Lecture 1: I am therefore I think

О мероприятии

В рамках визита Карла Фристона будет организована серия мастер-классов

A masterclass in the free energy principle

This workshop comprises three lectures covering the various aspects of the free energy principle (delivered by its principal architect – Karl Friston); namely, biological self organisation in dynamical systems like the brain and how this leads to predictive coding and embodied (active) inference. The second lecture deals with equivalent formulations of active inference for models of the world that can be described in terms of discrete states (and time steps). The final lecture will consider recent advances in Bayesian model selection and averaging in the brain that provide a formalism for artificial curiosity and insight.

Lecture 1: I am therefore I think.

This overview of the free energy principle offers an account of embodied exchange with the world that associates conscious operations with actively inferring the causes of our sensations. Its agenda is to link formal (mathematical) descriptions of dynamical systems to a description of perception in terms of beliefs and goals. The argument has two parts: the first calls on the lawful dynamics of any (weakly mixing) ergodic system – from a single cell organism to a human brain. These lawful dynamics suggest that (internal) states can be interpreted as modelling or predicting the (external) causes of sensory fluctuations. In other words, if a system exists, its internal states must encode probabilistic beliefs about external states. Heuristically, this means that if I exist (am) then I must have beliefs (think). The second part of the argument is that the only tenable beliefs I can entertain about myself are that I exist. This may seem rather obvious; however, if we associate existing with ergodicity, then (ergodic) systems that exist by predicting external states can only possess prior beliefs that their environment is predictable. It transpires that this is equivalent to believing that the world – and the way it is sampled – will resolve uncertainty about the causes of sensations. We will conclude by looking at the epistemic behaviour that emerges under these beliefs, using simulations of active inference. 

рабочий язык мероприятия: английский

Программа мероприятия