[ExI] The Genius Neuroscientist Who Might Hold the Key to True AI

[William Flynn Wallace]

I tend to dismiss ideas that a big room full of highly intelligent people
cannot make sense of.  And then I remember reading that at one time there
were only ten people in the world who could understand Einstein (which
theory I cannot remember).   bill w

On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 4:12 AM John Grigg via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> "For the past decade or so, Friston has devoted much of his time and
> effort to developing an idea he calls the free energy principle. (Friston
> refers to his neuroimaging research as a day job, the way a jazz musician
> might refer to his shift at the local public library.) With this idea,
> Friston believes he has identified nothing less than the organizing
> principle of all life, and all intelligence as well. “If you are alive,” he
> sets out to answer, “what sorts of behaviors *must* you show?”
>
> First the bad news: The free energy principle is maddeningly difficult to
> understand. So difficult, in fact, that entire rooms of very, very smart
> people have tried and failed to grasp it. A Twitter account
> <https://twitter.com/farlkriston>2 with 3,000 followers exists simply to
> mock its opacity, and nearly every person I spoke with about it, including
> researchers whose work depends on it, told me they didn’t fully comprehend
> it.
>
> But often those same people hastened to add that the free energy
> principle, at its heart, tells a simple story and solves a basic puzzle.
> The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the universe tends toward
> entropy, toward dissolution; but living things fiercely resist it. We wake
> up every morning nearly the same person we were the day before, with clear
> separations between our cells and organs, and between us and the world
> without. How? Friston’s free energy principle says that all life, at every
> scale of organization—from single cells to the human brain, with its
> billions of neurons—is driven by the same universal imperative, which can
> be reduced to a mathematical function. To be alive, he says, is to act in
> ways that reduce the gulf between your expectations and your sensory
> inputs. Or, in Fristonian terms, it is to *minimize free energy*.
>
> To get a sense of the potential implications of this theory, all you have
> to do is look at the array of people who darken the FIL’s doorstep on
> Monday mornings. Some are here because they want to use the free energy
> principle to unify theories of the mind, provide a new foundation for
> biology, and explain life as we know it. Others hope the free energy
> principle will finally ground psychiatry in a functional understanding of
> the brain. And still others come because they want to use Friston’s ideas
> to break through the roadblocks in artificial intelligence
> <https://www.wired.com/tag/artificial-intelligence/> research. But they
> all have one reason in common for being here, which is that the only person
> who truly understands Karl Friston’s free energy principle may be Karl
> Friston himself."
> What do you think?
>
>
> https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston-free-energy-principle-artificial-intelligence/
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