Provost’s Lecture: Karl Friston on “I Am Therefore I Think”

Karl Friston is Professor of Neurology at University College London. He is a theoretical neuroscientist and an authority on brain imaging. Although he trained in psychiatry, his revolutionary impact on studies of the brain derives from his inventive use of probability theory to analyse neural imaging data. He invented statistical parametric mapping, voxel-based morphometry, and dynamic causal modelling. These contributions were motivated by schizophrenia research and theoretical studies of value-learning, formulated as the dysconnection hypothesis of schizophrenia. Friston currently works on models of functional integration in the human brain and the principles that underlie neuronal interactions. His main contribution to theoretical neurobiology is a free-energy principle for action and perception (active inference). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2006 and became of Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology in 2012. He was the 2016 recipient of the Charles Branch Award for unparalleled breakthroughs in Brain Research and the Glass Brain Award, a lifetime achievement award in the field of human brain mapping. He holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of Zurich and Radboud University.

[@MLDawn]

Prof. Friston is an absolute legend and he is such a lovely character

[@perjespersen4746]

I dont consider myself slow or ignorant. ButCarl blows my mind. I can barely understand the languish and concepts he uses, yet he does so like describes what he had for dinner.

[@stephenwarren64]

Fantastic! Karl Friston is a genius. His ability to abstract and generalize and formulate mathematically is over-the-top!

[@anjankatta1864]

These provost lectures are just incredible, thank you for sharing

[@KalebPeters99]

This is an absolute gold mine of a video. So much to unpack haha Thank you for uploading! And good job on the camera work to actually include the slides 😆

[@anjankatta1864]

These provost lectures are incredible, thank you for making these public!

[@RafaelMorgan]

Can I say I get it and I don't, simultaneously? This is how I feel when I study Friston.

[@ovaisnaqvi1965]

You may....or may not.

[@ReflectiveJourney]

I loved the optical illusion at 33 min. Really hits the point home

[@anywallsocket]

the only issue with the heuristic application of the Markov blanket to the (brain | body) / (brain | environment) boundary is that the division is not sharp: the brain-stem extends down and out into the nervous system which of course permeates most of the body. while that may sound trivial, it's the assumption which defines the accuracy of such a model. moreover, the choice of boundary - as to whether you assume YOU are your brain, or YOU are your brain + body - ends up defining the extent of your cognitive model. that in-turn adds an ambiguous element to any theory thereof. so if we want to consider the functionality of life in model-oriented terms - or inevitably computational terms, we have to be very careful as to the thresholds we impose as necessary for defining the blanket, because if we're not careful, we will get lost in the relativity of such blankets; the accidental applicability of 'living-like functionality' to pockets of entropic delay. which is to say, arbitrary blankets will be made possible which subsume all of our assumptions about what makes life life, within vaguely defined boundaries. if this ambiguity is ignored, it will be akin to Wolfram's computational equivalence - in which the computer can not only be a rock, but it can also be ANY set of arbitrarily connected causal events.

[@khwajawisal1220]

that is what automatically arises from the active inference that is why it is termed as embodied cognition.

[@anywallsocket]

@@khwajawisal1220 yes, in part i'm saying you cannot differentiate whether it's you embodying the cognition, or your environment.

[@annaperry5133]

you are what you control, inside or outside your body

[@anywallsocket]

@@annaperry5133 control, at its edges, turns out to be a rather meek notion, which is what i'm on about. no one however should well disagree with you in terms of your more immediate internal and external correlations.

[@andrewandrus3296]

Are you talking about what constitutes a sensory state vs an internal state?

[@evolutionarythinking5096]

Hail Friston!

[@sapienspace8814]

@ 57:50 "...confirm our own ideas or get ignored..." I wonder if I did that...

[@islandbuoy4]

52:40 Herman von Helmholtz is quoted ... prior to that Karl Friston gives a more detailed explanation of the same 'idea being discussed' ... well now as an *ark+E+typal archangEL who loves angLEs* here is our explanation of the same phenomena being discussed ... *'people often pray to the angELs for help, and the angELs provide new angLEs or solutions altering the POV'*

[@davidwilkie9551]

"Neither", and both, in axial-tangential orthogonality spacing of floating synchrony sequences/universal resonance.

[@islandbuoy4]

hello Karl Friston ... shall we apply one Karl insight to yet another Karl insight? ... i.e. *Karl Popper's falsifiability as applied to Karl Friston's theory?* what we love about Karl Friston's insights is how it defaults in a sense to the law of thermodynamics as applied to entropy [a pet peeve of mine] ... now it was not until 2012 that the following was stumbled upon by the physics community i.e. *entropy + particle shape = chirality* [suggesting right hand dominance in humans does not need to be found in our genes necessarily] ... thus yours truly being the son of yet another Karl asks the obvious ... is the following algorithm hinting at what set the world into 'motion' falsifiable? the algorithm is thus expressed as *ACHIRAL >>> CHIRAL >>> ACHIRAL >>> CHIRAL >>> forever and ever* and ever till death do us part and the chiral anomaly [part of a feedback loop] gives birth to yet another ever emergent manifestation of what 'just is' ... *BTW Karl Popper's insights to Plato's elementary square and elementary equilateral as being approximations of sqrt2 + sqrt3 = pi merged with the squaring of the circle archetype clearly demonstrate the ACHIRAL >>> CHIRAL algorithm...herr Carl Jung yet another Karl called squaring of the circle the 'archetype of wholeness'* To all of the above we can add one more quote by Albert Einstein ... "the coincidence is god's way of remaining anonymous"

[@Gerardemful]

I used to admire Mr. Friston until he outed himself as a cheap nationalist in his Guardian interview.