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A comment on Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to true AI.

Re:Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to ... by currymj on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @10:53AM (#18494722)
As 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”.)

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Re:Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to ... by atschantz on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @12:15PM (#18495491)
The 'revolutionary' aspect is the suggestion that a single celled organism is also doing variational inference. Or, more accurately, can be described as such.
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Re:Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to ... by eli_gottlieb on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @01:41PM (#18496418)
The trouble is hitting the right "happy medium" between (variational) inference as an explanation of the sensory and motor cortices, and variational inference as a universal theory of everything.
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Re:Karl Friston: a neuroscientist who might hold the key to ... by josepi_ on Tuesday November 20, 2018 @07:18PM (#18499138)
Man, I can barely understand any of this. Is there a more ELI5 type explanation anywhere?
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