<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:comic sans ms,sans-serif;font-size:large;color:#000000">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</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 4:12 AM John Grigg via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div>"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 <em>must</em> you show?”<p>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 <a href="https://twitter.com/farlkriston" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Twitter account</a><sup>2</sup>
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.</p><div style="border-top-width:10px"><p>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 <em>minimize free energy</em>.</p></div><p>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 <a href="https://www.wired.com/tag/artificial-intelligence/" target="_blank">artificial intelligence</a>
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."</p>
</div><div>What do you think?<br></div><div><br></div><div><a href="https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston-free-energy-principle-artificial-intelligence/" target="_blank">https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston-free-energy-principle-artificial-intelligence/</a></div></div>
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