The first Chris Fields lecture of "Physics as Information Processing" course starts in less 1 hour!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpOrRw4EhTo Session 1 (18 May) will review some history, starting with Boltzmann’s relation between entropy and energy, and continuing through Church’s and Turing’s models of computation, Shannon’s information theory, the “black box” methods of Ashby et al., Pearl’s definition of a Markov blanket, Bekenstein’s area law for black holes, Hooft’s and Susskind’s formulation of the holographic principle, the ideas of objects, interfaces, and virtual machines in computing, up to Friston’s 2010 and 2013 papers introducing active inference. The goal of this session is to establish the idea of a Markov blanket as a communication interface. Course syllabus Discussions at AII Discord server