Might Friston’s “Free Energy” Markov Blankets = Liquid Membraning?

Karl Friston is looking to move forward describing the ‘free energy principle’, for example using the Friston/Ramstead/Babcock paper describing “all life in terms of Markov Blankets.” https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston-free-energy-principle-artificial-intelligence/ and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064517301409

Another term for Markov Blankets might be “Liquid Membraning”. I use Liquid Membraning in problem-solving; the cognitive process appears to be akin to stitching up data-points into Markov Blankets. “Cloud-Boxing” is my other term. The suggestion here is to shift away from the rigid/fixed/ossifying nature of the term “blankets” to a flow-state framework that evokes particulates and osmoticity? Could the term instead be Markov “fluidics,” “flow-states”, “nets”, “clouds”, and/or “meshes”?


“Liquid Membraning”* is the deep enveloping that evanescently correlates datasets during the gloaming phase of a sort; stitching up cloud-points out of constellations of clues; out of a search to find the deep root cause of a challenge/problem/issue/threat [ie. to go back to the deep root first principle]. This produces a key that when turned unlocks the entire problem. Computationally you could call it super-swarming. It has been suggested that creatives approach a task ‘more intuitively’, not analytically. I disagree; these skills could be characterized as hyperfast analytical tasking. Think of super-swarming as standing in a cloud. Where the cloud is a set of data points. Among these are the discrete clues that I notice. Among these are the patterns and there a route of questions to find, to follow, down to the root clue/key that unlocks everything. Another way to look at this is to say I see all the trees in the forest, and then notice the clue paths and patterns that lead me back to the one different tree.

* definition circa 25 Nov 2018


Image: “Internet map 1024” (cropped), By The Opte Project [CC BY 2.5], https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_map_1024.jpg

Hadley’s Primer

I’m working out lessons to teach how to think in 3D. Here’s one of the first ideas for this. I got to watching Jodie Foster’s movie Contact. And came to the segment where Hadley reveals the primer to Ellie:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SbKE_U4b7U

Director Robert Zemeckis needed to explain the idea without detailing the depths that an efficient data set could get to. It gets neat when we replicate the Hadley Primer into a 3D library with many books, layers and leaves:

This is Zemeckis’ version:

Now imagine the underlay also being a book, inverted:

Now imagine Zemeckis’ book as a level-1 hypercube [a tesseract projected into three-space]:

 

Now imagine it as a multi-layered hypercube…3D books nested within books within books…

Now imagine what lies at the “centre” of the nestlings… 

Is it “the centre”? Is it a singularity? Is it a cloud of data? Can we ever get there?

A book with infinitive leaves that “linear we” cannot perceive? 

Words in a starry firmament? Words that we cannot truly read?

Yet…