And I'm particularly interested in what kind of things can it tell us and what kind of things can it tell us in the future, perhaps, to that symptom-based diagnosis wouldn't be able to.

Yeah, some very broad and excellent questions here.

I'll briefly say what computational psychiatry is from my point of view, and then focus on a particular application, which I suspect is what you're interested in.

So computational psychiatry was invented by people like Reed Montague and Peter Diane many years ago as a rallying call to try and attract funding and young clinicians and academics into a more computational, formal, theoretical approach to psychiatry.

And it's been relatively successful.

Since that time, there's now a journal, Computational Psychiatry.

And the idea can be read in a number of different ways.

Now, I'm curious, in terms of treatment, what can we do in terms of treatment to decrease the resistance that a false belief has to contradictory

So how could FEP and this theory apply to a condition like schizophrenia? And I guess my simple understanding is that maybe there's too much of that precision weight being given to, you know, noisy, irrelevant sensory signals, but maybe you can help us better understand that a little.

So yeah, you're absolutely right.

I mean, we introduced Parkinson's disease as a particular example of a failure of sensory attenuation or the failure to attenuate the precision afforded prediction errors.

So if you read, um, The more philosophical treatment of predictive processing, very often you'll be talking about not just the minimization of prediction errors, but the minimization of precision-weighted prediction errors.

So the precision is really important.

It scores the credence or the confidence that you're placing in a very context-sensitive way in this particular source of information that is going to be used to drive your belief updating.

So a very simple example of that would be, say, I'm in a hotel room and it's dark and I've just shut the door and I don't know where the light switch is.

And then I see a lot of scientists or, you know, people studying medicine signed to the comments saying like no this paper is not arguing at all that stress has no impact on the body absolutely stress has impact on the body it's more arguing that the trauma storing is like a metaphor it's not a literal meaning of it you know so that's the kind of overall gist of it

I guess what causes one person from the free energy perspective to be more okay with uncertainty versus another person who may be less okay with uncertainty?

I see.

Another great question.

Well, I think I'll simply answer just by noting, of course, everybody's completely different because we're all trying to learn our world models or generative models.

And the only source of learning is what we sense, our sensorium, and that is unique and private to everyone.

thing in the universe, and especially true of every person on our planet.

So we're all going to have different generative models.

So what about them from the perspective of the free energy principle? What makes them different?

[laughs] Yes

... yeah, at these festivals.

Um, so, uh, sorry.

The, um, just something that might, um, tie together the, um, the missing information perspective on probability and the first, um, scale invariant, or, um, looking for invariances or symmetries at multiple scales.

Uh, um, o-one response as a physicist, um, with very little training, and my training was a year of quantum, um, uh, mechanics and a year of probability theory, um, is that it's all about probability.

There is no reality.

Um, and on that view, information is just an attribute of a probability density.

Yeah.

Mm

... and he didn't know the difference.

So I spent the first few years of my education being, uh, studying to become a doctor and then, uh, specializing in psychiatry.

But at the earliest opportunity, um, tried to move into research, and that's where the list of mentors, um, arises.

Uh, and the first mentor, um, was a gentleman called Phil Cowan, um, who comes from a stable of very influential, um, clinical academics in the UK that effectively established neuropharmacology as a discipline.

Um, and they're still, um, you know, some of the, the good and great now.

People like Dave Nutt in, um, in the UK were part of that, part of that group.

Yeah