Karl Friston: The Physics of Sentience

Dr. Karl Friston, University College London, applies the free energy principle to set forth an account of life, or self-organization, in terms of active inference. August 19th, 2023.

[@ginogarcia8730]

i dunno understand a damn thing but it looks awesome

[@cerioscha]

Its great so see this lecture and hear this narrative, simplifying the papers which underly it. Exciting times ahead. Having read Meta’s Chief AI Scientist's "vision is to create machines that can learn internal models of how the world works so that they can learn much more quickly, plan how to accomplish complex tasks, and readily adapt to unfamiliar situations." I cant help thinking that the Free energy principle is going to play a key role. Current multi agent RAG frameworks will need a "North star" to navigate though the minimisation of cognitive dissonance (that they'll encounter) in the face of the increasing cyber Entropy resulting from "Anyone can say Anything about Anything". If the current quantum of Ai has evolved from perceptron to transformer then perhaps the next stop will be a Belief Desire Intention (BDI) instance, networked among many and actively inferring and evolving its collective Markov blanket.

[@chineduecheruo8872]

Great point. I'd like to think about it as a swarm of Prediction Error collapsing robots.

[@cerioscha]

@@chineduecheruo8872 Thats an interesting idea. The JADEX active components is potentially a good starting point for that. Its based / inspired by Bratman's (BDI )Belief Desire Intention folk psychology and affords the potential for agents to use speech act performatives, ontologies and negotiations. The underlying beliefs tend to be crisp or fact based and so the blending of current statistical models perhaps leading to probabilistic (and emergent ) ontologies could be interesting. The framework comes with interesting deoms of scenarios such as: hunter prey, blocks worlds and many more. I'm interested in potential applications to economics and consumer behaviour such as the: "Law of Equi Marginal Returns" and diminishing marginal utility. Can one's affinity for ( maybe Markov blanket against) chocolate be recovered after over indulgence ( to the extent of the tenth mars bar at Christmas ) to a more balanced propensity for chocolate. Is their a time dependent evolution to the markov blanket and or internal state akin to a PID controller.

[@robertmontgomery2047]

Great presentation! Well done.

[@vulturom]

Thank you so much this is very clear and enlightening

[@hyperduality2838]

Minimizing prediction errors to track targets and goals is a syntropic process -- teleological.
Syntropy (prediction) is dual to increasing entropy -- the 4th law of thermodynamics!
"Always two there are" -- Yoda.
Mind (the internal soul, syntropy) is dual to matter (the external soul, entropy) -- Descartes or Plato's divided line.
Concepts are dual to percepts (measurements) -- the mind duality of Immanuel Kant.

[@ionutandrasesc2376]

Very impressive

[@Ostyool]

well I believe I have met my dignitary