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Society Is At A Major Turning Point | Karl Friston Λ Anna Lembke
March 21, 2024
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Now we're at a point where there's a whole generation of people that are coming to grips with the fact that we need to change everything about everything that we do and we need to do it fast.
I think that's just a wonderful frame or concept for all of us living in the world to periodically just take a moment and take these models and just say you know everything I think I know about the world I'm going to temporarily suspend it and I'm just going to be open and when that happens we can be present and learn in a way that it's not possible when we're just trying to reinforce our models.
I was invited by the innovative and prestigious Active Inference Institute to host an all-star academic panel where questions explored are what's the difference between building a model and building a narrative? What about the relationship between predictions and what constitutes you? So that is personal identity.
You're going to hear from top neuroscientist Carl Friston at the University of College London, Anna Lemke, who's a professor of psychiatry at the Stanford Addiction Clinic and author of Drug Dealer and Dopamine Nation, links to which are in the description. You'll also hear from Raphael Kaufman, who's the CTO of Digital Gaia. You'll hear from Bert De Vries, who's a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology. Lastly, you'll hear from Guillaume Demas, who is an associate researcher in computational psychiatry
at the University of Montreal. So my neighbor. Because why? I am Kurt Jaimungal and my background is in mathematical physics from the University of Toronto, which is where I'm based. And the whole project of this channel is to analyze various theories of everything, usually in the physics sense that are proposed, including grand unification with gravity plus dualities and other schemes, as well as what constitutes consciousness.
You can find this podcast by typing in theories of everything onto YouTube or whichever podcast catcher you have, or you can just click the subscribe right here. The links to the Active Inference Institute are in the description as well. A special thank you to Daniel Friedman for putting this all together. Enjoy. Okay, now speaking of the brain as a computer, we frequently hear in these circles the brain as a predictive machine. Where does this the quote unquote brain as a predictive machine have its limits? And also, is that to be interpreted as implying
Conscious experience is a predictive machine as well. Okay. And if not, why not? I think Carl, you'd be a great person to start this off and then we'll go around the table again. Yeah, I was mindful of Mao's presentation the past half hour, the notion of temporal thickness. And I'm sure that's got a lot to do with the
necessary conditions for the kind of consciousness I'm guessing you're referring to, you know, that freedom from the moment. And if one reads prediction in its sort of psychological or pretensive or pretension nature in terms of being able to predict what will happen in the future, I think that's going to be a sort of a key
Do not possess a third kind of sentience and things that do. And that bright line just rests basically upon, well from the perspective of active infants, having a generative model that includes the consequences of your own actions in the future. So just by having consequences you're now talking about
The future and the consequences in the future now become random variables, therefore you have to infer them, which leads you directly to the notion of planning as inference, which means that bright light is just the difference between things that plan and do not plan. I would guess that that's where you probably want to start in terms of foregrounding the role of prediction as being
an aspect of self-organization and its sort of reading under active influence that can try this conscious things from non-conscious things, namely the ability to plan. Does that make sense? I have follow-up questions. We'll get to them at some point. For now, Anna, do you have any comments on that and Bert as well afterward? Well, you know, I'm new to this field, so I'm just familiarizing myself even with the language.
But I can respond to the question, the brain is a predictive machine in terms of the work that I do clinically in the kind of psychopathology that I see. When I'm working with patients, I work primarily with narratives, the stories that they tell about their lives. And one of the recurring themes I've seen through my work is that when patients tell stories in which they are perpetually the victims of other people's actions or the world,
they tend
What they contribute to their life problems. So I guess when I think of the limits of the brain as a predictive machine, I think in some ways one of the big limits is that it's a very powerful predictive machine that actually allows us to subsequently shape what actually happens to us and or our perceptions of what happens to us, which then can perpetuate a false narrative.
And I'll just give one small example from my own life. I've had my conflicts with my mother, and one of my beefs about her is that she's a very poor communicator, and that whenever I email her, I either get a cryptic response or no response at all, and it drives me crazy. And about five years ago, she sent an email, asked me some questions, I wrote her back and responded, and it was clear to me that that required yet a response from her, which I never got.
And that then perpetuated my narrative about her as a very poor communicator and many other negative things. And then about three months after I sent that email, I found the email in my draft inbox in my draft box. So I had never actually responded to there's email, I hadn't actually sent the email. And that was for me, I'm just a, you know, a personal, wonderful example of the ways in which we can, our actions can actually
Right. And I have a quick question, Bert, just for Anna, before we get to you. So use the word narrative there. How are you defining the word narrative? Is it the same as model? Is it a sequence of events? Like what is the specific definition of narrative?
You know, I never really thought about it in those terms, but when I talk about narrative, I'm talking about the stories that people tell about their lives, because that's sort of my data. And also about models, because what I've discovered about self-narrative is it's not just a way to organize the past, it also becomes a roadmap for the future. That's the language that I use, but I see it maps very nicely onto your alls.
I see professor degrees please yeah it's clear that the ability to predict is the essence of the decision making.
Yeah, I have a different background, right? I'm not a psychiatrist. So I think about these things in different ways. The thing that I think about when I think about prediction is I would assume that brain predicts far ahead, that things get less accurate, right? If I predict that I want to go three quarters around, around about, I don't care about the centimeter where my car goes when I'm around there, I just want to get in the right lane.
I would assume that the brain doesn't take much, it takes less computations if you care about things less precisely. But that's very hard in a computer. This is what kind of kills us in our current way of implementing active inference. When we want to predict a deep half, we don't care about the accuracy, but we don't know how to do it much cheaper when things are less accurate.
Thank you. Now, Professor Kaufman.
I'm not a professor but I'll answer anyway. They just call me Rafa. Yeah, so there's so many really interesting avenues here and it's not often that I get the pleasure of discussing this kind of stuff with this kind of diverse crowd. But I do, I mean, I've been interested in these questions for a pretty long time and I
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How active inference as a lens, for instance, it enables us to get another sense of what non-dualist views on consciousness are saying when they get us experientially to notice the difference between what we actually perceive and what
between the different various different processes or things that are going on in our in our head and our tendency to like lump them all together into the same okay this is this is my this is my experience that that i'm immersed in so noticing being able to to to notice is different with the the the
the process of proceeding and acting and to an extent it's automated and the narrative or the various narratives that are going on in parallel in my head whether I'm aware of them or not and our ability to just put kind of seemingly arbitrary meta level on top of it to try to make sense of it all and to force
for that experience of having multiple networks and multiple framings going on at the same time makes sense of that experience in a
in a way that aligns with our presuppositions about how things are. So I think that's super interesting. I also want to highlight that, like this view of consciousness as being kind of defined by having a narrative or an internal model that's about self, or that at least is about self, and that leads, as Carl said, to planning as inference.
Sure. And how is it that you're using the word deflationary there?
Carl, I remember I asked you about that when we had our podcast together. But Rafael, similar question. So you said deflationary view when we have narratives of self. Do you mean it relegates us to something that consciousness is much less than?
Yeah, I mean, it's not necessarily much less than in the subjective sense, but it's perhaps much less than in the scientific sense. So one example of one not saying exactly that, but maybe something close to what Daniel Dennett calls hetero phenomenology, which is basically the statement that the sum of what one can say scientifically about consciousness is
is equal to what can be studied and modeled and theorized and communicated and learned and agreed upon on the basis of objective data about what people, including you, but also other people say.
About their experience which and of course like what can be measured of neural correlates and whatever which is not the same as our not necessarily the same as our experience of our directive but we think is our direct experience of being conscious and conscious right so one way to look at it is that is that the science of consciousness doesn't necessarily have to put the primacy on on people the for for instance people saying they have qualia
That that we thought in that sense of this deflationary, right? It's Yeah, you have to explain why people believe they have qualia not why people have quality because it's not it's not necessarily a scientific truth that people have quality, right? Professor Dumas Yeah, so well on the limits of various breaking machine. Well, which we should be always careful to not move from one
map territory fallacy to another one for sure so we need to be skeptics and avoid to reify the methods and well the this world symposium show how this metaphor is super useful and and fruitful
But I can see like two main limits or at least things where we should be careful. So following what Professor Lemke said, like in psychiatry, I think the looping effects and the way people picture themselves can be very unpredictable. And so the way
We think about the brain as a predictive machine, think prediction for patients would have different signification of what we mean by predictive machines in the context of active inference and in general also like
I can see that certain psychologists or anthropologists would have a big appeal all of a sudden for active inference and pre-energy principles, but taking the words as directly what they think the word means, we need to be careful in the way to communicate it. Typically, following also what Professor DeVries said about
Prediction has been super important for decision making. I think we should be careful about the weirdness of cognitive science and how it doesn't necessarily expand to a non-Western educated industrialized country where maybe the cultural value is not about optimization of your decision making or your profit.
And so that's the first thing where I think we should be careful. It's more like a matter of how to communicate the theory. In that case, not necessarily a limit of the theory itself. But the second one is about the equivalence or not with other frameworks. So like I can see how we had Mao, Alvazan talking about category theory.
And I'm very curious about right now among the different frameworks that are out there, how can we define what is equivalent or not with active inference?
to be able to see those limits. Maybe we are living what happened with quantum mechanics in the early 20th century with different interpretation, with different tools to model quantum mechanics and here with artificial intelligence and cognitive neuroscience we have also all those frameworks and I think
Okay, now my role is the moderator, but I would like you all to speak to one another. So I'm going to ask a question that will serve as well. You each will speak on it, but as the other people are speaking, just think, okay, is there a question that I have or is there a comment that I have? So the question
is what are some of the recent advancements or breakthroughs in your respective fields that you find particularly promising? And well, recent, let's say 2020 till now. So we'll start off with Rafael, you're smiling and you look like you're championing.
Well, I was thinking, what is my field, right? Because we're very much in the last mile of applying the wonderful stuff that you all come up with and making it useful on the ground. But so I'm extraordinarily excited about research like what BERT is doing and feel like
As Guillaume was saying, we're also starting to see some convergence on different ways to get to at least the same shape of answers and in some cases even to the same results. One example of this is work that Chris Fields, Carl and others have been doing on the quantum
Basically explaining quantum information theory and how it relates to the free energy principle, looking at the free energy principle as the classical limit of
of quantum information theory, and I don't pretend to understand all of it, but as somebody who is coming from a quantum physics background, just being alive to see this kind of convergence happening, which, as I mean, as Guillaume said, we've been at this business of post-classical, what the hell is going on for over a century now, and it's nice to be at a time where, again, we're starting to talk less past each other.
And that's from a theoretical perspective, from a practical perspective, I think just finding that we have all the building blocks to create fast, interpretable, reliable, and aligned decision-making systems.
which includes AI systems, autonomous systems that have all those characteristics and that it turns out that all the things that the reinforcement learning and the neural networks people thought were very hard or impossible are sort of in the realm of what we can do.
looking at things from an active inference lens and vice versa. A lot of things that active inference models have been procuring so far. It turns out if you toss in a neural network approximator here and borrow some other massively parallel computation techniques, it also becomes feasible. So it's converging.
Yeah, for me, what's remarkable is that there's so many domains of what we thought was exclusively human or would be exclusively human for decades that in just the past couple of years, robots or computers seem to be just as good, if not exceeding us. And I don't know if that's promising or worrisome. But anyhow, Carl, please, if you don't mind answering the question, and then we'll go Anna, then Bert and then Dumas.
Actually, just reflecting upon one of your observations, I think it's very difficult to identify one thing. In a sense,
What is impressive is the diversity of advances and applications and I just say that because that's what I was thinking you know over the past six hours just listening to the amazing presentation after presentation and just you know noting how diverse you know and yet there's this common thread this common commitment basically stating our curiosity and using the tools that naturalize that kind of
Sense making curious behavior and communication that inherent from some either maths or category theory or as rough notes now quantum information theory but just to pick up on a couple of things which are relevant to this conversation so the work with Chris fields.
