Keith Duggar: commitment

Transcript context

…Path integrals, particular kinds and strange things. And it introduced a categorization of particles. So for example, inert to active and ordinary to strange. The strange categorization was particularly interesting because you were giving an account of how these particular particles could give rise to phenomenal, you know, conscious states or even agentic states. And we we felt that this was almost an account of panagentialism. So, you know, historically, we've done interviews about the free energy principle, and we've spoken about self organization and emergence and and the agency and the phenomenal states are something which emerge when you have this sort of temporal and counterfactual depth. And maybe we're misunderstanding, but it but it feels like this is an account of low level agentic potential and phenomenal potential. So to set the scene, just to come back to that partition that we were just talking about, there are many ways of arranging the conditional independencies, you know, to sort of disconnect various partitions, external states, internal states, my sensory states, my active states. And the combinations of disallowed influences give rise to an ontology of different kinds of things and you could call them natural kinds. I've been told by Maxwell I shouldn't use that, but I like natural kinds. The things in nature that just prescribe themselves just by being special instances of a lack of causal influence. So if we start off with, you know, the simplest case where there are no internal states and there are no active states, and what are we talking about? We're talking about some kind of causal black hole or something that's quintessentially inert. And you can never see it because you can only see the active states that act back on the environment in which it is embedded. But then we get to more interesting things that have a full complement of internal states and external states and a bidirectional coupling between the 2, which of course is mediated by the sensory states and the active states. And if you disallow action at a distance, by which I mean I have to be in some metric sense next to you in order for me, my active states, become your sensory states and your sensory states to be my active states, then you have a very simple kind of Markov blanket which would be fine for describing active matter, for example, or any medium where I have to touch, to feel, to influence, or to sense. And this kind of particle interestingly has its or this kind of system partition has its active states on the inside, which is, you know, I had to think about, you know, when you know, and it can be no other way if if you, you know, just try to arrange all the dependencies. So what would that look like? It would look like something like a cell that had on the outside its sensory states that was supported by a layer of active states that surrounded the internal state. So you're complying with the laws of the Markov blanket of thingness. You know, you you need to have that conditional independence to separate the thing from everything else or the self from from the non self. And everything's fine because the active states are hiding behind the sensory states, so the external states can't influence the active states, so that's tick 1, that's what we need. But we also have to ensure that the internal states symmetrically cannot act to influence the sensory states. That's fine because they're hiding behind the active states. So you've got, you know, a nice mathematical image of, you know, cell, if you like. But that doesn't work for things like you and me. Things like you and me have a hierarchical structure. And what that basically means is that the active states which were hitherto in very simple organisms immediately juxtaposed to the internal states now become sequestered. So now effectively the active states t that basically means is that the active states which were hitherto in very simple organisms immediately juxtaposed to the internal states now become sequestered. So now effectively the active states are no longer seen by the internal states. And then something quite remarkable happens mathematically. It's really simple and it's just another aspect of conditional probability distributions. Because you can't see your active states, so you can now only see your sensory states, it looks as if, from the point of view of the internal states, that the active states are now become causes of the sensory states. So now your world is caused not just by the external world, by the environmental states, by my heat bath, by my external milieu, but also my own actions. So now I'm inferring the causes of my sensorium where I'm actually call a cause. So I'm inferring myself. So there's this beautiful recursion, which is licenses is sort of strange loop analogy with a bit of poetic license. Another way of putting that is that for these simple structures, for these natural kinds that would be, say, single celled organisms, the internal states can be read as modeling the causes of their sensations that just are the external states. So they have direct access to the active states, so there's no conditional independence that licenses the notion of description as in terms of inference or sense making. Whereas now the Bayesian mechanics that attends the activity, the internal activity, internal machinations now covers both my action and the things that I'm acting upon. And of course this is a nice metaphor for planning as inference that I'm now thinking about and trying to infer what am I actually doing. And that, to my mind, produces a very unique and special kind of thing, you know, things like you and me basically, which are pretty unique when we look at all the different kinds of things that could be around. Well, it's it's it's another example of how…

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