🚨 Preprint 🚨 “Active inference and intentional behaviour,” from @VERSESAI (Friston, @TommSalvatori, @a_tschantz, @exilefaker, Verbelen, @KoudahlM, @aswinpaule, @drclbuckley, me) and collaborators (@TakuyaIsomura, Parr, @adeelrazi, @ANeuroExplorer)
1/8arxiv.org/abs/2312.07547 This paper offers a mathematical characterisation of self-organised behaviour, through the lens of the free energy principle (FEP)—and introduces a new form of active inference, called “inductive planning,” which allows us to model agents that aim to achieve explicit goals 2/8

🚨🧠 Preprint alert 🧠🚨 Stoked to share “The inner screen model of consciousness,” which presents a model of #consciousness based on the free-energy principle #FEP, written with @MahaultAlbarra1, @exilefaker, @jkbren, Fields, Friston, & @adamsafron 1/11
psyarxiv.com/6afs3 Much debate has occurred over whether the FEP per se has anything to say about consciousness. We present an affirmative answer to this question, and provide a model of consciousness that follows directly from applying the FEP to model well known human neuroanatomy 2/11

🚨 Our new flagship paper on the free energy principle & Bayesian mechanics has now been published! 🚨
“On Bayesian mechanics: a physics of and by beliefs” by @DaltonSakthi @conorheins @KoudahlM @BerenMillidge @lancelotdacosta @jkbren and Karl Friston 1/7
royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rs… The paper aims to comprehensively re-introduce the FEP. The first part of the paper exhaustively reviews applications of FEP in the literature, and in so doing addresses all currently relevant philosophical and technical criticism that has been raised recently 2/7

“We know you like response threads, so we wrote a response thread to your response thread”:
A 🧵in response to @WiringTheBrain’s 🧵 in response to my 🧵 about our new paper “On Bayesian mechanics: A physics of and by beliefs”

https://twitter.com/WiringTheBrain/status/1529753928233099265

1/32 Hi @WiringTheBrain, thanks for the friendly critical engagement with our paper (arxiv.org/abs/2205.11543). It’s appreciated and healthy. You raise important questions here. Thanks also for reading the preprint so quickly (less than 2 days after we preprinted), I appreciate it 2/32

🚨 Preprint alert 🚨 Rebooting the free energy principle literature
A 🧵 on our new paper, “On Bayesian mechanics: A physics of and by beliefs,” by @DaltonSakthi, @conorheins, @KoudahlM, @BerenMillidge, @lancelotdacosta, @jkbren, and Karl Friston 1/21
arxiv.org/abs/2205.11543 The paper presents our attempt to “soft reboot” the FEP literature to reflect the evolution of our thinking about the FEP over the last several years. I haven’t been this excited to share a paper with you in a very long time. The paper makes three main contributions 2/21

Publication alert! A thread on our new paper, “Towards a computational phenomenology of mental action: modelling meta-awareness and attentional control with deep parametric active inference,” with @lars_sandved, @casper_hesp, Jérémie Mattout, @Antoine_Lutz, and Karl Friston 1/13 Our new paper presents an argument to the effect (i) that conscious mental action is predicated on a higher-level access to cognitive states and (ii) that the resources of parametrically deep active inference can enable us to formalize this form of active meta-awareness 2/13

The renewed Bayesian mechanics and the mathematical foundations of the free-energy principle and active inference: A thread.
“Bayesian mechanics for stationary processes”
arxiv.org/abs/2106.13830 1/14 I can’t overstate how happy I am to see this new work by @lancelotdacosta, Karl Friston, @conorheins, and Grigorios Pavliotis. The preprint provides new mathematically rigorous derivations for a Bayesian mechanics under the free-energy principle 2/14

A long thread on a new paper just uploaded to the PsyArXiv: “Laying down a forking path: Incompatibilities between enaction and the free energy principle”
psyarxiv.com/d9v8f
1/23 This new paper, written by a formidable team of scholars from the enactive approach (Ezequiel Di Paolo, @evantthompson, and Randall Beer), aims to establish that the enactive approach and the free energy principle (FEP) are deeply incompatible 2/23

A thread to discuss our new preprint, "Is the free-energy principle a formal theory of semantics? From variational density dynamics to neural and phenotypic representations" written w @ineshipolito and Karl Friston, which is now available on the ArXiv 1/14
arxiv.org/abs/2007.09291 I’m proud to say that this paper contains one of the clearest presentations of FEP. Section 2 unpacks the formalism step-by-step and goes deep into the mathematical core of the FEP, cohering with the most up to date treatment in Friston’s monograph 2/14
arxiv.org/abs/1906.10184

Wow, it's finally out! "Sophisticated Inference" by Friston, Da Costa, Hafner, @casper_hesp, and Parr. A new, third-wave extension of the active inference, with a new free-energy functional enabling deep tree search over counterfactual policies
arxiv.org/abs/2006.04120 So called "first wave" free-energy models (in papers from approx. the mid-2000s to 2012 or so) didn't have policy selection per se: the dynamics of internal and active states was determined in a step-wise fashion through gradient descent on variational free-energy.

PSA to folks getting into the free-energy principle and active inference, nearly all the papers written on this before 2016 are outdated. If the paper you're reading doesn't mention expected free-energy of policies (denoted 'G'), then it isn't operating with the current formalism The consideration of temporal depth is central to our new work and dramatically changes what active inference is able to do. Most criticisms I've seen of late target earlier renditions of the FEP, centered on free-energy without consideration of the temporal depth of policies