It sounds lovely and exciting to bring quantum mechanics into active inference but that's not the move that I think Chris is really wanting to champion. The move I think is something that we've all been addressing in one way or another which is leveraging the scale-free aspects of this principled approach to self-organization and hopefully self-organization to some kind of
Generalize synchrony and so that that's where the conformation theory get into the game is scale free and did you go further and say it's completely background free everything is constructed it's just so i think that that's a lovely move because once you gone scale free then start to ask the questions about.
How you couple one scale to another scale and in a sense ecosystems is just that. How do the delusions of an ecosystem, how is it constituted, how is it co-constructed, what is the structure of it. These are all questions about how one scale links to another scale. So I think there have been lots of advances in that direction in many many different fronts and you can read that either in terms of coupling different sort of spatial
What is your special skills and probably more importantly sort of temporal scales and you see that you have you look you just come back to what do you mean by a narrative. It is exactly i think i said it's just a plan is this a story.
Notice the story has a temporal aspect to it. I have narratives about being a good person, being a good father, being a good scientist. I also have narratives about I want my cup of coffee or I have to go look after the child. We've all got narratives at very, very different timescales. I just came back to Bert's example of
I'm an autonomous vehicle and I'm sentient and we're five years into the future and I have to drive around the roundabout. What temple scale and what kind of temple course grading to define the narrative with narratives would be appropriate for that kind of situation.
the ensuing planning. So a short answer to your question, I think there have been many many advances. I think what they've had in common is basically transcending either different domains but in particular different scales of application. I also agree with the notion, well
Another important and pragmatic advance is something that Bert mentioned which is democratization of this technology. I think Ralph also hinted at this is the time you start using this for the common good.
So I think you know things like RxInfer and PiMDP and I didn't know about the Gaia project but it sounds as though there's been great advances there as well. So this kind of democratization I think is really important, this sort of socialization where everybody can play and start to sort of not talk past each other. I think that's a that's a very important a very important advance.
And did you say the word scale invariance or scale independence? I said scale invariant. I actually said scale-free and I shouldn't have done that. I said scale-free. So the idea that you can apply exactly the same mechanics and literally, for example, say from Bert's perspective, the same kind of message passing at different space-time scales.
Reactive means that you don't have to prescribe the scheduling.
but in addressing the problems or the issues that entailed by having to specify the scheduling of talking or of message passing you're bound to deal with time and in a scale invariant context or nested with nested scales for example you have to deal with the
I think there's going to be a very important generic question which technically Bert will have been thinking about furiously for the past few years but I think implicitly we're all going to have to be addressing soon which is the how do you put that the timing of your messages when you make a move or when you listen to a patient or
When you actually pass a message on a factor graph, how are we going to be able to put the separation of time scales into the architecture in a way that speaks to this scaling variance? The GEAR project, for example, how do you integrate live feed from traffic flow sensors with fluctuations in the climate?
These kinds of this kind of data comes very very different temple scales and yet has to be assimilated and modeled in a way that is also I think has to pay due courtesy to that separation of temple scales. Bert, could you please recapitulate the question for the audience and then begin to answer it.
Okay, the issue is if you have active instance agents are nested agents and the higher levels supposed to operate on a larger temporal scale, but they are also working at a lower resolution. If you look far ahead, you don't care as much about precision.
Not that is sent to me the level when i go around around about i don't care to send to me the real land but if i'm but for the next few milliseconds i do care about because it may mean the difference between getting in the ditch or not. So i don't want to send so the higher level i want to look very deep ahead but i don't want to send every millisecond message to go to let's say.
a minute ahead because i need to space it out a lot but then i may miss things so preferably you would just send inaccurate messages but that only works if you actually have a method
You also let's say use less computational power to compute a less accurate message and we're not good at that yet there i think i mean what we are thinking about is there's a new field a new field but there's a a field called probabilistic numerics where we are used in math to just compute everything very precisely or as precise as possible
And do not care about how much computation we spend on it. So in probabilistic numerics, I hope we can leverage this for message computations. I would like to spend, let's say, proportionally less computational power on the accuracy of a message. One way possibly would be to consider a message, a latent variable, that has an uncertainty by itself.
But I don't have a totally clear answer for Carl because we haven't solved that either. But there is a problem in, let's say, what we do on our, I mean, our computers. We're so completely different from computers, let's say, from the brain that, yeah, we're spending
You spend just too many computations on messages that in the end are very, very inaccurate. And that's a problem in what we do on our computers currently. Yeah, so I don't know how we go. I mean, what you want to do with this on the higher level, if you want to look maybe 10 times farther ahead and spend about the same amount of computation on the lower level.
That's sort of the goal. And we don't have an answer for that either at the moment. And Anna, please feel free to comment on or ask a question to anyone. Well, I mean, I, you know, I don't I don't have anything to contribute, unfortunately, to how computers work. But I can tell you that
This idea of temporal scales is something that we face often in our work with patients. For example, addicted patients are very focused on short-term rewards. In fact, their ability to control how they feel in the moment, that is partially what drives the addiction. When I try to adopt Ural's language of minimizing surprise or minimizing free entropy,
That's one of the things that people are trying to do on a short term time to scale when they become addicted. So I have a young woman who was addicted to nitrous oxide, which has a very fast onset of intoxication or the order of seconds and a very fast offset. And she says that that's exactly what she likes about it because she's controlling it second by second. So when we work with patients to get them out of that short temporal horizon,
We actually rely more and more on action and having them change something in their lives, namely abstain from their drug of choice for long enough to kind of completely reset
I have a question about that. So you mentioned control and the short term.
And you've also mentioned that you study the positive effects of having a higher power in your life or surrender. I kind of gave the punchline away by saying surrendering to the higher power. Where I was going was, OK, what's the association between seeing yourself in the largest time frame and a higher power? And then also, is there something that is akin to giving up control when you
yeah look farther and farther into the future that's a great yeah that's really at the heart of what i'm very interested in because it's a real paradox right it's this kind of locus of control within ourselves that really in modern culture we we think is a great thing but when that's taken to an extreme and one example of that is addictive behaviors it's very bad for people and for communities
And so what can pull people out of that is this kind of surrender to a higher power, giving up that locus of control, locating that locus of control outside themselves, not necessarily like in a theistic sense. One of the things that they talk about in Alcoholics Synonymous, for example, is you don't have to believe in God. It's just not you. You're not driving it.
And so I would be very curious from the perspective of Ural's understanding of active inference and free energy principle and how the brain works. Why is it that sort of embracing our inability to control what happens in our lives can actually be the very source of healing, especially embedded in this really kind of over controlled
Yeah, I would even go so far as to say endemically narcissistic culture like I'm really curious I don't want to take the conversation No in a direction, please. Please. That's a fantastic question. So if anyone has a comment on that, please I have some thoughts And I think this applies Supplies both at the personal level and at the at the global level and I think it has to do with the the my quotes from earlier
by Edward Fulbrock that if you're following from a plane, yes, maybe an altimeter and some instruments might be useful, but what you really need is a parachute. So we have this presupposition that whatever framing we have operating in our day-to-day is going to be, okay, this is the right framing and it's going to
It tends to be this rational, scientific framing of very linear cause and consequence for most stuff.
And it turns out that even if you inspect or data data behavior, bigger, more complicated models are not necessarily better, which is where we get the success of heuristics under a bounded computation, bounded rationality. And if you scale it up to 8 billion humans interacting in a resource-constraining planet,
You know the world of possibilities but also of challenges then you just you have to we have to like drastically lower our bar for
Yes, how much control we have, but also even like how much was where does information gathering reach diminishing returns? Where does modeling reach diminishing returns? There is a whole literature on the business world about the expected value of information and how much you should actually invest. Also in science is also known as optimal experiment design, where basically, you know, acknowledging that that have
limited budget in terms of how much you can act and how much can grow and how much time you can spend thinking about stuff. And I think what we're doing when we feel like burned out or exhausted from overthinking, we're immediately feeling that we've gone too high and we need to give ourselves a vacation, give ourselves some free time here. I think
I think that doing this in a principled way, we're not just taking the heuristics and the signals that we inherit from evolution, but actually being able to figure out collaboratively and with some rigor, we don't need to know exactly how many degrees the world is going to warm
by 2100 in order to know that maybe it's a good idea to start doing something about the amount of carbon in the atmosphere or whatever, right? And so I think this leads to this idea of a real knowledge economy and of things like abstraction as a service. How can you actually build in
building these kinds of sophisticated translation layers that take some of this burden from ourselves as individuals and even as organizations and just put it out in the world as value-added services, which is what they are.
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Yeah, thanks. Now, I was still also thinking about the recent breakthrough post-2020 in active inference. To me, there were theoretical progress that were very interesting. We heard already about the formalism maturity at the mathematical level between multiscale and scale-free aspects.
I really like also the development of a more multi-agent perspective of active insurance. It's very interesting. Especially, for instance, seeing
We have just heard about multi-agent systems, like even society as a whole, as many as one system or as many as many subsystems and how we can use maybe those formalisms to also deal with policymaking. That's a very interesting venue.
and the emergence of norms, culture and ideas or so because one thing that I'm still struggling with in the case of active inference models is like how to get outside the checkerboard. You can put a lot in the model a priori and how you make the model creating new stuff that is not backed inside at the first and on that like
One very interesting breakthrough was the application of active inference to morphogenesis. I really like the work that has been done on that. And on the technical aspects, I think the two main focus that I love are all the deep active inference and how to scale up active inference because it's a strong limitation for the adoption of the formalism if it's not scaled enough.
compared to other frameworks like deep learning. And then the link with empirical data. I really like, for instance, the work of Ryan Smith and how to connect with the electrophysiology and clinical data. I think it's also something very important to anchor the theory in the real world and have like falsifiability and empirical validation of those models.
And what are some of the applications of active inference to morphogenesis? So, well, I'm not the expert here. Carl would be the best to answer that. But I was referring to the work with Michael Levin and how a model can help to create a sort of embryogenesis. So maybe Carl, you can explain better than me. Please. Yeah.
I don't have a reputation for explaining things very clearly. But yeah, that's absolutely right. It was just work with Michael Eben and colleagues showing that you can get quite expressive and biomimetic pattern formation and movement of different cells into an organization, often described in terms of morphogenesis, simply by
communicating your beliefs. So I'm coming back to this sort of cross-cutting theme of communication. So if you just broadcast your beliefs and you're a little cell and you have and there are a little ensembles of cells and they all have the shared generative model that includes if I was in this position I would sense that. Now they all have exactly the same
Genitive model the same predictions the same expectations.
um and they're all um broadcasting their beliefs about where they are and the free energy minimizing solution is just when they're all in a place that they they receive signals that they would expect to to um receive when they're in this place and of course if that is the same for everybody there's only one arrangement where each cell finds its place so basically it's just knowing your place is an immersion property
I'm making the world mutually predictable through communication.
The game i thought you will have your units is precision psychiatry so i thought you're going to talk about precision so i'm going to do a game now i'm going to talk about more for Genesis i can talk about precision now i think that's a really nice way to pick up on
Things which everybody's just mentioned and in particular the pathology of precision and by precision you can read precision in the sense that Bert was talking about in terms of do you use an unsigned integer or a double you know how much can I coarse-grained my numeric representation or you can use it in terms of coarse-graining in the sense of the renormalization group
Is this chunking things in hours or years as opposed to milliseconds and minutes or you can look at it in terms of a statistician describing the reliability or the inverse variance of a signal and of course we have to estimate that.
When i say we i mean your agents and statisticians and act accordingly and certainly in the active in the work of brian smith on addiction much of the sort of mathematical explanation for these addictive locked in OCD like phenomena.
Rests upon a failure to get that course grading that precision estimation right. The reason I wonder whether it be just worthwhile revisiting addiction and psychopathology or it's only pathology of behavior from the point of view of getting precision
Wrong and certainly assigning too much precision to low level processing which is what wants to avoid doing and it just strikes me that that kind of story. Also has mileage in terms of why we are in the state of paralysis when it comes to climate change because they also notice gear and then you talk about climate action and never heard that before but that seems to me to be the important thing why isn't there any climate action.
