#033 Karl Friston - The Free Energy Principle

This is a lot more useful than lex Friedman. Fascinating talk with Friston, really appreciate the background work you put into it.

Great podcast, but the music is really, really distracting

No music please!

You guys are amazing! Your preparation really shows. What's even more amazing is the artificial life that is the YouTube. Months ago it introduced me to Hameroff's idea of quantum effects in microtubules for photosynthesis. Following up yesterday morning I searched for quantum mechanics/least action principle and YouTube supplied Feynman's PhD thesis anticipating his work on QED. Yesterday afternoon it offered me, unbidden, Friston, who mentions Feynman, path integrals, and what seems to be the Holy Grail, Free Energy Principle. By manipulating a few electrons here and there YouTube seems to be a conduit for effecting communication among the collective consciousness that Dean Radin has been monitoring. True synchronicity with a concrete mechanism exposed. Amazing!

Really great job! What I love about Prof. Friston is that regardless of how great and accomplished he is, he always stays in touch with the community. Really great!

Such a powerful line. "Objective functions should about belief and consequences of belief states, not states of the world."

So having watched and revisited a few segments- There is so much to say here, these subjects are heady and far-reaching. But first of all thank you for bringing Prof. Friston as a guest and providing excellent leap-off questions. I think the main thing I find is that how cool is it that we are at a point in time- scientific groundwork and technology wise -that we can even entertain seriously the idea of applying first-principles style modeling and mathematical formalism to this subject matter and the deepest questions we've ever thought to ask?? I would wager most of the audience here has grown up with these questions and some less-or-more rigorous version of these thoughts swimming about their heads. And, seemingly, we are at the point where it is practical to invent or experiment to harness and improve a formulation that combines theoretical physics and intelligent agency, without it being nonsense on a cartoon villain's secret laboratory blackboard. :D I also find it very encouraging that there seems to be so much usefulness that can come from investigating these ideas. Even if we never arrive via this pathway at some sort of truly universal explanation of the dynamics of embodied intelligence, all the math and contemplation that goes into it will bear fruit in "workaday" applications that can benefit from, say, markov blanket modeling or whatnot. Great stuff.

I really enjoyed the edited summary at the beginning of this one.

Regarding the question about learning phonemes from the radio vs. from speech in social interaction, I believe the difference is well explained in Stanislas Dehaene’s “How we Learn.” The difference between these two situations is shared attention. In a social context a child is going to attend to the noise produced by adults and see it as important because it will recognize them as sources for the noise. In the radio situation, unless the child already speaks and can recognize the noise as language, it will not be attending to it in the same way. Dehaene describes a slightly different situation, learning an association between an object and a word from an adult vs. a loudspeaker, but I think the general principle is the same. Young children are hardwired to attend to what adults do (gaze direction detection, facial recognition, etc.) and attention, as we all know, is all you need.

Why why do you add the music? Do you know how difficult you make it for us the aveverage intelligence curious person to listen absorb and understand?! Please release on Spotify a music free version.

More subscribers to you, really such nice work. Youtube algo must be stupid not suggesting your content. But this will follow and then you will have a peak

I enjoy the chat. Very informative, NEW WAY TO SEE THINGS THAT ARE HIDDEN,.

I have am a Physicist. Coincidence or not I am working independently for about a year on the problems of LLMs, The approach I am developing is actually very similar to Dr Karl. Good to know there’s already a framework for that. I am well versed in numerical analysis, multiple scale methods and programming. My academic work was basically on objects that I think are very suitable to FEM. Solitons in PT symmetrical systems. Not any system though. I found a particular type of system in a particular kind of bifurcation that behaves like being alive. Like, instead of carefully prepared, they actually form themselves from very weak initial conditions. Also pretty hard perturbations very quickly dissipate from these solitons. They cure themselves. I really would love to collaborate with someone on this topic. My papers are easy to find. F. C. Moreira SHG solitons on scholar will lead to results.

Wonderful. Thanks for creating and posting.

Very interresting topic ,but i find the background music in the first part very distracting..sometimes even overwhelming what is being said!..the other part is totally fine

14:24 "one of the few principles that conforms to itself" -- just a side curiosity: in words, these are known as autologies. 'Pentasyllabic' or 'noun', or 'repugnant'

PLEASE GET RID OF THE BACKGROUND MUSIC. It isn't necessary, and is distracting.

So if something with a Markov blanket system exists over time, it must resist entropy by gathering evidence of its own existence, minimising free energy or surprise, via a change in its modelling or actions. The first line of thinking makes sense, if something exists over time and is consistently able to resist entropy, it must have a strategy to do so whether consciously or not. Whether that strategy is gathering evidence of its own existence, I'm not sure. For example, I'm not trying to confirm my own existence by any means, I'm looking to understand it, even if understanding it moves me towards an increasing accumulation of evidence that disproves my existence. I'm not actively seeking the blue pill if you will, I seek the red as it moves me closer to the truth. This may be my strategy for resisting entropy, by better modelling the world, others and my self, but the aim isn't reduction of uncertainty, it's growth. Growth in consciousness. Growth in level of awareness of being, in relation to understanding of self, other (people/species) and whole (nature/universe/God). Perhaps this reduces down to a systems ability to process information at the various Markov blankets in which it exists. Or awareness of that within its blanket, outside its blanket & the interface between the two. The quantity and quality of its data set, the ability to process, model & synthesise that information, then translate those learnings in to revisions of its modelling or actions, in a real time continuous learning loop. Minimising uncertainty might be a key survival strategy, but is mere survival the highest motivating force in the universe?

This is Great information! Thank You so much!!!

"in some realist sense, we don't think that the photon travels every one of those possible paths, but it's 'as if' it did." I'd like to challenge this. The story is a bit more subtle than that. Let's take the simplest case of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer which is the same idea but with only two paths (two inputs into a first beamsplitter, two mirrors with tunable phase recombining the outputs into a second beamsplitter and we look at the two final outputs). The state of the photon in the interferometer can be represented using the Bloch sphere: the North Pole represents travelling in one arm of the interferometer and the South Pole is travelling in the other arm. The states on the equator are equal superpositions of travelling in either arm with an adjustable phase (the longitude). We can show that the photon actually goes both ways because if it didn't it wouldn't feel the phase difference (because there would be no "equator"). We actually detect the fact that it feels the phase difference by looking at the statistics with which it emerges from the final outputs. Closely related to this, there are some paradoxical gedankenexperiments (a few even tried out for realz usually in quantum optical experiments) like the Elizur-Vaidman bomb tester, and many things in the field of interaction-free measurements: there is a very real sense in which we can say that the photon actually went through all of the paths.