Free Energy, Time, Consciousness

Excellent. And we're away. Okay. So welcome everybody to the first episode of Active Inference Insights brought to you by the Active Inference Institute. I am your host, Darius Parvizzi-Wayne, and today I have the privilege of speaking to Professor Carl Friston, one of the most revolutionary thinkers in the fields of neuroscience, cognitive science, theoretical biology, and dare I say physics and philosophy. A leading authority in neuroimaging, he is the inventor of statistical parametric modelling and voxel-based morphometry. I hope I pronounced that correctly. More recently, he has posited the free energy principle, which is technically a normative account of self-organisation in terms of optimal Bayesian design, or in other words, a description of how things continue to be things. As such, his groundbreaking ideas hold profound implications not only for biology and psychology, but also the very nature of reality itself. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my honour to introduce Professor Carl Friston. Professor Friston, thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you. Thank you for that lovely introduction. But what you can say is I just invented lots of three-letter acronyms. That's much simpler. So you have. And I sense a lot of three-letter acronyms have also spawned from a lot of your work. Excellent. Well, this podcast, this is the first episode, as I was saying, sort of off-camera, this is very exciting for me, hopefully very exciting for everyone tuning in. The reason why it's come about is that we wanted, the Active Inference Institute wanted a way to introduce the ideas of active inference and the free energy principle, perhaps to an audience who were not PhD holders, but had a kind of latent interest in psychology, neuroscience, maths, biology, whatever it is, and wanted to explore these ideas a little bit further. So it's a non-specialised introduction to the ideas of active inference and the free energy principle. And as the author, inventor, discoverer of the free energy principle, we can have an interesting philosophical conversation about what that is. It's an absolute delight to have you. So I guess my first question that I need to ask for everyone listening is, could you give us a very brief, or not very brief, but a very accessible definition of the free energy principle, what free energy is, and what this principle says about reality and ourselves? Yes, I'm not very good at giving brief answers, but I'll do my best. We have a while, so go ahead. So just to put things in context, the free energy principle is a principle as read by a physicist or engineer. That means it's a method, much like Hamilton's principle of least action, that you can apply. So one might ask, what are the most important applications of the free energy principle? I guess that would be active inference. So I will answer your question, and I will say what the free energy principle is, but that may have to be qualified by looking specifically at the application, which is active inference, and what that means teleologically, heuristically, what it brings to the table when you do apply the free energy principle. But the free energy principle itself is just a description of things that persist or exist, and it rests upon a careful specification of what you mean by a thing. It starts with exactly the same assumptions that all of physics starts with, basically a random dynamical system. Some people describe that in terms of stochastic differential equations. If you're not familiar with that kind of description, it's just saying that you can describe the universe in terms of the way that states change as a function of themselves. So it's a very generic description of any given universe that just commits to the notion that there is a state of the universe, and it could be very high dimensional, and that it has some dynamics. So that's where the free energy principle starts. But the special thing about the free energy principle that distinguishes it…