I'm gonna you know what you like you going to the clinic and find some of the parkinsons disease why isn't this person moving. Yeah i'm interesting to be the computational explanation for parkinsons disease. Is assigning too much precision to the evidence that you're not moving before you move so if you don't if you can't ignore the fact that nothing is changing.
All your prior beliefs, your predictions that I am going to stand up or going to initiate walking. Don't get a look at it because they are immediately cancelled because you've assigned too much precision to the lower level processing.
I'm just wondering whether that that's something that that kind of pathology is exactly what Ralph is Ralph is trying to reverse by having morals at hand recommendations that have to provide a more coarse-grained view of things a deeper view. Anna, would you like to comment on that?
Yeah, well I just, I love this idea of the pathology of precision because I think it manifests in so many
different ways, not just among my patient population, but I think it's almost like a cultural sickness in a way. You know, the ways in which we seem like obsessed with certain types of data and we're missing the big picture. So I'm going to think more about that. I'm going to read more about it. I really appreciate the discussions. Interesting for me.
And when you're referring to the pathology of precision, do you mean so in a more conscious sense that we're over evaluating something that we don't need to? Whereas, Carl, you're referring to it in an unconscious sense, like the brain is putting too much precision on something, because in Parkinson's, it's not like you consciously are putting precision in a place. Well, I think you could look at it sort of like in both cases, when I think about addiction,
People aren't doing it consciously. It's that they really do see this as adaptive and healthy and also even on some level that they can't do otherwise. And they're not able to see the true impact of their drug use on their lives. They're genuinely not able to see the negative consequences. I mean, that's what contributes to getting caught in that vortex. But I mean, you could also see it as part of
What's happened culturally, like, for example, like the whole wellness industrial complex, the way that we now count ourselves, you know, through all these different devices. And if we could just count our breathing and count our heart rate and supplements, you know, then we would somehow reach some levitating state of precise wellness. And I don't know, I mean, you know, just kind of this is all kind of new ideas for me.
That's interesting. So you believe that we can be inundated with health data and that that's detrimental to us. Oh, absolutely. I see that all the time. So for me, I used to have. OK, maybe I'll take this out of the. Let me figure out how to say this diplomatically. I used to have a device that would measure my heart rate. Let's say that and my sleep. And instead of improving my sleep.
That's exactly it.
i should be able to control it right so with all of this data and information i should be able to reduce free entropy or whatever house produce surprise as you guys talk about um you know and i think that's obviously that only goes so far and then can actually contribute to our misery because we're why aren't we all you know
I see this also with people who have productivity tools and not only that, but mechanical keyboards, let's say. The reason why I don't have a mechanical keyboard, even though I think I'd love it,
is because I know that why the heck do I care about the clicking sound of a keyboard? But if I got one, then I'd be like, well, what's the difference between clicking sound A versus clicking sound B versus clicking sound C? And I become obsessed with the trappings of productivity that is sharpening so-called sharpening the axe rather than cutting down the tree. There's this phrase that is apocryphal and it said it's attributed to Lincoln, which is that he'd spend 80 percent of his time or half the time sharpening the knife than cutting the tree.
Can I, uh...
Just talk about what I find exciting in my field about. Sure, sure. Yes. I mean, it was a long time ago, but there is a paper and it's about that. It says, well, active influence is not really a scientific loop because it's biased. And, um, and I read that and the, the, the, the sound of the paper was kind of, so this, so it's not good.
But I think active inference is maybe not a science loop, it's an engineering loop. Because there's bias and we need bias in engineering, we need to make stuff, we need to build stuff, we need to have a bias. So it's an engineering design cycle. I see that everywhere around me. And active inference could be a complete breakthrough in engineering. The fields around me
I'm myself in a signal processing department or group and everybody builds algorithms. For us, I mean, in Active Influence agents, it's inference over states. Then the floor below me, they build control systems. Well, it's inference over actions. Then other people are working on machine learning. It's inference over parameters.
Active inference could be, and you'll like this Kurt, it's a very deflationary view on engineering because everything is just inference. And so rather than building algorithms everywhere, if we become really good at implementing
We will be able to build a great engineering design cycles and we'll be engineering better machines for medical procedures or other things that are important.
So it has a tremendous application potential in engineering. In engineering, I think in many fields, people have sort of drifted in different directions. Control theorists have, I mean, they do almost the same thing as signal processing people, but they speak a different language now. And you know, and signal processing people
It's a completely different group from the machine learning people, but it's all information processing. And this brings it, this field can bring it together. So I think it's, but the thing is that in order to make it successful in engineering, we need to build an application that impresses, right? That it's not like a tic-tac-toe thing. It really needs to impress people. It needs to be better than
You know there's some other control systems but once we do that I think there is tremendous application potential because there haven't been enormous breakthroughs in signal processing and control. The last big breakthrough I think was Kalman filtering and this was 1960s.
And I mean, it's kind of it's kind of funny that the essence of what we do in active influence is also carbon filtering. That's I think there's tremendous opportunities for for what we do here for for engineering. So that's why that's why it's getting to me. And do you mind expanding on what you said about acting and therapists should be helping their patients with that?
Oh, sure. Just so I mean, one of my critiques of mental health treatment today is that there's not enough. There's not enough encouragement of patients to actually go and act differently in the world as a way of gathering data and said it often ends up being kind of this
World building, um, between therapists and patients, not, not necessarily ultimately adaptive in the world. So I was really just kind of responding to what Robin was saying that we need to act in the world. I think that's more true now, um, in, you know, modern rich nations than ever before, because we are so incredibly sedentary and interacting. Of course we're interacting with a virtual world and that's, you know, good and bad, but I mean, we need to be actually acting in the world.
Hmm. And so there's different forms of therapy, as you know, there's talk therapy, and then there's also cognitive behavioral therapy or psychotherapy instead of talk therapy. But cognitive behavioral therapy, as far as I understand, focuses on the actions. Is that incorrect?
I mean, for you know, again, treating addiction, like you're not going to really get that far with cognitive behavioral therapy or anything that's focused on just emotions and cognitions, people have to go out and actually try stop using their stopping their substance or their addictive behaviors and gather data from that experience and then come back and process it. So, Anna, in your field, and this question will go to everyone in your field and what you study, where is the largest gap that you would like to see closed?
We're facing a huge mental health crisis now. We have more and more young people coming in with depression, anxiety, suicidality, addictions of all sorts. These are not necessarily people who are struggling by virtue of trauma or socioeconomic disparity. These are people who have really privileged lives in many instances. It's really a puzzle. What is going on for people? I think a big part of it is
The fact that people are not having embodied experiences, they're not having experiences in the world. And also the experiences they are having are, you know, these kinds of very quick fixes and fast pleasures.
I think the co-created sort of models through healthier communication that allow people to feel part of a community and also to have like truthful co-created narratives, trying to use the language here, I think that's really important.
So for example, one of the things he's excited about, one of the things I'm excited about in the field of addiction medicine is mutual support and the proliferation of things like Alcoholics Anonymous, but also other mutual help groups, a lot of them existing now online and the way that people are together creating healthier narratives and acted together to counteract a lot of the unhealthy narratives that I think are driving a lot of decision making today.
I wanted to know, is there a correlation between the rise in mental health or sorry, mental illness or mental health issues, whatever we want to call it, and a certain trait of people? Like, is it affecting every, is it affecting the population the same? So the whole population is raised 20% in terms of how many mental health issues they have per year. Or is it affecting people who deal with abstractions more and more? So for instance, we're talking over Zoom.
and some people study abstractions just like us and then there's some people whose work it is to do something physical like running or swim like is it affecting everyone equally or are you noticing that there's some broad trend well the broad trends that are out there are just correlational but the more time that people spend in the virtual world the more likely they are to suffer from depression anxiety and other mental health problems
You know, people haven't really been able to narrow that down to specific content, but they have been able to save just the sheer amount of time that you're spending online increases your risk for certain, you know, poor mental health outcomes. Again, if anyone has any comments or questions, please just raise your physical hand. I can see that. And okay, Rafael, sorry. I was going to say that I think another notable
Trend is, and I just saw somebody say this on YouTube just yesterday, that young people are disproportionately affected by things like climate grief because they're the ones that are going to be alive to deal with it. And I think that applies more generally that Peter Senge already like 30 years or something ago wrote about the inescapable network of neutrality, the reality that
What we do affects each other. We took advantage of this huge resource buffer that's called the biosphere and Earth to pretend that it didn't for quite a long time and got a lot of mileage out of it.
Now we're at a point where there's a whole generation of people that are coming to grips with the fact that I'm going to stop myself from saying a swear word, but oh my God, we actually need to change everything about everything that we do and we need to do it fast. And by the way, it's not just what we do in
It's not just what we do out there, it's also what we do inside, how we get ready for how to show up for life internally, right? So no wonder that impacts on myself. I've dealt with anxiety and a lot of other things. We've had conversations about what are we doing bringing a daughter into this world and all these kinds of things. I think it's only natural that it's coming to a head in this way right now.
Guillaume, you have your hand up and I can't see you. Yes. Yeah, it's connected with what has just been said. So in your initial question about the gaps that needs to be closed, I think like a scale-free model of health and mental health particularly would be great. Like we are in silos in biomedical research and the fact that someone is
having depression can come from interacting genes as much as interacting people and also is related to climate change and so on. So how we can have a new health systems that doesn't deal with those silos and integrate those different scales to me it's like really a big challenge but a challenge that
In my field of engineering, active inference is not understood.
Because almost all papers are written by neuroscientists and they're hard to read. So I was really happy to hear today.
I think it's Sanjeev Namjoshi who is writing an engineering book on active inference. So that will really help. That together with the availability of good toolboxes for implementing active inference should make a lot of engineers much more enthusiastic about active inference.
Because it's not something that is not understood at the moment in engineering circles. So I hope that the book will be good. I'm enthusiastic about that. And Carl, where are some gaps in the research that you'd like to see addressed?
All the gaps as a whole, empty space out there yet to be explored. But in terms of what seems to be emerging from the session and specifically the past few answers, it does seem to be important to have
It's very generic just to take Burt's sort of line that this is just one deflationary simple and probably the right way to understand stuff and to make recommendations or to describe people's actions possibly to themselves in a therapeutic context.
and as such it should be push button technology and it should be democratized and socialized and I think that's the challenge practically and one may ask why would you want to do that? For me there are two clear imperatives. One is
very abstract and it's not really within my comfort zone and the other one is in my comfort zone, but the one that's outside my comfort zone is this notion of interactivity and hyper-connectivity and the meta-crisis that we heard about.
And, and Guillaume also referred to this in terms of what he was trying, he was trying to distinguish between a Californian notion of optimality and another kind, another way forward. And to me, it's, it's, it's a stark contrast with growth is good versus sustainability. And of course, the maths of the free energy principle is just about sustainability. It's just a description
of the physics of systems, random dynamical systems that self-organize to some non-equilibrium steady state. That is what we are. So for me, there's something deeply, if you like, apt about the free energy principle and its chloral risk such as active inference in application to ecosystems and lived ecosystems and realized ecosystems
So if those basic principles can be brought back into globalization, into the market, into fintech, into social media, into politics, into climate action, I think that would be a good thing. I'm just mindful, this struck me in a number of the presentations today,
I remember before but was saying if you look at the brain which is a really lovely example of a self organizing system to a non equilibrium steady state and then it's empty and what did you mean by that it didn't mean you're empty headed what he meant was it's incredibly sparsely connected.
Now that tells you immediately that a pathology of connectivity is hyper connective over connectivity which immediately well it made me very alert to the presentation of the meta crisis that one of the first three things
That was under the metacrisis or the current crisis where i can't intend with is a destruction of that sparse delicate connectivity that defines thing that's undefined some things technically in terms of markets so we want a world in which lots of different things can coexist in some kind of generalized synchrony in a sustainable way. You need sparse connectivity.
