Thomas Parr and his collaborators wrote a book titled "Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain and Behavior" which introduces Active Inference from both a high-level conceptual perspective and a low-level mechanistic, mathematical perspective. Active inference, developed by the legendary neuroscientist Prof. Karl Friston - is a unifying mathematical framework which frames living systems as agents which minimize surprise and free energy in order to resist entropy and persist over time. It unifies various perspectives from physics, biology, statistics, and psychology - and allows us to explore deep questions about agency, biology, causality, modelling, and consciousness. Buy Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior Thomas Parr, Giovanni Pezzulo, Karl Friston https://amzn.to/4dj0iMj Please support us on Patreon to get access to the private Discord server, bi-weekly calls, early access and ad-free listening. https://patreon.com/mlst Pod: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/machinelearningstreettalk/episodes/Dr--Thomas-Parr---Active-Inference-Book-e2j4sdn TOC: 00:00:00 Intro 00:05:10 When Thomas met Friston 00:06:13 ChatGPT comparison 00:08:40 Do NNs learn a world model? 00:11:04 Book intro 00:13:22 High road low road of Active Inference 00:17:16 Resisting entropic forces 00:20:51 Agency vs free will 00:26:01 Are agents real? non-physical agents 00:35:54 Mind is flat / predictive brain 00:44:23 Volition 00:50:26 Externalism 00:51:57 Bridge with Enactivism 00:53:27 Bayesian Surprise 01:01:47 Variational inference 01:05:47 Why Bayesian? 01:12:04 Causality 01:17:35 Hand crafted models 01:26:45 Chapter 10 - bringing it together 01:28:58 Consciousness 01:33:10 Humans are incoherent 01:35:25 Experience writing a book Interviewer: Dr. Tim Scarfe