> Friston found time for other pursuits as well. At age 19, he spent an entire school vacation trying to squeeze all of physics on one page. He failed but did manage to fit all of quantum mechanics.
Is the page available to read?
Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI
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Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI
#32Notes from the last time I tried to understand this - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wpZJvgQ4HvJE2bysy/god-help-u...
Thanks - I found this very useful.
> From the Alius interview:
"The free energy principle stands in stark distinction to things like predictive coding and the Bayesian brain hypothesis. This is because the free energy principle is what it is — a principle. Like Hamilton’s Principle of Stationary Action, it cannot be falsified. It cannot be disproven. In fact, there’s not much you can do with it, unless you ask whether measurable systems conform to the principle."
This is a big kahuna burger of a bullet to bite!
Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI
#33Notes from the last time I tried to understand this - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wpZJvgQ4HvJE2bysy/god-help-u...
That was great, thanks.
This all reminds me of Socrates' claim in the Theatetus that "Philosophy begins in wonder," wonder being roughly equivalent to the the desire to reduce uncertainty, and the Platonic idea that philosophy is central to the good life.
Which leads to the ubiquitous Whitehead quote about western philosophy consisting of footnotes to Plato...
Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI
#34> Friston found time for other pursuits as well. At age 19, he spent an entire school vacation trying to squeeze all of physics on one page. He failed but did manage to fit all of quantum mechanics. Is the page available to read?
https://www.aliusresearch.org/uploads/9/1/6/0/91600416/frist...
Page 6
Though not fully legible as captured in that pdf.
Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI
#35The complex systems people used to discuss the problem of agents with internal models making models of other agents [1].
Similarly biologists are interested in how a living thing 'organises itself' in the world, maintains its structure and how its sensing and action is coupled to the environment[2].
This sounds like a similar approach, however fuzzy. Isn't it just saying 'can we look for principles that define how living creatures should organise the effort (energy/information) it makes sense to put into "recognising/ predicting/ acting in / being in" the world?'
Makes sense there could be some shared mechanisms, though I'd personally be surprised if they are universal, as differing life-forms seem suited for differing levels of environmental change. This is something lots of people have looked at (it's fun), and agree the Wired article doesn't give a clear answer.
1. Can't recall the paper, but think it was Doyne Farmer ( or Chris Langton?) arguing that if your agent had complexity N, then you should spend sqrt(N) complexity modelling another agent
2. e.g. Maturana & Varela, summary of autopoeisis here http://supergoodtech.com/tomquick/phd/autopoiesis.html but I'm sure lots of other biologists have good theories
Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI
#36Well, here is what I believe brains do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9022206 It makes total sense for the brain's job to be minimizing surprise, because minimizing surprise is the best and most basic strategy for survival.
This is incomplete, but it sounds similar to the memory-prediction framework theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory-prediction_framework) and similar theories. Although I might be biased / primed to interpret it this way.
Basically, according to such theories, we don't really "decide" anything; we carry out what we predict we're going to do, by hierarchically modelling patterns of input and output together in a hierarchy. E.g. "I am eating an apple" -> "I see an apple" and "I'm bringing the apple closer to my mouth" -> "I see lines and colour" and "I tense my hand and move my arm"
Adding a biological perspective, my opinion is that motivation arises from attention modulation by neurotransmitters like dopamine and noradrenaline, and feeding this back into the abstract theory, the hierarchy of recognition favours converging on models with high stimulation weight ("I am eating tasty food" or "I am avoiding a car crash" rather than "I am completing boring paperwork")
Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI
#37> Friston found time for other pursuits as well. At age 19, he spent an entire school vacation trying to squeeze all of physics on one page. He failed but did manage to fit all of quantum mechanics. Is the page available to read?
https://www.aliusresearch.org/uploads/9/1/6/0/91600416/frist... Page 6 Though not fully legible as captured in that pdf.
Thanks but "not fully legible" means absolutely unreadable in this case. I've tried zooming in yet couldn't recognize a single letter (those in the title don't count).
Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI
#38Thinking about this with my engineering hat on -- If I wanted to guide the behaviour of such a system, I would have to influence the prediction somehow - and then the system would act to change the state of the world to match that prediction and/or update the prediction with more information about what is actually going on (by actively making observations etc...). This seems like quite an elegant and neat little lever for high-level control/objective setting. A bit like a Picardian 'make it so' button...
Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI
#39Clickbait article. It is noteworthy that Friston has, as of November 2018, neither (1) formalised free energy minimisation (FIM) with sufficient precision that it goes beyond a vague research heuristic, that can (and is) adapted in ad-hoc ways; nor (2) come up with sufficient empirical evidence for his claim that FIM is how human or animal brains works -- despite the recent revolution in our ability to measure live n…
Agreed. No technical detail means quackery, something the field always had in abundance.
Oh boy, yes. Neuroscience is all about serving the egos of the scientists, and it can often be anything but scientific.
(Although, as a failed vision scientist myself, I may be credibly accused of some disqualifying bias in this regard).
Re: Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI
#40As far as I can tell the “free energy principle” is just asserting that the brain is approximately Bayesian and is doing some kind of variational inference, right? I’m not sure how revolutionary that is. (I’m predisposed not to like Friston because his work in fMRI plays fast and loose with the idea of “causality”.)
The 'revolutionary' aspect is the suggestion that a single celled organism is also doing variational inference. Or, more accurately, can be described as such.