Overview
In this interview, Karl Friston discusses the origins and implications of the Free Energy Principle (FEP), from childhood observations of woodlice to a comprehensive framework for understanding cognition, life, and consciousness. Friston recounts how watching woodlice scurry in sunlight and slow in shade led to the insight that biological self-organization can be explained by principles of self-organization. The conversation covers the FEP's relationship to Bayesian inference, predictive process
Overview source: Curated paper metadata.
Methods and contributions
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Findings and contributions
- Friston recounts that the prototype of the FEP came from noticing, at age eight, that woodlice simply moved faster in the sun and slower in the shade.
- Friston distinguishes the FEP as an unfalsifiable principle from process theories such as predictive coding, which are empirically testable hypotheses.
- Friston argues the Bayesian brain and predictive coding lack the enactive aspect of the FEP because they do not consider entropy reduction.
- Friston contends that apparent inverted-U 'sweet spots' are all explained by minimizing expected free energy, not by different laws at different levels.
- Friston holds that consciousness is the process of inference, so any free-energy-minimizing system is conscious to some degree; self-awareness requires a self-other model.
Methods
- Long-form Q&A interview of Karl Friston by Fortier and Friedman — The work is a published interview (ALIUS Bulletin): Martin Fortier and Daniel A. Friedman pose long-form questions and Karl Friston answers them.
- Interviewer-framed contrasts of Bayesian brain, predictive coding and FEP — Questions set out formal Bayesian belief-updating equations and contrast the three frameworks before asking Friston to respond.
- Questions drawing on empirical literatures (fluency, psychosis, altered states) — Interviewers bring in specific prior work, e.g. Chetverikov's fluency/disfluency 'sweet spot' results and competing models of psychosis, as prompts.
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- 2018_WoodliceAndMen.pdf PDF · 0.72 MiB · extracted-text source
Citation
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Catalog details and resources
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