Yep, I 100% agree that this is relevant. The PP/Friston/free-energy/active-inference camp is definitely at least trying to “cross the gradient gap” with a unified theory as opposed to a two-system solution. However, I’m not sure how to think about it yet.
I may be completely wrong, but I have a sense that there’s a distinction between learning and inference which plays a similar role; IE, planning is just inference, but both planning and inference work only because the learning part serves as the second “protected layer”??
It may be that the PP is “more or less” the Bayesian solution; IE, it requires a grain of truth to get good results, so it doesn’t really help with the things I’m most interested in getting out of “crossing the gap”.
Note that PP clearly tries to implement things by pushing everything into epistemics. On the other hand, I’m mostly discussing what happens when you try to smoosh everything into the instrumental system. So many of my remarks are not directly relevant to PP.
I get the sense that Friston might be using the “evolution solution” I mentioned; so, unifying things in a way which kind of lets us talk about evolved agents, but not artificial ones. However, this is obviously an oversimplification, because he does present designs for artificial agents based on the ideas.
Overall, my current sense is that PP obscures the issue I’m interested in more than solves it, but it’s not clear.
Yep, I 100% agree that this is relevant. The PP/Friston/free-energy/active-inference camp is definitely at least trying to “cross the gradient gap” with a unified theory as opposed to a two-system solution. However, I’m not sure how to think about it yet.
I may be completely wrong, but I have a sense that there’s a distinction between learning and inference which plays a similar role; IE, planning is just inference, but both planning and inference work only because the learning part serves as the second “protected layer”??
It may be that the PP is “more or less” the Bayesian solution; IE, it requires a grain of truth to get good results, so it doesn’t really help with the things I’m most interested in getting out of “crossing the gap”.
Note that PP clearly tries to implement things by pushing everything into epistemics. On the other hand, I’m mostly discussing what happens when you try to smoosh everything into the instrumental system. So many of my remarks are not directly relevant to PP.
I get the sense that Friston might be using the “evolution solution” I mentioned; so, unifying things in a way which kind of lets us talk about evolved agents, but not artificial ones. However, this is obviously an oversimplification, because he does present designs for artificial agents based on the ideas.
Overall, my current sense is that PP obscures the issue I’m interested in more than solves it, but it’s not clear.