My Blog

Posts on active inference, variational free energy and the predictive brain, written from a software engineer's point of view.

• How to derive Variational Free Energy: A Software Engineer's Guide - Part 1

  A guide on deriving Variational Free Energy following 'A tutorial on the free-energy framework for modelling perception and learning'(Bogacz 2017)

• Active Inference: The Predictive Brain

  A post about Active Inference, the brain as a prediction engine, prediction error, perception vs action, and the free energy principle.

• Active Inference, Part 2: From Survival Equations to the Living Brain

  A guided tour of Da Costa et al. (2020), 'Active inference on discrete state-spaces: a synthesis' — why survival forces an organism to model the world, the Markov blanket, perception as variational free energy, action as expected free energy, and how the maths maps onto real neurons.