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Welcome to all the folks who joined this in the past week! đ
Hey team!
If you listen to one podcast this year, listen to this one.
I chat with Karl Friston, a theoretical neuroscientist who is one of the most cited researchers of all time.
For four decades, Karl has been searching for the simplest explanation for âhow it all worksââa unified theory that explains biology, chemistry, physics, and sociotechnical systems.
I think heâs found it. He calls it the Free Energy Principle (FEP).
Letâs understand FEP using the brain as an example.
Can you tell what these images are?
Probably not. It just looks like a bunch of black and white sensory data.
But then I tell you that it's a dalmatian and a cow. Boom! You can see them now. Iâve given you a model to understand the world.
This is how our brains work. They predict what will happen with âtop-down modelsâ and then fit âbottom-up sensory dataâ into those models.
Friston would say our brains are âminimizing free energyâ or âminimizing surpriseâ. Our brains minimize the amount of surprise between their models and the incoming data. Once we have a model (dalmatian, cow), we fit the data into it.
Another way we can minimize free energy is to do âactive inferenceâ: to change the world to match our models. Animals do this by moving! If my model is that the world is a sunny place, Iâll move to LA to make that happen. Iâm not changing my model. Iâm changing the world. But Iâm still minimizing surprise.
But our brains arenât the only things that minimize surprise. Everything does it. For example, a fish minimizes free energy by:
Having a model of the world (I like to live in water)
Then if it washes on shore, it âexperiences surpriseâ, so wants to go back into the water to minimize surprise
Any entity (brains, fish, etc.) must abide by the Free Energy Principle. It has a model of the worldâa steady-state that it likes to orbit around, like a fish in water. Then itâll do anything to stay in that orbit.
In the podcast, we apply this to five different fields:
How celestial bodies like the sun âexistâ by finding a stable gravitational orbit
How life began as initial bits of RNA fitting their model by finding energy near deep-sea vents. How evolution is Survival of the Fittest Model.
How our brains are a competition for Survival of the Fittest Meme. Based on our brain architecture the fittest memes are âgood explanations for your sensed world.â
How societies strive to minimize surprise with mutual intelligibility through shared language and shared identities (religions, nations, politics). It is our nature to divide into groups.
How Friston thinks AI will shift away from Big Data and towards active AI agents, curious for data. Like a domesticated robot.
It is a pretty mind-blowing conversation. Spend 60min to take the âFree Energy Principleâ pill. You wonât regret it. đ
Youtube below. Podcast here: Apple, Google, Spotify.
Thanks and very curious for your thoughts!
Hope you have a great week!
Warmth, Rhys
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