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Dr. Sanjeev Namjoshi, a machine learning engineer who recently submitted a book on Active Inference to MIT Press, discusses the theoretical foundations and practical applications of Active Inference, the Free Energy Principle (FEP), and Bayesian mechanics. He explains how these frameworks describe how biological and artificial systems maintain stability by minimizing uncertainty about their environment.

Namjoshi traces the evolution of these fields from early 2000s neuroscience research to current developments, highlighting how Active Inference provides a unified framework for perception and action through variational free energy minimization. He contrasts this with traditional machine learning approaches, emphasizing Active Inference’s natural capacity for exploration and curiosity through epistemic value.

The discussion covers key technical concepts like Markov blankets.
generative models, and the distinction between continuous and discrete implementations. Namjoshi explains how Active Inference moved from continuous state-space models (2003−2013) to discrete formulations (2015-present) to better handle planning problems.

He sees Active Inference as being at a similar stage to deep learning in the early 2000s — poised for significant breakthroughs but requiring better tools and wider adoption. While acknowledging current computational challenges, he emphasizes Active Inference’s potential advantages over reinforcement learning, particularly its principled approach to exploration and planning.

Namjoshi advocates for balanced oversight that enables innovation while maintaining appropriate safeguards. He expresses particular concern about the rapid pace of AI development potentially outpacing our understanding of risks and regulatory frameworks.

Dr. Sanjeev Namjoshi.

Bioengineered bacteria to eat plastic in seawater:3 Which in large quantities can eat all the plastic in the ocean:3 Yay face_with_colon_three


Poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) is a highly recyclable plastic that has been extensively used and manufactured. Like other plastics, PET resists natural degradation, thus accumulating in the environment. Several recycling strategies have been applied to PET, but these tend to result in downcycled products that eventually end up in landfills. This accumulation of landfilled PET waste contributes to the formation of microplastics, which pose a serious threat to marine life and ecosystems, and potentially to human health. To address this issue, our project leveraged synthetic biology to develop a whole-cell biocatalyst capable of depolymerizing PET in seawater environments by using the fast-growing, nonpathogenic, moderate halophile Vibrio natriegens. By leveraging a two-enzyme system—comprising a chimera of IsPETase and IsMHETase from Ideonella sakaiensis —displayed on V. natriegens, we constructed whole-cell catalysts that depolymerize PET and convert it into its monomers in salt-containing media and at a temperature of 30°C.

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What is information in biology? information is essential for analyzing data and testing hypotheses. But what is information in evolution, population genetics, levels of selection, and molecular genetics? Is computational biology transformational?

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Terrence William Deacon is an American neuroanthropologist. He taught at Harvard for eight years, relocated to Boston University in 1992, and is currently Professor of Anthropology and member of the Cognitive Science Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

Physicists in Germany have used visible light to measure intramolecular distances smaller than 10 nm thanks to an advanced version of an optical fluorescence microscopy technique called MINFLUX. The technique, which has a precision of just 1 angstrom (0.1 nm), could be used to study biological processes such as interactions between proteins and other biomolecules inside cells.

In conventional microscopy, when two features of an object are separated by less than half the wavelength of the light used to image them, they will appear blurry and indistinguishable due to diffraction. Super-resolution microscopy techniques can, however, overcome this so-called Rayleigh limit by exciting individual fluorescent groups (fluorophores) on molecules while leaving neighbouring fluorophores alone, meaning they remain dark.

One such technique, known as nanoscopy with minimal photon fluxes, or MINFLUX, was invented by the physicist Stefan Hell. First reported in 2016 by Hell’s team at the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Multidisciplinary Sciences in Göttingen, MINFLUX first “switches on” individual molecules, then determines their position by scanning a beam of light with a doughnut-shaped intensity profile across them.

Joscha Bach is a German artificial intelligence researcher and cognitive scientist who works on on cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modeling, and multi-agent systems. We got connected over the hard problem of consciousness — namely, why do people seem to think it’s so hard? During our conversation we deal with the foundational questions of the technological future being built in Silicon Valley, the fever dream of machine intelligence, and try to understand why people seem to think that there’s even such a thing as the hard problem of consciousness in the first place.

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00:00:00 Go!
00:04:09 Career Advice.
00:11:31 Beauty, Grace, & Hotness.
00:13:48 Putting on Airs.
00:22:32 Patreon Ask.
00:22:33 Winning for the sake of winning.
00:29:35 Transformative experiences.
00:36:25 Speciation event, or crap again?
00:42:17 Who is Joscha Bach.
00:52:39 Physics & Causality.
01:00:52 Physics vs Biology.
01:12:16 Life vs Cells.
01:20:14 Biosynthetic AGI
01:28:15 Creativity & Novelty.
01:38:52 Wetware & Neuromorphic computing.
01:50:46 The Limits of Hardware.
02:05:07 The value of Agency.
02:15:47 Layers of Society.
02:35:03 Chimp Empire.
02:52:31 Collapse.
03:05:13 The Hard Problem.
03:43:28 Computer Imagination.
04:02:52 How reasoning works.
04:14:28 Reward Functions.
04:20:01 Consciousness dreams.
04:25:35 The heart of the disagreement.
04:30:15 Consensus.

#AGI #consciousness #machinelearning.

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Plastic pollution is everywhere, and a good amount of it is composed of polyethylene terephthalate (PET). This polymer is used to make bottles, containers and even clothing. Now, researchers report in Environmental Science & Technology that they have discovered an enzyme that breaks apart PET in a rather unusual place: microbes living in sewage sludge. The enzyme could be used by wastewater treatment plants to break apart microplastic particles and upcycle plastic waste.

Microplastics are becoming increasingly prevalent in places ranging from remote oceans to inside bodies, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that they appear in wastewater as well.

However, the particles are so tiny that they can slip through water treatment purification processes and end up in the effluent that is reintroduced to the environment. But effluent also contains microorganisms that like to eat those plastic particles, including Comamonas testosteroni—so named because it degrades sterols like testosterone.

Professor Michael Levin explores the revolutionary concept of diverse intelligence, demonstrating how cognitive capabilities extend far beyond traditional brain-based intelligence. Drawing from his groundbreaking research, he explains how even simple biological systems like gene regulatory networks exhibit learning, memory, and problem-solving abilities. Levin introduces key concepts like “cognitive light cones” — the scope of goals a system can pursue — and shows how these ideas are transforming our approach to cancer treatment and biological engineering.