Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast: Karl Friston on Brains, Predictions, and Free Energy

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

If you tell me that one of the world’s leading neuroscientists has developed a theory of how the brain works that also has implications for the origin and nature of life more broadly, and uses concepts of entropy and information in a central way — well, you know I’m going to be all over that. So it’s my great pleasure to present this conversation with Karl Friston, who has done exactly that. One of the most highly-cited neuroscientists now living, Friston has proposed that we understand the brain in terms of a free energy principle, according to which our brains are attempting to model the world in such a way as to minimize the amount of surprise we experience. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but I think we made great headway in explicating some very profound ideas in a way that should be generally understandable.

More here.