I'm the pathology the thing that will destroy that is over connectivity so it seems to be very important that we get that into interplay in terms of machine learning artificial intelligence.
politics, fintech, climate change, and the only way it's going to get there is epistemically by equipping people to actually build their own little models and ask their own questions. You can't tell people this. They're going to learn. They're going to learn it for themselves. Just very quickly, because I'm sure we've only got a couple of minutes left.
The other agenda which I'm more familiar with is exactly Anna's and Guillaume's agenda which is making this work in the context of
of neurology and psychiatry. So if you can democratize and socialize this way of describing things so that people can now build models of their particular patient in the other use of precision psychiatry. I suspect the games unit was called after. So personalized medicine that is really personalized in the sense that you actually have your digital twin of your behavior.
and then you've got that you know you optimize your digital twin to become a model of your patient and then you can start to do experiments on that on that model behavioral interventions or even share that model very much in the spirit of cbt with the patient and say look this is you this is what would happen if you went out and did this and this is what would happen if you went out and did that
That to my mind and indeed that was the initial motivation for much of this work was actually to build observation models of psychiatric conditions to work out both the pharmacological and physiological basis and the disruption of the pathology of precision and message passing on the factor graphs that are our brain even though they are very empty.
on the one hand but also get that behavior that that key thing that i was talking about the active engagement with the lived world uh into into that model and hence active inference and just to conclude you know um that that the activity that sort of physical engagement that embodiment that sort of um for ease and everything else
I think it's really coming to a head now in terms of people's after the large language model after the chat GPT moment the bounce back has been what's missing. What's not there because what is not there is agency and embodied engagement with the world and that's why i think this is still a lot of work to be done in bringing artificial intelligence red as active inference.
You all now have 30 seconds to 60 seconds to speak directly to the audience. What closing message do you have? You're speaking directly to someone who's listening. They're a curious person. They're interested in active inference. They also want to lead better lives, hopefully, and do something propitious.
So what message do you have for them? Anna, we'll start with you.
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Gosh, I'm just going to say what pops into my mind right now is that one of the things I have learned from my patients who are trying to get into recovery from severe addictions is something that they call the set aside prayer, where they set aside all of the notions that they have about how the world works and try to be completely open and receptive to information coming into their minds.
And I think that's just a wonderful frame or concept for all of us living in the world to periodically just take a moment and take these models and just say, you know, everything I think I know about the world, I'm going to temporarily suspend it and I'm just going to be open. And when that happens, we can be present and learn in a way that it's not possible when we're just trying to reinforce our models. Great. Fantastic.
And then we'll go Carl and then Raph and then Guillaume.
I just enjoyed today very much. I thought there was a lot of material both for people from let's say psychology, neuroscience, but also for engineers. So if you haven't watched some of the talks, go look through the schedule because some of the talks are really good and things are really enjoyed. And then yeah, what should I tell people? Go work out, do a lot of sports, it's good for you.
Mm-hmm, Carl Yeah, sorry, I was gonna make a joke but I can't because
So I'm going to use my 30 second just to thank Daniel and his team for this. So if you want something to do, you should go and watch the live streams and get involved with this ecosystem. I hadn't seen that paper being presented before but I was really impressed with the Active Inference Institute and its openness and its welcoming
Rafael.
Yeah, so I'll second what Carl said and follow on with it's an invitation not just to participate in the Active Defense Institute, but also an invitation to participate in building this Gaia tractor, this new way of doing things that acknowledges the value of growth.
and also the value of sustainability joins it all together in this thing called regeneration. And it really is a collective effort, a collective learning effort. And this also, by the way, also applies to the panelists as well. I think obviously what Burt and Carl are doing, it has immediate things having to have to do with
What we're after, but one of the main things that we discussed, that we keep discussing is also like this, the intersubjectivity and the importance of being able to operate well as humans together, and that connects directly to cognitive science, psychiatry, and so on. And yeah, so everybody that wants to be engaged and
And Guillaume.
I would thanks also all of you for the discussion and the organizer for what they are doing. Indeed, the work of the Action Inference Institute is very
I'm not very good at sports, but some say that science is a team sport, so at least have a good team perspective when doing science and being kind to each other would be the best advice to everyone.
Well, thank you all. I also would like you get yours, too. Somebody else has to come in from outside the Markov blanket, though. Well, I wanted to just thank you, Daniel. Thank you, Daniel and Rafael. Well, and also Carl and Anna and Bert and Guillaume. This was a tremendous amount of fun. I hope I get to speak to you all individually. As usual, I have way more questions than we were able to get to. Thank you all. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks, everyone.
Firstly, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. There's now a website, curtjymungle.org, and that has a mailing list. The reason being that large platforms like YouTube, like Patreon, they can disable you for whatever reason, whenever they like.
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"text": " I think that's just a wonderful frame or concept for all of us living in the world to periodically just take a moment and take these models and just say you know everything I think I know about the world I'm going to temporarily suspend it and I'm just going to be open and when that happens we can be present and learn in a way that it's not possible when we're just trying to reinforce our models."
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"text": " I was invited by the innovative and prestigious Active Inference Institute to host an all-star academic panel where questions explored are what's the difference between building a model and building a narrative? What about the relationship between predictions and what constitutes you? So that is personal identity."
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"text": " You're going to hear from top neuroscientist Carl Friston at the University of College London, Anna Lemke, who's a professor of psychiatry at the Stanford Addiction Clinic and author of Drug Dealer and Dopamine Nation, links to which are in the description. You'll also hear from Raphael Kaufman, who's the CTO of Digital Gaia. You'll hear from Bert De Vries, who's a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology. Lastly, you'll hear from Guillaume Demas, who is an associate researcher in computational psychiatry"
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"text": " at the University of Montreal. So my neighbor. Because why? I am Kurt Jaimungal and my background is in mathematical physics from the University of Toronto, which is where I'm based. And the whole project of this channel is to analyze various theories of everything, usually in the physics sense that are proposed, including grand unification with gravity plus dualities and other schemes, as well as what constitutes consciousness."
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"text": " You can find this podcast by typing in theories of everything onto YouTube or whichever podcast catcher you have, or you can just click the subscribe right here. The links to the Active Inference Institute are in the description as well. A special thank you to Daniel Friedman for putting this all together. Enjoy. Okay, now speaking of the brain as a computer, we frequently hear in these circles the brain as a predictive machine. Where does this the quote unquote brain as a predictive machine have its limits? And also, is that to be interpreted as implying"
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"text": " necessary conditions for the kind of consciousness I'm guessing you're referring to, you know, that freedom from the moment. And if one reads prediction in its sort of psychological or pretensive or pretension nature in terms of being able to predict what will happen in the future, I think that's going to be a sort of a key"
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"text": " Do not possess a third kind of sentience and things that do. And that bright line just rests basically upon, well from the perspective of active infants, having a generative model that includes the consequences of your own actions in the future. So just by having consequences you're now talking about"
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"text": " The future and the consequences in the future now become random variables, therefore you have to infer them, which leads you directly to the notion of planning as inference, which means that bright light is just the difference between things that plan and do not plan. I would guess that that's where you probably want to start in terms of foregrounding the role of prediction as being"
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"text": " an aspect of self-organization and its sort of reading under active influence that can try this conscious things from non-conscious things, namely the ability to plan. Does that make sense? I have follow-up questions. We'll get to them at some point. For now, Anna, do you have any comments on that and Bert as well afterward? Well, you know, I'm new to this field, so I'm just familiarizing myself even with the language."
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"text": " But I can respond to the question, the brain is a predictive machine in terms of the work that I do clinically in the kind of psychopathology that I see. When I'm working with patients, I work primarily with narratives, the stories that they tell about their lives. And one of the recurring themes I've seen through my work is that when patients tell stories in which they are perpetually the victims of other people's actions or the world,"
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"text": " What they contribute to their life problems. So I guess when I think of the limits of the brain as a predictive machine, I think in some ways one of the big limits is that it's a very powerful predictive machine that actually allows us to subsequently shape what actually happens to us and or our perceptions of what happens to us, which then can perpetuate a false narrative."
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"text": " And I'll just give one small example from my own life. I've had my conflicts with my mother, and one of my beefs about her is that she's a very poor communicator, and that whenever I email her, I either get a cryptic response or no response at all, and it drives me crazy. And about five years ago, she sent an email, asked me some questions, I wrote her back and responded, and it was clear to me that that required yet a response from her, which I never got."
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"text": " And that then perpetuated my narrative about her as a very poor communicator and many other negative things. And then about three months after I sent that email, I found the email in my draft inbox in my draft box. So I had never actually responded to there's email, I hadn't actually sent the email. And that was for me, I'm just a, you know, a personal, wonderful example of the ways in which we can, our actions can actually"
},
{
"end_time": 543.183,
"index": 20,
"start_time": 519.172,
"text": " Right. And I have a quick question, Bert, just for Anna, before we get to you. So use the word narrative there. How are you defining the word narrative? Is it the same as model? Is it a sequence of events? Like what is the specific definition of narrative?"
},
{
"end_time": 572.176,
"index": 21,
"start_time": 543.814,
"text": " You know, I never really thought about it in those terms, but when I talk about narrative, I'm talking about the stories that people tell about their lives, because that's sort of my data. And also about models, because what I've discovered about self-narrative is it's not just a way to organize the past, it also becomes a roadmap for the future. That's the language that I use, but I see it maps very nicely onto your alls."
},
{
"end_time": 585.947,
"index": 22,
"start_time": 572.244,
"text": " I see professor degrees please yeah it's clear that the ability to predict is the essence of the decision making."
},
{
"end_time": 613.439,
"index": 23,
"start_time": 586.561,
"text": " Yeah, I have a different background, right? I'm not a psychiatrist. So I think about these things in different ways. The thing that I think about when I think about prediction is I would assume that brain predicts far ahead, that things get less accurate, right? If I predict that I want to go three quarters around, around about, I don't care about the centimeter where my car goes when I'm around there, I just want to get in the right lane."
},
{
"end_time": 644.002,
"index": 24,
"start_time": 614.138,
"text": " I would assume that the brain doesn't take much, it takes less computations if you care about things less precisely. But that's very hard in a computer. This is what kind of kills us in our current way of implementing active inference. When we want to predict a deep half, we don't care about the accuracy, but we don't know how to do it much cheaper when things are less accurate."
},
{
"end_time": 672.432,
"index": 25,
"start_time": 645.947,
"text": " Thank you. Now, Professor Kaufman."
},
{
"end_time": 700.947,
"index": 26,
"start_time": 673.404,
"text": " I'm not a professor but I'll answer anyway. They just call me Rafa. Yeah, so there's so many really interesting avenues here and it's not often that I get the pleasure of discussing this kind of stuff with this kind of diverse crowd. But I do, I mean, I've been interested in these questions for a pretty long time and I"
},
{
"end_time": 728.422,
"index": 27,
"start_time": 701.374,
"text": " Running a business comes with a lot of what-ifs. But luckily, there's a simple answer to them. Shopify. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses, including Thrive Cosmetics and Momofuku, and it'll help you with everything you need. From website design and marketing, to boosting sales and expanding operations, Shopify can get the job done and make your dream a reality. Turn those what-ifs into"
},
{
"end_time": 756.8,
"index": 28,
"start_time": 729.428,
"text": " How active inference as a lens, for instance, it enables us to get another sense of what non-dualist views on consciousness are saying when they get us experientially to notice the difference between what we actually perceive and what"
},
{
"end_time": 779.65,
"index": 29,
"start_time": 757.483,
"text": " between the different various different processes or things that are going on in our in our head and our tendency to like lump them all together into the same okay this is this is my this is my experience that that i'm immersed in so noticing being able to to to notice is different with the the the"
},
{
"end_time": 804.531,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 780.094,
"text": " the process of proceeding and acting and to an extent it's automated and the narrative or the various narratives that are going on in parallel in my head whether I'm aware of them or not and our ability to just put kind of seemingly arbitrary meta level on top of it to try to make sense of it all and to force"
},
{
"end_time": 814.991,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 804.821,
"text": " for that experience of having multiple networks and multiple framings going on at the same time makes sense of that experience in a"
},
{
"end_time": 839.599,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 815.538,
"text": " in a way that aligns with our presuppositions about how things are. So I think that's super interesting. I also want to highlight that, like this view of consciousness as being kind of defined by having a narrative or an internal model that's about self, or that at least is about self, and that leads, as Carl said, to planning as inference."
