Yeah, to me this all just sounds like standard Free Energy Principle/Active Inference obscurantism. Especially if you haven’t even read the paper that you claim is evidence for FEP.
Yeah, to me this all just sounds like standard Free Energy Principle/Active Inference obscurantism.
Again (maybe the last time), I would kindly ask you to point what is obscure in this simple conjecture:
Goal = utility function doesn’t make sense, if you think about it. What your utility function is applied to, exactly? It’s observational data, I suppose (because your brain, as well as any other physical agent, doesn’t have anything else). Then, when you note that real goals of real agents are (almost) never (arguably, just never) “sharp”, you arrive at the same definition of the goal that I gave.
I genuinely want to make my exposition more understandable, but I don’t see anything that wouldn’t be trivially self-evident in this passage.
Especially if you haven’t even read the paper that you claim is evidence for FEP.
DishBrain was not brought up as “evidence for Active Inference” (not FEP, FEP doesn’t need any evidence, it’s just mathematical tool). DishBrain was brought up in the reply to the very first argument by Steven: “I have yet to see any concrete algorithmic claim about the brain that was not more easily and intuitively [from my perspective] discussed without mentioning FEP” (he also should have said Active Inference here).
These are two different things. There is massive evidence for Active Inference in general, as well as RL in the brain and other agents. The (implied) Steven’s argument was like, “I haven’t seen a real-world agent, barring AIs explicitly engineered as Active Inference agents, for which Active Inference would be “first line” explanation through the stack of abstractions”.
This is sort of a niche argument that doesn’t even necessarily need a direct reply, because, as I wrote in the post and in other comments, there are other reasons to use Active Inference (precisely because it’s a general, abstract, high-level theory). Yet, I attempted to provide such an example. Even if this example fails (at least in your eyes), it couldn’t invalidate all the rest of the arguments in the post, and says nothing about obscurantism of the definition of the “goal” that we discuss above (so, I don’t understand your use of “especially”, connecting the two sentences of your comment).
Your original post asked me to put a lot of effort into understanding a neurological study. This study may very well be a hoax, which you hadn’t even bothered checking despite including it in your post.
I’m not sure how much energy I feel like putting into processing your post, at least until you’ve confirmed that you’ve purged all the hoaxy stuff and the only bits remaining are good.
“Unless you can demonstrate that it’s easy” was not an ask of Steven (or you, or any other reader of the post) to demonstrate this, because regardless of whether DishBrain is hoax or not, that would be large research project worth of work to demonstrate this: “easiness” refers anyway to the final result (“this specific model of neuronal interaction easily explains the culture of neurons playing pong”), not to the process of obtaining this result.
So, I thought it is clear that this phrase is a rhetorical interjection.
And, again, as I said above, the entire first argument by Steven is niche and not central (as well as our lengthy discussion of my reply to it), so feel free to skip it.
Yeah, to me this all just sounds like standard Free Energy Principle/Active Inference obscurantism. Especially if you haven’t even read the paper that you claim is evidence for FEP.
Again (maybe the last time), I would kindly ask you to point what is obscure in this simple conjecture:
I genuinely want to make my exposition more understandable, but I don’t see anything that wouldn’t be trivially self-evident in this passage.
DishBrain was not brought up as “evidence for Active Inference” (not FEP, FEP doesn’t need any evidence, it’s just mathematical tool). DishBrain was brought up in the reply to the very first argument by Steven: “I have yet to see any concrete algorithmic claim about the brain that was not more easily and intuitively [from my perspective] discussed without mentioning FEP” (he also should have said Active Inference here).
These are two different things. There is massive evidence for Active Inference in general, as well as RL in the brain and other agents. The (implied) Steven’s argument was like, “I haven’t seen a real-world agent, barring AIs explicitly engineered as Active Inference agents, for which Active Inference would be “first line” explanation through the stack of abstractions”.
This is sort of a niche argument that doesn’t even necessarily need a direct reply, because, as I wrote in the post and in other comments, there are other reasons to use Active Inference (precisely because it’s a general, abstract, high-level theory). Yet, I attempted to provide such an example. Even if this example fails (at least in your eyes), it couldn’t invalidate all the rest of the arguments in the post, and says nothing about obscurantism of the definition of the “goal” that we discuss above (so, I don’t understand your use of “especially”, connecting the two sentences of your comment).
Your original post asked me to put a lot of effort into understanding a neurological study. This study may very well be a hoax, which you hadn’t even bothered checking despite including it in your post.
I’m not sure how much energy I feel like putting into processing your post, at least until you’ve confirmed that you’ve purged all the hoaxy stuff and the only bits remaining are good.
“Unless you can demonstrate that it’s easy” was not an ask of Steven (or you, or any other reader of the post) to demonstrate this, because regardless of whether DishBrain is hoax or not, that would be large research project worth of work to demonstrate this: “easiness” refers anyway to the final result (“this specific model of neuronal interaction easily explains the culture of neurons playing pong”), not to the process of obtaining this result.
So, I thought it is clear that this phrase is a rhetorical interjection.
And, again, as I said above, the entire first argument by Steven is niche and not central (as well as our lengthy discussion of my reply to it), so feel free to skip it.