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

[Stuart LaForge]

Quoting John Grigg:


> 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.

What are they talking about? The free energy principle is hardly  
incomprehensible, instead it seems obvious to me. Minimization of  
free-energy is why chemical reactions occur in the first place and is  
a direct consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. Any work  
done by a system must be paid for by a commensurate increase in  
entropy. Living things are compartmentalized chemical reactions that  
maintain their dynamic complexity by disordering the universe around  
them whether it be splitting an ATP molecule at the cellular level, by  
eating food at an organismal level, or burning wood or fossil fuels at  
a societal level. Schrodinger wrote about this in the 20th century, so  
it is not novel.

> 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*.

We are like a super-complex omelette that requires the breaking of  
many eggs. Again not a mystery. The notion that this can be reduced to  
a mathematical function is true and seems very similar to the  
Universal Learning Function I keep harping on about. Whether you are  
rolling down hill, minimizing free energy, adapting to your  
environment through natural selection, or minimizing a neural  
network's error function, you are in principle performing the same  
algorithm of multidimensional gradient descent.

> 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?

I think I want to see Karl Friston's math.

Stuart LaForge