Love & Philosophy #11: From Ants to Active Inference with Daniel Ari Friedman
This is a conversation between Andrea Hiott and Daniel Ari Friedman discussing various themes related to cognition, perception, action, and the concept of Active Inference. The conversation starts with Daniel's time with Deborah Gordan studying ants. Then they delve into the understanding of different terminologies and concepts relative to complexity, the individual and collective behaviour. They dive deep into Karl Friston's active inference and into relative terms like predictive processing, predictive coding and the role and application of models and 'maps' in scientific research. Daniel explains the principles of active inference in relation to cognition and perception and how it can be viewed as a scale-free (or better scale-friendly) framework. They also discuss the importance of semantics in their fields and the role of the Active Inference Institute. The conversation is reflective and philosophical, touching on the intersection between cognitive science, neuroscience, and environmental interaction. They come to words like 'service' and 'love' before it ends.
Relative to way-making research: System 3 representations and a discussion of affordances (a fence post or a rock does not have them)
Podcast artwork by Daniel Ari Friedman
Active Inference Institute
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Andrea & Daniel discuss:
scale-free and scale-friendly.
Individual and Collective behaviour of ants.
Complex systems.
Bioinformatics.
How we can find real boundaries, and how not-so-real boundaries can be modelled.
Uncertainty.
Language as a model.
The difference between predictive processing, predictive coding, and active inference.
Why a fence post does not have affordances.
Affordance beyond Gibson.
Perception as inbound regularities. Action as outbound regularities.
Buckminster Fuller: "Unity is plural and at minimum two."
Deborah Gordan
Gordon's paper Wittgenstein and Ant Watching
Karl Friston
Chris Fields Research
Competency in Navigating Arbitrary Spaces as an Invariant for Analyzing Cognition in Diverse Embodiments
Active Inference
For Paulo Sayeg: https://philpapers.org/versions/IENPPU
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