},
{
"end_time": 866.049,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 839.599,
"text": " Sure. And how is it that you're using the word deflationary there?"
},
{
"end_time": 878.439,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 866.664,
"text": " Carl, I remember I asked you about that when we had our podcast together. But Rafael, similar question. So you said deflationary view when we have narratives of self. Do you mean it relegates us to something that consciousness is much less than?"
},
{
"end_time": 906.8,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 878.882,
"text": " Yeah, I mean, it's not necessarily much less than in the subjective sense, but it's perhaps much less than in the scientific sense. So one example of one not saying exactly that, but maybe something close to what Daniel Dennett calls hetero phenomenology, which is basically the statement that the sum of what one can say scientifically about consciousness is"
},
{
"end_time": 923.302,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 906.8,
"text": " is equal to what can be studied and modeled and theorized and communicated and learned and agreed upon on the basis of objective data about what people, including you, but also other people say."
},
{
"end_time": 950.981,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 923.626,
"text": " About their experience which and of course like what can be measured of neural correlates and whatever which is not the same as our not necessarily the same as our experience of our directive but we think is our direct experience of being conscious and conscious right so one way to look at it is that is that the science of consciousness doesn't necessarily have to put the primacy on on people the for for instance people saying they have qualia"
},
{
"end_time": 978.933,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 951.596,
"text": " That that we thought in that sense of this deflationary, right? It's Yeah, you have to explain why people believe they have qualia not why people have quality because it's not it's not necessarily a scientific truth that people have quality, right? Professor Dumas Yeah, so well on the limits of various breaking machine. Well, which we should be always careful to not move from one"
},
{
"end_time": 996.237,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 979.462,
"text": " map territory fallacy to another one for sure so we need to be skeptics and avoid to reify the methods and well the this world symposium show how this metaphor is super useful and and fruitful"
},
{
"end_time": 1024.428,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 996.749,
"text": " But I can see like two main limits or at least things where we should be careful. So following what Professor Lemke said, like in psychiatry, I think the looping effects and the way people picture themselves can be very unpredictable. And so the way"
},
{
"end_time": 1041.425,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1024.821,
"text": " We think about the brain as a predictive machine, think prediction for patients would have different signification of what we mean by predictive machines in the context of active inference and in general also like"
},
{
"end_time": 1068.473,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1041.834,
"text": " I can see that certain psychologists or anthropologists would have a big appeal all of a sudden for active inference and pre-energy principles, but taking the words as directly what they think the word means, we need to be careful in the way to communicate it. Typically, following also what Professor DeVries said about"
},
{
"end_time": 1095.35,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1068.916,
"text": " Prediction has been super important for decision making. I think we should be careful about the weirdness of cognitive science and how it doesn't necessarily expand to a non-Western educated industrialized country where maybe the cultural value is not about optimization of your decision making or your profit."
},
{
"end_time": 1125.196,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1095.708,
"text": " And so that's the first thing where I think we should be careful. It's more like a matter of how to communicate the theory. In that case, not necessarily a limit of the theory itself. But the second one is about the equivalence or not with other frameworks. So like I can see how we had Mao, Alvazan talking about category theory."
},
{
"end_time": 1137.176,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1125.486,
"text": " And I'm very curious about right now among the different frameworks that are out there, how can we define what is equivalent or not with active inference?"
},
{
"end_time": 1158.592,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1137.602,
"text": " to be able to see those limits. Maybe we are living what happened with quantum mechanics in the early 20th century with different interpretation, with different tools to model quantum mechanics and here with artificial intelligence and cognitive neuroscience we have also all those frameworks and I think"
},
{
"end_time": 1187.927,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1159.087,
"text": " Okay, now my role is the moderator, but I would like you all to speak to one another. So I'm going to ask a question that will serve as well. You each will speak on it, but as the other people are speaking, just think, okay, is there a question that I have or is there a comment that I have? So the question"
},
{
"end_time": 1204.155,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1188.319,
"text": " is what are some of the recent advancements or breakthroughs in your respective fields that you find particularly promising? And well, recent, let's say 2020 till now. So we'll start off with Rafael, you're smiling and you look like you're championing."
},
{
"end_time": 1231.135,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1204.667,
"text": " Well, I was thinking, what is my field, right? Because we're very much in the last mile of applying the wonderful stuff that you all come up with and making it useful on the ground. But so I'm extraordinarily excited about research like what BERT is doing and feel like"
},
{
"end_time": 1259.309,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1231.766,
"text": " As Guillaume was saying, we're also starting to see some convergence on different ways to get to at least the same shape of answers and in some cases even to the same results. One example of this is work that Chris Fields, Carl and others have been doing on the quantum"
},
{
"end_time": 1269.974,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1259.735,
"text": " Basically explaining quantum information theory and how it relates to the free energy principle, looking at the free energy principle as the classical limit of"
},
{
"end_time": 1298.899,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1270.265,
"text": " of quantum information theory, and I don't pretend to understand all of it, but as somebody who is coming from a quantum physics background, just being alive to see this kind of convergence happening, which, as I mean, as Guillaume said, we've been at this business of post-classical, what the hell is going on for over a century now, and it's nice to be at a time where, again, we're starting to talk less past each other."
},
{
"end_time": 1316.408,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1299.394,
"text": " And that's from a theoretical perspective, from a practical perspective, I think just finding that we have all the building blocks to create fast, interpretable, reliable, and aligned decision-making systems."
},
{
"end_time": 1333.422,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1316.834,
"text": " which includes AI systems, autonomous systems that have all those characteristics and that it turns out that all the things that the reinforcement learning and the neural networks people thought were very hard or impossible are sort of in the realm of what we can do."
},
{
"end_time": 1357.295,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1333.422,
"text": " looking at things from an active inference lens and vice versa. A lot of things that active inference models have been procuring so far. It turns out if you toss in a neural network approximator here and borrow some other massively parallel computation techniques, it also becomes feasible. So it's converging."
},
{
"end_time": 1385.538,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1358.985,
"text": " Yeah, for me, what's remarkable is that there's so many domains of what we thought was exclusively human or would be exclusively human for decades that in just the past couple of years, robots or computers seem to be just as good, if not exceeding us. And I don't know if that's promising or worrisome. But anyhow, Carl, please, if you don't mind answering the question, and then we'll go Anna, then Bert and then Dumas."
},
{
"end_time": 1414.94,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1386.118,
"text": " Actually, just reflecting upon one of your observations, I think it's very difficult to identify one thing. In a sense,"
},
{
"end_time": 1443.643,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1416.254,
"text": " What is impressive is the diversity of advances and applications and I just say that because that's what I was thinking you know over the past six hours just listening to the amazing presentation after presentation and just you know noting how diverse you know and yet there's this common thread this common commitment basically stating our curiosity and using the tools that naturalize that kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 1460.043,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1443.643,
"text": " Sense making curious behavior and communication that inherent from some either maths or category theory or as rough notes now quantum information theory but just to pick up on a couple of things which are relevant to this conversation so the work with Chris fields."
},
{
"end_time": 1489.497,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1460.538,
"text": " It sounds lovely and exciting to bring quantum mechanics into active inference but that's not the move that I think Chris is really wanting to champion. The move I think is something that we've all been addressing in one way or another which is leveraging the scale-free aspects of this principled approach to self-organization and hopefully self-organization to some kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 1509.991,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1489.497,
"text": " Generalize synchrony and so that that's where the conformation theory get into the game is scale free and did you go further and say it's completely background free everything is constructed it's just so i think that that's a lovely move because once you gone scale free then start to ask the questions about."
},
{
"end_time": 1536.903,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1510.094,
"text": " How you couple one scale to another scale and in a sense ecosystems is just that. How do the delusions of an ecosystem, how is it constituted, how is it co-constructed, what is the structure of it. These are all questions about how one scale links to another scale. So I think there have been lots of advances in that direction in many many different fronts and you can read that either in terms of coupling different sort of spatial"
},
{
"end_time": 1557.79,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1536.903,
"text": " What is your special skills and probably more importantly sort of temporal scales and you see that you have you look you just come back to what do you mean by a narrative. It is exactly i think i said it's just a plan is this a story."
},
{
"end_time": 1583.677,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1558.166,
"text": " Notice the story has a temporal aspect to it. I have narratives about being a good person, being a good father, being a good scientist. I also have narratives about I want my cup of coffee or I have to go look after the child. We've all got narratives at very, very different timescales. I just came back to Bert's example of"
},
{
"end_time": 1603.643,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1583.677,
"text": " I'm an autonomous vehicle and I'm sentient and we're five years into the future and I have to drive around the roundabout. What temple scale and what kind of temple course grading to define the narrative with narratives would be appropriate for that kind of situation."
},
{
"end_time": 1629.991,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1604.701,
"text": " the ensuing planning. So a short answer to your question, I think there have been many many advances. I think what they've had in common is basically transcending either different domains but in particular different scales of application. I also agree with the notion, well"
},
{
"end_time": 1646.783,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1629.991,
"text": " Another important and pragmatic advance is something that Bert mentioned which is democratization of this technology. I think Ralph also hinted at this is the time you start using this for the common good."
},
{
"end_time": 1673.353,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1647.244,
"text": " So I think you know things like RxInfer and PiMDP and I didn't know about the Gaia project but it sounds as though there's been great advances there as well. So this kind of democratization I think is really important, this sort of socialization where everybody can play and start to sort of not talk past each other. I think that's a that's a very important a very important advance."
},
{
"end_time": 1701.476,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1674.326,
"text": " And did you say the word scale invariance or scale independence? I said scale invariant. I actually said scale-free and I shouldn't have done that. I said scale-free. So the idea that you can apply exactly the same mechanics and literally, for example, say from Bert's perspective, the same kind of message passing at different space-time scales."
},
{
"end_time": 1717.756,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1701.749,
"text": " Reactive means that you don't have to prescribe the scheduling."
},
{
"end_time": 1747.176,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1718.387,
"text": " but in addressing the problems or the issues that entailed by having to specify the scheduling of talking or of message passing you're bound to deal with time and in a scale invariant context or nested with nested scales for example you have to deal with the"
},
{
"end_time": 1769.445,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1747.466,
"text": " I think there's going to be a very important generic question which technically Bert will have been thinking about furiously for the past few years but I think implicitly we're all going to have to be addressing soon which is the how do you put that the timing of your messages when you make a move or when you listen to a patient or"
},
{
"end_time": 1797.722,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1769.923,
"text": " When you actually pass a message on a factor graph, how are we going to be able to put the separation of time scales into the architecture in a way that speaks to this scaling variance? The GEAR project, for example, how do you integrate live feed from traffic flow sensors with fluctuations in the climate?"
},
{
"end_time": 1822.329,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1797.944,
"text": " These kinds of this kind of data comes very very different temple scales and yet has to be assimilated and modeled in a way that is also I think has to pay due courtesy to that separation of temple scales. Bert, could you please recapitulate the question for the audience and then begin to answer it."
},
{
"end_time": 1848.575,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1824.019,
"text": " Okay, the issue is if you have active instance agents are nested agents and the higher levels supposed to operate on a larger temporal scale, but they are also working at a lower resolution. If you look far ahead, you don't care as much about precision."
},
{
"end_time": 1873.763,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1848.933,
"text": " Not that is sent to me the level when i go around around about i don't care to send to me the real land but if i'm but for the next few milliseconds i do care about because it may mean the difference between getting in the ditch or not. So i don't want to send so the higher level i want to look very deep ahead but i don't want to send every millisecond message to go to let's say."
