KARL FRISTON - INTELLIGENCE 3.0

Karl Friston is on the money here. He is formally combining ideas that have been running alongside each other since Schrodinger's "What Is Life?". Life, biology and intelligence are intimately related to the 2nd law of thermodynamics and Friston articulates this (both formally and informally) in a multidisciplinary and accessible way. The man is a living legend.

He sounds like he remembers every book, article and theory word for word, and can discuss related topics, formulating connections, discussing, posing, viewing, dressing things in the vocabulary and concepts of all the theoretical frameworks he knows. He seems to have the sort of "lowest common denominator" theoretical frameworks in mind for just about any topic. An academic in the truest sense.

Great interview, so much to nibble on. I appreciate Dr. Friston's humility to acknowledge his ignorance and displays a child-like attitude towards learning.

Less than an hour in and I can already tell I’ll be rewatching two or three times 🤩

I am very impressed with the humility and/or self confidence of your guest asking for definitions when he doesn’t know what they mean. He is truly a very intelligent man who doesn’t have to pretend to be other than human. Great video and great ideas. Thanks.

Listening to Karl speak always gives me more hope for the future of humanity than literally anything else these days. It is just deeply comforting to know that, as a collective species, we are even able to analyze and consider the nature of existential dynamics to this degree, and level of lucidity. I can’t wait till we are building general AI models that employ active inference at the core of their architectures.

Mind blowing discussion, thank you!

Denouement definition - just, omg I love you so much. My little world expands in multiple dimensions with each episode.

I'm a Universalist too, but not completely. It seems to me that as we go deeper and wider with our models training is creating cognitive architecture. One section is encoding and embedding, another is categorizing, this section is an attention mechanism, etc. Go deep enough and we can flatten out all our loops. But it isn't efficient to flatten loops. Stephen Wolfram talks about computational reducability. We're okay at this. So we can have some handcrafted symbolic pieces of synthetic cognitive architectures to reduce model size. Eventually, our machines should be able to do this themselves, but I think there will always be a need for symbolic subsystems.

Information, information, information. “Define your terms.” There is a great deal of rigour & explanatory power here in this podcast but no where is ‘information’ - otherwise widely & rightly considered to be a foundational element of reality - defined. Identified, defined, understood. Indeed, this lack of clarity concerning ‘information’s’ ontological identity contaminates (quite un-necessarily) pretty much all of the key elements in the entire discourse. Including the nature of being itself …….. Having, myself, had the dubious fortune of, stepping stone fashion starting with ‘information’, coming to recognise the ontological identities of all of these great wonders, I offer the following remarks.

Karl Friston recommends pipe smoking, he’s a true genius.

I love the way he explains these complex topics. Definitely will listen to this interview more than once! ❤

A masterful theorist! Thank you for this.

Just a few minutes in and this is shaping up to be an epic conversation. I had the pleasure of meeting Professor Friston when i visited UCL. In a short presentation I introduced a Mind-Sense-Environment model I was researching, that fitted neatly into his own developments into Markov Blankets. I have moved my own ideas on and reached a much more psychadelic awareness of the reality we share. I personally am not a computationalist. I figure we only need a combinatorial value of intelligence, that there's something in the way information connects and not just that it adds up.

What a great episode! Welcome back Keith. I believe that some inner loops and an outer loop can synthesize curiosity. An LLM can be asked to break up a problem into component parts until the smallest parts are reached. Inner loops can explore each part by requesting from the LLM and other sources all available information. And they can perform testing of LLM generated hypotheses. Context synthesis can be built, tested, and curated. Symantic manipulation can be employed for continued context manipulation. These kinds of explorations can be continued programmatically until goals are reached. This is a better kind of curiosity without the problems of ego, idée fixe, or emotion of any kind. Passion is completely unnecessary.

❤another awesome Oscar of cyber world performance from You and Mara, and this awesome guest, thank You guys ❤️🌞

Fill your mind with wonder and there is no room for fear

Wow, fascinating

The relation to Iain McGilchrist 30+years research in the asymetry of the brain and the way the left and right hemispheres percieve and analyze the objective world, his research into people who have damaged either hemishere and their descriptions/action/perception changes...his latest masterpiece....the matter with things..... is a 1300 page incredible indepth thesis on a 'whole new way of interpreting and understanding. His channel has a 23 x hour plus dialogue on every chapter with a very good interviewer who is a high academic also.. Iain was a 7 year all souls oxford tenor...he passed the most difficult exam on earth..a 2 dayer to qualify..7 years to study whatever he wanted..no students..the pinnacle of learning and resources

The simplest plan would be to freeze or flee on movement. First freeze. It the movement continues towards you, flee. This may be the most basic survival instinct, and it may be what simplest lifeforms do. It may be the entirety of their capacity to plan. So is that intelligence? Is that more than what a thermostat can do? Is it fundamentally different? I ask this question understanding that insects, for example, have a far greater ability to plan. Still, at what point does the feature cause our world model to split, and we categorize a behavior as planning?