Since much or our lives today depend on systems and many of the biggest risks for individuals and for humanity as a whole emanate from systems, it is imperative that we have proper methods and tools to build useful and safe systems.
Arto
Quality and free energy
On Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, ISO 9000, quality, and the free energy principle.
Changing the world
In this post I will try to explain how an organism, according to active inference framework, plans actions to minimize free energy, thereby staying alive.
Many ways to slice free energy
Variational free energy can be expressed in many ways, each with a different but complementary interpretation.
What is surprise?
In this post I try to, with less than stellar success it turns out, unpack how surprise is represented in the formalism of AIF.
A segway into information theory
Information theory may be useful for understanding active inference. As a minimum it offers some alternative perspectives on the quantities used in the active inference theory such as surprise, KL divergence, and entropy. This post provides a very short introduction to information theory.
A deeper look at perceptual inference
In this post we will take a deeper look at how, according to the active inference theory, the brain interprets what it observes.
Active inference lecture notes
I have set out to gain some insights into the active inference theory that provides a unified framework for perception, learning, decision making, and action. I will share my “lecture notes” combined with my own comments in this and future posts. My focus is on the mathematical models and the necessary algorithms.
Is artificial intelligence a threat to humanity?
I’m worried about irreversible climate change, nuclear war, war on rationality, isolationism, extreme nationalism, intolerance, pandemics, the declining mental health of the young, religious extremism, bioterrorism, and many other things. AI doesn’t make it to my top 10 list. Why?
Under resurrection…
This blog has been dormant for a few years because of other priorities. Now I again feel the urge to write as a tool for learning and because some recent developments in the world just need to be commented.