well say that bossa nova explains my feelings. Perhaps "describe" would trim a bit of intellectual hubris from the dialog.

I love the upgrade from "human chauvinist" to "anthropocentric biases". Unless of course you find them individually more useful in specific cases lol.

I could listen to this all day…geez

Is there a difference between being agentic and being an agent? So agents as originators because of the existence of planning, and then a number of subordinate processes that are agentic (they do stuff), but the lack of planning behind them separates them out?

Fabulous so far... You're making these theories so much more accessible - I can't express how grateful I am for your work. 🙏👍

Thank you mlst for sharing these fabulous conversations!

I am thinking that we should perhaps ask AI, itself for help with this solution. I'm an old-school AI guy (chess, backgammon, poker, pinball, etc.). And yes, those early deductive methodologies are likely too innocent compared to the new Armageddon inductive concepts - that is, it beat us just through speed and the number and accuracy of considerations possible. I am hoping that it may be possible to have a universal auditing function running simultaneously that ensures each AI plays nice. I just wouldn't, couldn't trust mere humans to police our proposed limitations, and yes, as I mentioned earlier: any limitations our friend, AI itself recommends for itself. The machine isn't bad, it is the greedy malevolent users that need to be bridled by the auditing code.

Really great conversation. I appreciate your stepping into the unknown. 😊

I thought that I had an above average education etc .. but the use of English in this video was well beyond me ... and I am a Physicist! I will need to process & simplify the transcript using AI.

Thank you great conversation

Reinforcement Learning and Active Inference agents are definitely not agential. These frameworks have no deep explanation of where the reward function comes from (RL) , or where generative model comes from (Active Inference) and how both of these functions should change over time as the agent learns more about the world. The functions "encode" (so-to-speak) the normativity of the agent, but are always crafted by humans at the end of the day. Agents should be able to derive their own values from an evolving understanding of the world.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ this is the most encouraging talk that I’ve heard. I think we are on the right track.

Great conversations, really loved this one.

Great conversation!

I consider myself as a guy who thinks that 'reality' is as it is, but not as we want it to be, and the best we can do is to understand some of its aspects, but on the other hand I've also discovered that I would easily give up all my understanding in exchange for getting rid of such a burden as depression. So, squeezed between my curiosity about how the mind works and my desire to alleviate depression, I've found myself listening to this talk twice).

Strongly disagree that we "can't know" anything about physical or objective reality. At a fundamental level we can know that distictions are pssoble for example, bc it would not be possible to demark some boundary of the knower if in real and objective ontological sense distinctions did not exist or were not possible. Furthermore the idea that "we can only know ourselves" would be utterly meaningless in any formal sense without a proper treatment to account for selfrecursive computation with no distinctions or boundary conditions. This is why Wolfram's work is so important to my view, bc it illustrates at a fundamental level some things are necessarily entiailed in order to even form perceptions, regardless of the specificity of unweltness.

Thanks!