Life and the Second Law

Beyond its application in neuroscience, Karl Friston’s free energy principle appeals to the physicist in me, because it starts from a very elegant homeostatic (and autopoetic) argument. It is based on the assumptions that (1) living organisms can be described as stochastic dynamical systems which are (approximately) ergodic, i.e. which possess some kind of attractor, and that (2) these […]

Introducing: The Deep Active Inference Agent

Edit (09/07/17): Sorry for the long quiet interval. It was (partly) due to the fact that I took some time to refine some the code and the arguments in this and the previous post and put it into a paper, of which there is a preprint available as of today: http://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02341 🙂 Edit (11/14/18): A thoroughly […]

The Free Energy Principle and Active Inference

Hello World! I wanted to start the Blog with something that has been on my mind since the great Computational Psychiatry Course 2016. Some of the talks there revolved around the free energy/active inference framework in cognitive neuroscience. Although “free energy” does sound a little esoteric at first, the name derives from the thermodynamic free […]