Under an Active Inference perspective, it is little surprising, that we use the same concepts for [Expecting something to happen], and [Trying to steer towards something happenig], as they are the same thing happening in our brain.
I don’t know enough about this know, whether the active inference paradigm predicts, that this similarity on a neuronal level plays out as humans using similar language to describe the two phenomena, but if it does the common use of this “beliving in”—concept might count as evidence in its favour.
I think a better active-inference-inspired perspective that fits well with the distinction Anna is trying to make here is that of representing preferences as probability distributions over state/observation trajectories, the idea being that one assigns high “belief in” probabilities to trajectories that are more desirable. This “preference distribution” is distinct from the agent’s “prediction distribution”, which tries to anticipate and explain outcomes as accurately as possible. Active Inference is then cast as the process of minimising the KL divergence between these two distributions.
A couple of pointers which articulate this idea very nicely in different contexts:
Slightly different frame: predictive coding / perceptual control, instead of active inference. I think it plausibly explains why “believing in” and beliefs-as-predictions are very near in human conceptspace, to the extent that many languages don’t distinguish them?
“Believing in” → beliefs-as-predictions: If you want a project to yield good future outcomes, you would “believe in” the project, and the target-setting of your brain would predict good project outcomes (hold a target set-point of “the project has yielded good outcomes”), and the perceptual control part of your brain steers your actions towards making the project go well.
Beliefs-as-predictions → “believing in”: If you believe that a prediction market contract is underpriced and buy YES shares, you would then be incentivised to act to help the YES outcome actually happen. You’ve come to “believe in” the YES outcome.
Under an Active Inference perspective, it is little surprising, that we use the same concepts for [Expecting something to happen], and [Trying to steer towards something happenig], as they are the same thing happening in our brain.
I don’t know enough about this know, whether the active inference paradigm predicts, that this similarity on a neuronal level plays out as humans using similar language to describe the two phenomena, but if it does the common use of this “beliving in”—concept might count as evidence in its favour.
I think a better active-inference-inspired perspective that fits well with the distinction Anna is trying to make here is that of representing preferences as probability distributions over state/observation trajectories, the idea being that one assigns high “belief in” probabilities to trajectories that are more desirable. This “preference distribution” is distinct from the agent’s “prediction distribution”, which tries to anticipate and explain outcomes as accurately as possible. Active Inference is then cast as the process of minimising the KL divergence between these two distributions.
A couple of pointers which articulate this idea very nicely in different contexts:
Action and Perception as Divergence Minimization—https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.01791
Whence the Expected Free Energy—https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.08128
Alex Alemi’s brilliant talk at NeurIPS—https://nips.cc/virtual/2023/73986
Slightly different frame: predictive coding / perceptual control, instead of active inference. I think it plausibly explains why “believing in” and beliefs-as-predictions are very near in human conceptspace, to the extent that many languages don’t distinguish them?
“Believing in” → beliefs-as-predictions: If you want a project to yield good future outcomes, you would “believe in” the project, and the target-setting of your brain would predict good project outcomes (hold a target set-point of “the project has yielded good outcomes”), and the perceptual control part of your brain steers your actions towards making the project go well.
Beliefs-as-predictions → “believing in”: If you believe that a prediction market contract is underpriced and buy YES shares, you would then be incentivised to act to help the YES outcome actually happen. You’ve come to “believe in” the YES outcome.