},
{
"end_time": 1888.78,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1874.036,
"text": " a minute ahead because i need to space it out a lot but then i may miss things so preferably you would just send inaccurate messages but that only works if you actually have a method"
},
{
"end_time": 1917.534,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1889.445,
"text": " You also let's say use less computational power to compute a less accurate message and we're not good at that yet there i think i mean what we are thinking about is there's a new field a new field but there's a a field called probabilistic numerics where we are used in math to just compute everything very precisely or as precise as possible"
},
{
"end_time": 1947.432,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1918.131,
"text": " And do not care about how much computation we spend on it. So in probabilistic numerics, I hope we can leverage this for message computations. I would like to spend, let's say, proportionally less computational power on the accuracy of a message. One way possibly would be to consider a message, a latent variable, that has an uncertainty by itself."
},
{
"end_time": 1975.725,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 1948.2,
"text": " But I don't have a totally clear answer for Carl because we haven't solved that either. But there is a problem in, let's say, what we do on our, I mean, our computers. We're so completely different from computers, let's say, from the brain that, yeah, we're spending"
},
{
"end_time": 2001.459,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 1976.442,
"text": " You spend just too many computations on messages that in the end are very, very inaccurate. And that's a problem in what we do on our computers currently. Yeah, so I don't know how we go. I mean, what you want to do with this on the higher level, if you want to look maybe 10 times farther ahead and spend about the same amount of computation on the lower level."
},
{
"end_time": 2022.363,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2001.766,
"text": " That's sort of the goal. And we don't have an answer for that either at the moment. And Anna, please feel free to comment on or ask a question to anyone. Well, I mean, I, you know, I don't I don't have anything to contribute, unfortunately, to how computers work. But I can tell you that"
},
{
"end_time": 2048.217,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2022.756,
"text": " This idea of temporal scales is something that we face often in our work with patients. For example, addicted patients are very focused on short-term rewards. In fact, their ability to control how they feel in the moment, that is partially what drives the addiction. When I try to adopt Ural's language of minimizing surprise or minimizing free entropy,"
},
{
"end_time": 2075.316,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2048.916,
"text": " That's one of the things that people are trying to do on a short term time to scale when they become addicted. So I have a young woman who was addicted to nitrous oxide, which has a very fast onset of intoxication or the order of seconds and a very fast offset. And she says that that's exactly what she likes about it because she's controlling it second by second. So when we work with patients to get them out of that short temporal horizon,"
},
{
"end_time": 2089.804,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2075.896,
"text": " We actually rely more and more on action and having them change something in their lives, namely abstain from their drug of choice for long enough to kind of completely reset"
},
{
"end_time": 2118.951,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2090.265,
"text": " I have a question about that. So you mentioned control and the short term."
},
{
"end_time": 2143.558,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2119.326,
"text": " And you've also mentioned that you study the positive effects of having a higher power in your life or surrender. I kind of gave the punchline away by saying surrendering to the higher power. Where I was going was, OK, what's the association between seeing yourself in the largest time frame and a higher power? And then also, is there something that is akin to giving up control when you"
},
{
"end_time": 2167.09,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2143.814,
"text": " yeah look farther and farther into the future that's a great yeah that's really at the heart of what i'm very interested in because it's a real paradox right it's this kind of locus of control within ourselves that really in modern culture we we think is a great thing but when that's taken to an extreme and one example of that is addictive behaviors it's very bad for people and for communities"
},
{
"end_time": 2192.381,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2167.09,
"text": " And so what can pull people out of that is this kind of surrender to a higher power, giving up that locus of control, locating that locus of control outside themselves, not necessarily like in a theistic sense. One of the things that they talk about in Alcoholics Synonymous, for example, is you don't have to believe in God. It's just not you. You're not driving it."
},
{
"end_time": 2216.135,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2192.722,
"text": " And so I would be very curious from the perspective of Ural's understanding of active inference and free energy principle and how the brain works. Why is it that sort of embracing our inability to control what happens in our lives can actually be the very source of healing, especially embedded in this really kind of over controlled"
},
{
"end_time": 2244.275,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2216.135,
"text": " Yeah, I would even go so far as to say endemically narcissistic culture like I'm really curious I don't want to take the conversation No in a direction, please. Please. That's a fantastic question. So if anyone has a comment on that, please I have some thoughts And I think this applies Supplies both at the personal level and at the at the global level and I think it has to do with the the my quotes from earlier"
},
{
"end_time": 2267.927,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2244.445,
"text": " by Edward Fulbrock that if you're following from a plane, yes, maybe an altimeter and some instruments might be useful, but what you really need is a parachute. So we have this presupposition that whatever framing we have operating in our day-to-day is going to be, okay, this is the right framing and it's going to"
},
{
"end_time": 2280.486,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2268.575,
"text": " It tends to be this rational, scientific framing of very linear cause and consequence for most stuff."
},
{
"end_time": 2305.128,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2280.828,
"text": " And it turns out that even if you inspect or data data behavior, bigger, more complicated models are not necessarily better, which is where we get the success of heuristics under a bounded computation, bounded rationality. And if you scale it up to 8 billion humans interacting in a resource-constraining planet,"
},
{
"end_time": 2317.346,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2305.128,
"text": " You know the world of possibilities but also of challenges then you just you have to we have to like drastically lower our bar for"
},
{
"end_time": 2344.462,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2318.046,
"text": " Yes, how much control we have, but also even like how much was where does information gathering reach diminishing returns? Where does modeling reach diminishing returns? There is a whole literature on the business world about the expected value of information and how much you should actually invest. Also in science is also known as optimal experiment design, where basically, you know, acknowledging that that have"
},
{
"end_time": 2372.585,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2344.906,
"text": " limited budget in terms of how much you can act and how much can grow and how much time you can spend thinking about stuff. And I think what we're doing when we feel like burned out or exhausted from overthinking, we're immediately feeling that we've gone too high and we need to give ourselves a vacation, give ourselves some free time here. I think"
},
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"end_time": 2395.538,
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"text": " I think that doing this in a principled way, we're not just taking the heuristics and the signals that we inherit from evolution, but actually being able to figure out collaboratively and with some rigor, we don't need to know exactly how many degrees the world is going to warm"
},
{
"end_time": 2423.353,
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"start_time": 2395.845,
"text": " by 2100 in order to know that maybe it's a good idea to start doing something about the amount of carbon in the atmosphere or whatever, right? And so I think this leads to this idea of a real knowledge economy and of things like abstraction as a service. How can you actually build in"
},
{
"end_time": 2442.858,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2424.002,
"text": " building these kinds of sophisticated translation layers that take some of this burden from ourselves as individuals and even as organizations and just put it out in the world as value-added services, which is what they are."
},
{
"end_time": 2471.783,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2443.609,
"text": " Hear that sound? That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 2497.807,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2471.783,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
},
{
"end_time": 2523.592,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2497.807,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklyn. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase."
},
{
"end_time": 2553.012,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2523.592,
"text": " Go to Shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in Shopify.com slash theories. And Guillaume, if you have any statements or questions or retorts, then please feel free. At Capella University, learning online doesn't mean learning alone. You'll get support from people who care about your success, like your enrollment specialist who gets to know you and the goals you'd like to achieve."
},
{
"end_time": 2567.961,
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"text": " You'll also get a designated academic coach who's with you throughout your entire program. Plus, career coaches are available to help you navigate your professional goals. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University."
},
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"text": " Yeah, thanks. Now, I was still also thinking about the recent breakthrough post-2020 in active inference. To me, there were theoretical progress that were very interesting. We heard already about the formalism maturity at the mathematical level between multiscale and scale-free aspects."
},
{
"end_time": 2606.988,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2595.333,
"text": " I really like also the development of a more multi-agent perspective of active insurance. It's very interesting. Especially, for instance, seeing"
},
{
"end_time": 2625.674,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2607.568,
"text": " We have just heard about multi-agent systems, like even society as a whole, as many as one system or as many as many subsystems and how we can use maybe those formalisms to also deal with policymaking. That's a very interesting venue."
},
{
"end_time": 2653.166,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2625.998,
"text": " and the emergence of norms, culture and ideas or so because one thing that I'm still struggling with in the case of active inference models is like how to get outside the checkerboard. You can put a lot in the model a priori and how you make the model creating new stuff that is not backed inside at the first and on that like"
},
{
"end_time": 2681.596,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2653.626,
"text": " One very interesting breakthrough was the application of active inference to morphogenesis. I really like the work that has been done on that. And on the technical aspects, I think the two main focus that I love are all the deep active inference and how to scale up active inference because it's a strong limitation for the adoption of the formalism if it's not scaled enough."
},
{
"end_time": 2711.032,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2682.159,
"text": " compared to other frameworks like deep learning. And then the link with empirical data. I really like, for instance, the work of Ryan Smith and how to connect with the electrophysiology and clinical data. I think it's also something very important to anchor the theory in the real world and have like falsifiability and empirical validation of those models."
},
{
"end_time": 2740.486,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2712.159,
"text": " And what are some of the applications of active inference to morphogenesis? So, well, I'm not the expert here. Carl would be the best to answer that. But I was referring to the work with Michael Levin and how a model can help to create a sort of embryogenesis. So maybe Carl, you can explain better than me. Please. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 2770.981,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2741.288,
"text": " I don't have a reputation for explaining things very clearly. But yeah, that's absolutely right. It was just work with Michael Eben and colleagues showing that you can get quite expressive and biomimetic pattern formation and movement of different cells into an organization, often described in terms of morphogenesis, simply by"
},
{
"end_time": 2798.268,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2771.596,
"text": " communicating your beliefs. So I'm coming back to this sort of cross-cutting theme of communication. So if you just broadcast your beliefs and you're a little cell and you have and there are a little ensembles of cells and they all have the shared generative model that includes if I was in this position I would sense that. Now they all have exactly the same"
},
{
"end_time": 2802.637,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2798.746,
"text": " Genitive model the same predictions the same expectations."
},
{
"end_time": 2832.944,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2802.995,
"text": " um and they're all um broadcasting their beliefs about where they are and the free energy minimizing solution is just when they're all in a place that they they receive signals that they would expect to to um receive when they're in this place and of course if that is the same for everybody there's only one arrangement where each cell finds its place so basically it's just knowing your place is an immersion property"
},
{
"end_time": 2843.916,
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"start_time": 2832.944,
"text": " I'm making the world mutually predictable through communication."
},
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"text": " The game i thought you will have your units is precision psychiatry so i thought you're going to talk about precision so i'm going to do a game now i'm going to talk about more for Genesis i can talk about precision now i think that's a really nice way to pick up on"
},
{
"end_time": 2888.541,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 2863.899,
"text": " Things which everybody's just mentioned and in particular the pathology of precision and by precision you can read precision in the sense that Bert was talking about in terms of do you use an unsigned integer or a double you know how much can I coarse-grained my numeric representation or you can use it in terms of coarse-graining in the sense of the renormalization group"
},
{
"end_time": 2905.708,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 2888.541,
"text": " Is this chunking things in hours or years as opposed to milliseconds and minutes or you can look at it in terms of a statistician describing the reliability or the inverse variance of a signal and of course we have to estimate that."
},
{
"end_time": 2927.483,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 2905.708,
"text": " When i say we i mean your agents and statisticians and act accordingly and certainly in the active in the work of brian smith on addiction much of the sort of mathematical explanation for these addictive locked in OCD like phenomena."
},
{
"end_time": 2946.869,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 2927.483,
"text": " Rests upon a failure to get that course grading that precision estimation right. The reason I wonder whether it be just worthwhile revisiting addiction and psychopathology or it's only pathology of behavior from the point of view of getting precision"
},
{
"end_time": 2975.401,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 2946.869,
"text": " Wrong and certainly assigning too much precision to low level processing which is what wants to avoid doing and it just strikes me that that kind of story. Also has mileage in terms of why we are in the state of paralysis when it comes to climate change because they also notice gear and then you talk about climate action and never heard that before but that seems to me to be the important thing why isn't there any climate action."
