One claim of this post is that desires and epistemic priors are enconded in essentially the same way in the brain
I think it’s a good idea to introduce the basic story of how active inference represents preferences in the introduction of this post, i.e. C = p(o) because it’s quite different from how other paradigms do it. People are often confused by this IME. And walk through some kind of toy example for precision and updating and prediction errors overriding the “deeper” beliefs v.s. the “deeper” beliefs persisting. And then say smth like “the payoff for this weird mixing of is and ought is it lets you explain depression really damn well”, then get into the neuroscience
Also, you may be interested in: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17957 (basic idea here is we not only introduce preferences over observatioins p(o), but also over hidden state beliefs p(s), to model stuff like why people are reluctant to update their beliefs due to social reasons)
I think it’s a good idea to introduce the basic story of how active inference represents preferences in the introduction of this post, i.e. C = p(o) because it’s quite different from how other paradigms do it. People are often confused by this IME. And walk through some kind of toy example for precision and updating and prediction errors overriding the “deeper” beliefs v.s. the “deeper” beliefs persisting. And then say smth like “the payoff for this weird mixing of is and ought is it lets you explain depression really damn well”, then get into the neuroscience
Also, you may be interested in: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17957 (basic idea here is we not only introduce preferences over observatioins p(o), but also over hidden state beliefs p(s), to model stuff like why people are reluctant to update their beliefs due to social reasons)