Living Mirrors with Dr. James Cooke Karl Friston on the Free Energy Principle, consciousness & psychedelics | Living Mirrors #57
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Jul 4, 2021 
Theoretical neurobiologist Karl Friston discusses the Free Energy Principle, consciousness, and psychedelics. Topics include brain inference processes, circular causality, mathematical simulations of behaviors, the balance between maximizing entropy and minimizing free energy, survival strategies, generative models, and psychedelics altering neural sensitivity.
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Brain as an Active Scientist
- The brain acts like a scientist, constantly forming and testing hypotheses about sensory input.
- It actively seeks data to confirm or disconfirm these hypotheses, shaping perception and action.
Existence Requires Boundary and Surprise Minimization
- Existence means a system maintains a boundary that distinguishes it from its environment.
- Such self-organizing systems minimize surprise by staying within states that define their identity.
Two Types of Free Energy Explained
- Thermodynamic free energy describes physical states like neural activity; variational free energy describes beliefs about external states.
- Minimizing variational free energy allows a system to predict and model its environment effectively.