},
{
"end_time": 3001.288,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 2975.401,
"text": " I'm gonna you know what you like you going to the clinic and find some of the parkinsons disease why isn't this person moving. Yeah i'm interesting to be the computational explanation for parkinsons disease. Is assigning too much precision to the evidence that you're not moving before you move so if you don't if you can't ignore the fact that nothing is changing."
},
{
"end_time": 3013.848,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3001.681,
"text": " All your prior beliefs, your predictions that I am going to stand up or going to initiate walking. Don't get a look at it because they are immediately cancelled because you've assigned too much precision to the lower level processing."
},
{
"end_time": 3035.93,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3014.172,
"text": " I'm just wondering whether that that's something that that kind of pathology is exactly what Ralph is Ralph is trying to reverse by having morals at hand recommendations that have to provide a more coarse-grained view of things a deeper view. Anna, would you like to comment on that?"
},
{
"end_time": 3044.991,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3037.056,
"text": " Yeah, well I just, I love this idea of the pathology of precision because I think it manifests in so many"
},
{
"end_time": 3071.425,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3045.435,
"text": " different ways, not just among my patient population, but I think it's almost like a cultural sickness in a way. You know, the ways in which we seem like obsessed with certain types of data and we're missing the big picture. So I'm going to think more about that. I'm going to read more about it. I really appreciate the discussions. Interesting for me."
},
{
"end_time": 3102.056,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3072.159,
"text": " And when you're referring to the pathology of precision, do you mean so in a more conscious sense that we're over evaluating something that we don't need to? Whereas, Carl, you're referring to it in an unconscious sense, like the brain is putting too much precision on something, because in Parkinson's, it's not like you consciously are putting precision in a place. Well, I think you could look at it sort of like in both cases, when I think about addiction,"
},
{
"end_time": 3129.787,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3102.5,
"text": " People aren't doing it consciously. It's that they really do see this as adaptive and healthy and also even on some level that they can't do otherwise. And they're not able to see the true impact of their drug use on their lives. They're genuinely not able to see the negative consequences. I mean, that's what contributes to getting caught in that vortex. But I mean, you could also see it as part of"
},
{
"end_time": 3155.401,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3130.435,
"text": " What's happened culturally, like, for example, like the whole wellness industrial complex, the way that we now count ourselves, you know, through all these different devices. And if we could just count our breathing and count our heart rate and supplements, you know, then we would somehow reach some levitating state of precise wellness. And I don't know, I mean, you know, just kind of this is all kind of new ideas for me."
},
{
"end_time": 3178.302,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3156.476,
"text": " That's interesting. So you believe that we can be inundated with health data and that that's detrimental to us. Oh, absolutely. I see that all the time. So for me, I used to have. OK, maybe I'll take this out of the. Let me figure out how to say this diplomatically. I used to have a device that would measure my heart rate. Let's say that and my sleep. And instead of improving my sleep."
},
{
"end_time": 3192.056,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3178.729,
"text": " That's exactly it."
},
{
"end_time": 3215.196,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3192.739,
"text": " i should be able to control it right so with all of this data and information i should be able to reduce free entropy or whatever house produce surprise as you guys talk about um you know and i think that's obviously that only goes so far and then can actually contribute to our misery because we're why aren't we all you know"
},
{
"end_time": 3234.445,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3216.067,
"text": " I see this also with people who have productivity tools and not only that, but mechanical keyboards, let's say. The reason why I don't have a mechanical keyboard, even though I think I'd love it,"
},
{
"end_time": 3263.677,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3234.855,
"text": " is because I know that why the heck do I care about the clicking sound of a keyboard? But if I got one, then I'd be like, well, what's the difference between clicking sound A versus clicking sound B versus clicking sound C? And I become obsessed with the trappings of productivity that is sharpening so-called sharpening the axe rather than cutting down the tree. There's this phrase that is apocryphal and it said it's attributed to Lincoln, which is that he'd spend 80 percent of his time or half the time sharpening the knife than cutting the tree."
},
{
"end_time": 3282.329,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3264.241,
"text": " Can I, uh..."
},
{
"end_time": 3307.619,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3282.688,
"text": " Just talk about what I find exciting in my field about. Sure, sure. Yes. I mean, it was a long time ago, but there is a paper and it's about that. It says, well, active influence is not really a scientific loop because it's biased. And, um, and I read that and the, the, the, the sound of the paper was kind of, so this, so it's not good."
},
{
"end_time": 3336.51,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3308.063,
"text": " But I think active inference is maybe not a science loop, it's an engineering loop. Because there's bias and we need bias in engineering, we need to make stuff, we need to build stuff, we need to have a bias. So it's an engineering design cycle. I see that everywhere around me. And active inference could be a complete breakthrough in engineering. The fields around me"
},
{
"end_time": 3362.056,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3337.039,
"text": " I'm myself in a signal processing department or group and everybody builds algorithms. For us, I mean, in Active Influence agents, it's inference over states. Then the floor below me, they build control systems. Well, it's inference over actions. Then other people are working on machine learning. It's inference over parameters."
},
{
"end_time": 3381.067,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3363.404,
"text": " Active inference could be, and you'll like this Kurt, it's a very deflationary view on engineering because everything is just inference. And so rather than building algorithms everywhere, if we become really good at implementing"
},
{
"end_time": 3397.193,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3382.005,
"text": " We will be able to build a great engineering design cycles and we'll be engineering better machines for medical procedures or other things that are important."
},
{
"end_time": 3423.899,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3397.415,
"text": " So it has a tremendous application potential in engineering. In engineering, I think in many fields, people have sort of drifted in different directions. Control theorists have, I mean, they do almost the same thing as signal processing people, but they speak a different language now. And you know, and signal processing people"
},
{
"end_time": 3454.633,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3424.991,
"text": " It's a completely different group from the machine learning people, but it's all information processing. And this brings it, this field can bring it together. So I think it's, but the thing is that in order to make it successful in engineering, we need to build an application that impresses, right? That it's not like a tic-tac-toe thing. It really needs to impress people. It needs to be better than"
},
{
"end_time": 3473.148,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3455.623,
"text": " You know there's some other control systems but once we do that I think there is tremendous application potential because there haven't been enormous breakthroughs in signal processing and control. The last big breakthrough I think was Kalman filtering and this was 1960s."
},
{
"end_time": 3499.121,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3473.592,
"text": " And I mean, it's kind of it's kind of funny that the essence of what we do in active influence is also carbon filtering. That's I think there's tremendous opportunities for for what we do here for for engineering. So that's why that's why it's getting to me. And do you mind expanding on what you said about acting and therapists should be helping their patients with that?"
},
{
"end_time": 3519.445,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3499.889,
"text": " Oh, sure. Just so I mean, one of my critiques of mental health treatment today is that there's not enough. There's not enough encouragement of patients to actually go and act differently in the world as a way of gathering data and said it often ends up being kind of this"
},
{
"end_time": 3549.94,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3520.145,
"text": " World building, um, between therapists and patients, not, not necessarily ultimately adaptive in the world. So I was really just kind of responding to what Robin was saying that we need to act in the world. I think that's more true now, um, in, you know, modern rich nations than ever before, because we are so incredibly sedentary and interacting. Of course we're interacting with a virtual world and that's, you know, good and bad, but I mean, we need to be actually acting in the world."
},
{
"end_time": 3564.991,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3551.203,
"text": " Hmm. And so there's different forms of therapy, as you know, there's talk therapy, and then there's also cognitive behavioral therapy or psychotherapy instead of talk therapy. But cognitive behavioral therapy, as far as I understand, focuses on the actions. Is that incorrect?"
},
{
"end_time": 3595.043,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3565.64,
"text": " I mean, for you know, again, treating addiction, like you're not going to really get that far with cognitive behavioral therapy or anything that's focused on just emotions and cognitions, people have to go out and actually try stop using their stopping their substance or their addictive behaviors and gather data from that experience and then come back and process it. So, Anna, in your field, and this question will go to everyone in your field and what you study, where is the largest gap that you would like to see closed?"
},
{
"end_time": 3625.657,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3596.613,
"text": " We're facing a huge mental health crisis now. We have more and more young people coming in with depression, anxiety, suicidality, addictions of all sorts. These are not necessarily people who are struggling by virtue of trauma or socioeconomic disparity. These are people who have really privileged lives in many instances. It's really a puzzle. What is going on for people? I think a big part of it is"
},
{
"end_time": 3642.671,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3626.698,
"text": " The fact that people are not having embodied experiences, they're not having experiences in the world. And also the experiences they are having are, you know, these kinds of very quick fixes and fast pleasures."
},
{
"end_time": 3660.247,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3643.2,
"text": " I think the co-created sort of models through healthier communication that allow people to feel part of a community and also to have like truthful co-created narratives, trying to use the language here, I think that's really important."
},
{
"end_time": 3688.37,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3660.589,
"text": " So for example, one of the things he's excited about, one of the things I'm excited about in the field of addiction medicine is mutual support and the proliferation of things like Alcoholics Anonymous, but also other mutual help groups, a lot of them existing now online and the way that people are together creating healthier narratives and acted together to counteract a lot of the unhealthy narratives that I think are driving a lot of decision making today."
},
{
"end_time": 3715.486,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3690.333,
"text": " I wanted to know, is there a correlation between the rise in mental health or sorry, mental illness or mental health issues, whatever we want to call it, and a certain trait of people? Like, is it affecting every, is it affecting the population the same? So the whole population is raised 20% in terms of how many mental health issues they have per year. Or is it affecting people who deal with abstractions more and more? So for instance, we're talking over Zoom."
},
{
"end_time": 3740.401,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3715.913,
"text": " and some people study abstractions just like us and then there's some people whose work it is to do something physical like running or swim like is it affecting everyone equally or are you noticing that there's some broad trend well the broad trends that are out there are just correlational but the more time that people spend in the virtual world the more likely they are to suffer from depression anxiety and other mental health problems"
},
{
"end_time": 3769.548,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3740.947,
"text": " You know, people haven't really been able to narrow that down to specific content, but they have been able to save just the sheer amount of time that you're spending online increases your risk for certain, you know, poor mental health outcomes. Again, if anyone has any comments or questions, please just raise your physical hand. I can see that. And okay, Rafael, sorry. I was going to say that I think another notable"
},
{
"end_time": 3797.978,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3769.855,
"text": " Trend is, and I just saw somebody say this on YouTube just yesterday, that young people are disproportionately affected by things like climate grief because they're the ones that are going to be alive to deal with it. And I think that applies more generally that Peter Senge already like 30 years or something ago wrote about the inescapable network of neutrality, the reality that"
},
{
"end_time": 3819.667,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3798.609,
"text": " What we do affects each other. We took advantage of this huge resource buffer that's called the biosphere and Earth to pretend that it didn't for quite a long time and got a lot of mileage out of it."
},
{
"end_time": 3845.742,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3820.111,
"text": " Now we're at a point where there's a whole generation of people that are coming to grips with the fact that I'm going to stop myself from saying a swear word, but oh my God, we actually need to change everything about everything that we do and we need to do it fast. And by the way, it's not just what we do in"
},
{
"end_time": 3875.094,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 3846.101,
"text": " It's not just what we do out there, it's also what we do inside, how we get ready for how to show up for life internally, right? So no wonder that impacts on myself. I've dealt with anxiety and a lot of other things. We've had conversations about what are we doing bringing a daughter into this world and all these kinds of things. I think it's only natural that it's coming to a head in this way right now."
},
{
"end_time": 3903.695,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 3876.254,
"text": " Guillaume, you have your hand up and I can't see you. Yes. Yeah, it's connected with what has just been said. So in your initial question about the gaps that needs to be closed, I think like a scale-free model of health and mental health particularly would be great. Like we are in silos in biomedical research and the fact that someone is"
},
{
"end_time": 3929.394,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 3904.275,
"text": " having depression can come from interacting genes as much as interacting people and also is related to climate change and so on. So how we can have a new health systems that doesn't deal with those silos and integrate those different scales to me it's like really a big challenge but a challenge that"
},
{
"end_time": 3950.828,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 3929.94,
"text": " In my field of engineering, active inference is not understood."
