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Nice!! I've generally found myself a bit skeptical of the "free energy minimization" framework of cognition, as it has looked to me like its spread is powered as much by memetics as it is by true explanatory power. I also failed to understand the basic idea of why it would ever be a good strategy to tailor my actions so as it align reality with my predictions of it.

I found this article which you linked to be very helpful in starting to resolve some of this: https://latentobservations.substack.com/p/making-sense-of-active-inference

The high level idea almost looks to me like its saying that by doing planning in "observation space" instead of "model space," I can achieve some robustness to model misspecification. Which makes some intuitive sense!

What I haven't understood yet is how the framework addresses learning (which probably means I haven't understood all that much, haha). Maybe this is similar to your complaint about the prior being overly determinative... Definitely interested to spend some more time digging into a couple of these papers!

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