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It's remarkable how much this still rings true today. The idea that we should try and understand life as a battle against the second law of thermodynamics has had a significant inf…

I previously tried to sign up via a Google account but it required a 'company Google account' - I was slightly confused about the reasoning behind this.

I used Notion for a significant period but ended up switching to Nuclino [1] - which is identical in many respects, but without the various add-ons that are unnecessary if you're w…

I mean it's difficult to 'observe' gradient descent, there are no characteristic properties that you can identify without specifying the relative objective function. But most of th…

As a general answer, the theory suggests that organisms maximize a quantity known as model evidence, which is just a way of saying 'how much evidence does some data provide for my …

I think you might be right, a quote from Friston on the relationship (in reference to belief propagation): "We turn to the equivalent message passing for continuous variables, whic…

Some attempts have been made in the form of Bayesian model reduction [1]. The idea is to 'carve' out the structure of your model using free energy minimization. [1] https://arxiv.o…

The idea is that you learn a model by calculating the derivative of free energy with respect to your model parameters.

It's worth noting that 'free energy' is just the 'evidence lower bound' that is optimized by a large portion of today's machine learning algorithms (i.e. variational auto-encoders)…

The particular study cited in the article is [1], however for a more general review of the links to reinforcement learning [2]. [1] https://www.biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org/article…

In terms of the free energy 'principle', it makes no predictions about how free energy minimized. But there have been multiple process theories suggested, most notably predictive c…

Well, a significant portion of empirical neuroscience works under the assumption that parts of the brain operate according to a predictive coding scheme, and there are countless st…

There is a large overlap, for instance, the popular VIME exploration algorithm [1] uses part of the free energy objective function. However, free energy isn't a theory of curiosity…

The 'revolutionary' aspect is the suggestion that a single celled organism is also doing variational inference. Or, more accurately, can be described as such.