},
{
"end_time": 3961.903,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 3951.323,
"text": " Because almost all papers are written by neuroscientists and they're hard to read. So I was really happy to hear today."
},
{
"end_time": 3983.626,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 3962.398,
"text": " I think it's Sanjeev Namjoshi who is writing an engineering book on active inference. So that will really help. That together with the availability of good toolboxes for implementing active inference should make a lot of engineers much more enthusiastic about active inference."
},
{
"end_time": 4008.865,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 3984.019,
"text": " Because it's not something that is not understood at the moment in engineering circles. So I hope that the book will be good. I'm enthusiastic about that. And Carl, where are some gaps in the research that you'd like to see addressed?"
},
{
"end_time": 4035.043,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4009.872,
"text": " All the gaps as a whole, empty space out there yet to be explored. But in terms of what seems to be emerging from the session and specifically the past few answers, it does seem to be important to have"
},
{
"end_time": 4056.084,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4035.435,
"text": " It's very generic just to take Burt's sort of line that this is just one deflationary simple and probably the right way to understand stuff and to make recommendations or to describe people's actions possibly to themselves in a therapeutic context."
},
{
"end_time": 4077.995,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4056.374,
"text": " and as such it should be push button technology and it should be democratized and socialized and I think that's the challenge practically and one may ask why would you want to do that? For me there are two clear imperatives. One is"
},
{
"end_time": 4100.162,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4078.268,
"text": " very abstract and it's not really within my comfort zone and the other one is in my comfort zone, but the one that's outside my comfort zone is this notion of interactivity and hyper-connectivity and the meta-crisis that we heard about."
},
{
"end_time": 4128.08,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4100.606,
"text": " And, and Guillaume also referred to this in terms of what he was trying, he was trying to distinguish between a Californian notion of optimality and another kind, another way forward. And to me, it's, it's, it's a stark contrast with growth is good versus sustainability. And of course, the maths of the free energy principle is just about sustainability. It's just a description"
},
{
"end_time": 4152.193,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4128.37,
"text": " of the physics of systems, random dynamical systems that self-organize to some non-equilibrium steady state. That is what we are. So for me, there's something deeply, if you like, apt about the free energy principle and its chloral risk such as active inference in application to ecosystems and lived ecosystems and realized ecosystems"
},
{
"end_time": 4175.725,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4152.193,
"text": " So if those basic principles can be brought back into globalization, into the market, into fintech, into social media, into politics, into climate action, I think that would be a good thing. I'm just mindful, this struck me in a number of the presentations today,"
},
{
"end_time": 4194.224,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4175.725,
"text": " I remember before but was saying if you look at the brain which is a really lovely example of a self organizing system to a non equilibrium steady state and then it's empty and what did you mean by that it didn't mean you're empty headed what he meant was it's incredibly sparsely connected."
},
{
"end_time": 4212.892,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4194.974,
"text": " Now that tells you immediately that a pathology of connectivity is hyper connective over connectivity which immediately well it made me very alert to the presentation of the meta crisis that one of the first three things"
},
{
"end_time": 4239.787,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4212.892,
"text": " That was under the metacrisis or the current crisis where i can't intend with is a destruction of that sparse delicate connectivity that defines thing that's undefined some things technically in terms of markets so we want a world in which lots of different things can coexist in some kind of generalized synchrony in a sustainable way. You need sparse connectivity."
},
{
"end_time": 4254.565,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4240.299,
"text": " I'm the pathology the thing that will destroy that is over connectivity so it seems to be very important that we get that into interplay in terms of machine learning artificial intelligence."
},
{
"end_time": 4276.374,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4254.821,
"text": " politics, fintech, climate change, and the only way it's going to get there is epistemically by equipping people to actually build their own little models and ask their own questions. You can't tell people this. They're going to learn. They're going to learn it for themselves. Just very quickly, because I'm sure we've only got a couple of minutes left."
},
{
"end_time": 4287.944,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4276.834,
"text": " The other agenda which I'm more familiar with is exactly Anna's and Guillaume's agenda which is making this work in the context of"
},
{
"end_time": 4316.288,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4288.353,
"text": " of neurology and psychiatry. So if you can democratize and socialize this way of describing things so that people can now build models of their particular patient in the other use of precision psychiatry. I suspect the games unit was called after. So personalized medicine that is really personalized in the sense that you actually have your digital twin of your behavior."
},
{
"end_time": 4339.872,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4316.561,
"text": " and then you've got that you know you optimize your digital twin to become a model of your patient and then you can start to do experiments on that on that model behavioral interventions or even share that model very much in the spirit of cbt with the patient and say look this is you this is what would happen if you went out and did this and this is what would happen if you went out and did that"
},
{
"end_time": 4367.381,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4339.872,
"text": " That to my mind and indeed that was the initial motivation for much of this work was actually to build observation models of psychiatric conditions to work out both the pharmacological and physiological basis and the disruption of the pathology of precision and message passing on the factor graphs that are our brain even though they are very empty."
},
{
"end_time": 4390.162,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4367.381,
"text": " on the one hand but also get that behavior that that key thing that i was talking about the active engagement with the lived world uh into into that model and hence active inference and just to conclude you know um that that the activity that sort of physical engagement that embodiment that sort of um for ease and everything else"
},
{
"end_time": 4419.48,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4390.162,
"text": " I think it's really coming to a head now in terms of people's after the large language model after the chat GPT moment the bounce back has been what's missing. What's not there because what is not there is agency and embodied engagement with the world and that's why i think this is still a lot of work to be done in bringing artificial intelligence red as active inference."
},
{
"end_time": 4449.599,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4419.667,
"text": " You all now have 30 seconds to 60 seconds to speak directly to the audience. What closing message do you have? You're speaking directly to someone who's listening. They're a curious person. They're interested in active inference. They also want to lead better lives, hopefully, and do something propitious."
},
{
"end_time": 4453.933,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4449.906,
"text": " So what message do you have for them? Anna, we'll start with you."
},
{
"end_time": 4481.186,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4454.667,
"text": " Hola, Miami! When's the last time you've been to Burlington? We've updated, organized, and added fresh fashion. See for yourself Friday, November 14th to Sunday, November 16th at our Big Deal event. You can enter for a chance to win free Wawa gas for a year, plus more surprises in your Burlington. Miami, that means so many ways and days to save. Burlington. Deals. Brands. Wow! No purchase necessary. Visit BigDealEvent.com for more details."
},
{
"end_time": 4513.882,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4485.606,
"text": " Gosh, I'm just going to say what pops into my mind right now is that one of the things I have learned from my patients who are trying to get into recovery from severe addictions is something that they call the set aside prayer, where they set aside all of the notions that they have about how the world works and try to be completely open and receptive to information coming into their minds."
},
{
"end_time": 4543.592,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4514.377,
"text": " And I think that's just a wonderful frame or concept for all of us living in the world to periodically just take a moment and take these models and just say, you know, everything I think I know about the world, I'm going to temporarily suspend it and I'm just going to be open. And when that happens, we can be present and learn in a way that it's not possible when we're just trying to reinforce our models. Great. Fantastic."
},
{
"end_time": 4547.978,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4543.985,
"text": " And then we'll go Carl and then Raph and then Guillaume."
},
{
"end_time": 4577.09,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4549.735,
"text": " I just enjoyed today very much. I thought there was a lot of material both for people from let's say psychology, neuroscience, but also for engineers. So if you haven't watched some of the talks, go look through the schedule because some of the talks are really good and things are really enjoyed. And then yeah, what should I tell people? Go work out, do a lot of sports, it's good for you."
},
{
"end_time": 4585.52,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4578.046,
"text": " Mm-hmm, Carl Yeah, sorry, I was gonna make a joke but I can't because"
},
{
"end_time": 4614.991,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4585.862,
"text": " So I'm going to use my 30 second just to thank Daniel and his team for this. So if you want something to do, you should go and watch the live streams and get involved with this ecosystem. I hadn't seen that paper being presented before but I was really impressed with the Active Inference Institute and its openness and its welcoming"
},
{
"end_time": 4635.094,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4614.991,
"text": " Rafael."
},
{
"end_time": 4658.712,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4636.118,
"text": " Yeah, so I'll second what Carl said and follow on with it's an invitation not just to participate in the Active Defense Institute, but also an invitation to participate in building this Gaia tractor, this new way of doing things that acknowledges the value of growth."
},
{
"end_time": 4686.203,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 4659.121,
"text": " and also the value of sustainability joins it all together in this thing called regeneration. And it really is a collective effort, a collective learning effort. And this also, by the way, also applies to the panelists as well. I think obviously what Burt and Carl are doing, it has immediate things having to have to do with"
},
{
"end_time": 4710.811,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 4686.203,
"text": " What we're after, but one of the main things that we discussed, that we keep discussing is also like this, the intersubjectivity and the importance of being able to operate well as humans together, and that connects directly to cognitive science, psychiatry, and so on. And yeah, so everybody that wants to be engaged and"
},
{
"end_time": 4740.384,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4710.811,
"text": " And Guillaume."
},
{
"end_time": 4753.746,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 4741.596,
"text": " I would thanks also all of you for the discussion and the organizer for what they are doing. Indeed, the work of the Action Inference Institute is very"
},
{
"end_time": 4781.92,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 4754.189,
"text": " I'm not very good at sports, but some say that science is a team sport, so at least have a good team perspective when doing science and being kind to each other would be the best advice to everyone."
},
{
"end_time": 4812.039,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 4782.671,
"text": " Well, thank you all. I also would like you get yours, too. Somebody else has to come in from outside the Markov blanket, though. Well, I wanted to just thank you, Daniel. Thank you, Daniel and Rafael. Well, and also Carl and Anna and Bert and Guillaume. This was a tremendous amount of fun. I hope I get to speak to you all individually. As usual, I have way more questions than we were able to get to. Thank you all. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks, everyone."
},
{
"end_time": 4827.466,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 4812.517,
"text": " Firstly, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. There's now a website, curtjymungle.org, and that has a mailing list. The reason being that large platforms like YouTube, like Patreon, they can disable you for whatever reason, whenever they like."
},
{
"end_time": 4853.916,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 4827.722,
"text": " That's just part of the terms of service. Now, a direct mailing list ensures that I have an untrammeled communication with you. Plus, soon I'll be releasing a one-page PDF of my top 10 toes. It's not as Quentin Tarantino as it sounds like. Secondly, if you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself"
},
{
"end_time": 4872.432,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 4853.916,
"text": " Plus, it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm, which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook or even on Reddit, etc., it shows YouTube, hey, people are talking about this content outside of YouTube, which in turn"
},
{
"end_time": 4900.674,
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"start_time": 4872.654,
"text": " Thirdly, there's a remarkably active Discord and subreddit for Theories of Everything where people explicate Toes, they disagree respectfully about Theories, and build as a community our own Toe. Links to both are in the description. Fourthly, you should know this podcast is on iTunes, it's on Spotify, it's on all of the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in Theories of Everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gained from rewatching lectures and podcasts"
},
{
"end_time": 4922.346,
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"text": " I also read in the comments"
},
{
"end_time": 4950.657,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 4922.346,
"text": " There's also PayPal. There's also crypto. There's also just joining on YouTube. Again, keep in mind it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time. You also get early access to ad free episodes, whether it's audio or video. It's audio in the case of Patreon video in the case of YouTube. For instance, this episode that you're listening to right now was released a few days earlier. Every dollar helps far more than you think. Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you so much."
},
{
"end_time": 4978.439,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 4963.575,
"text": " Raise a spoon to Grandma, who always took all the hungry cousins to McDonald's for McNuggets and the Play Play Slide. Have something sweet in her honor. Come to McDonald's and treat yourself to the Grandma McFlurry today. Ba da ba ba ba. And participate in McDonald's for a limited time."
}
]
}No transcript available.