Karl Friston believes he has identified nothing less than the organizing principle of all life, and all intelligence as well—and he may have. But to understand it, you need to peer inside the mind of Friston himself. (From 2018)
—a metric used to measure the impact of a researcher’s publications—nearly twice the size of Albert Einstein’s. Last year Clarivate Analytics, which over more than two decades has successfully predicted 46 Nobel Prize winners in the sciences, ranked Friston among the three most likely winners in the physiology or medicine category.
Friston’s office. A friend describes him as “a Victorian gentleman, with Victorian manners and tastes.”one of the most influential scholars in his field; he’s also among the most prolific in any discipline. He is 59 years old, works every night and weekend, and has published more than 1,000 academic papers since the turn of the millennium.
Friston traces his path to the free energy principle back to a hot summer day when he was 8 years old. He and his family were living in the walled English city of Chester, near Liverpool, and his mother had told him to go play in the garden. He turned over an old log and spotted several wood lice—small bugs with armadillo-shaped exoskeletons—moving about, he initially assumed, in a frantic search for shelter and darkness.
Toward the end of secondary school, Friston and his classmates were the subjects of an early experiment in computer-assisted advising. They were asked a series of questions, and their answers were punched into cards and run through a machine to extrapolate the perfect career choice. Friston had described how he enjoyed electronics design and being alone in nature, so the computer suggested he become a television antenna installer.
Twice a week he led 90-minute group therapy sessions in which the patients explored their ailments together, reminiscent of the Ask Karl meetings today. The group included colorful characters who still inspire Friston’s thinking more than 30 years later. There was Hillary,but who, before coming to Littlemore, had decapitated her neighbor with a kitchen knife, convinced he had become an evil, human-sized crow.
Friston, like many others, became enthralled by Hinton’s “childlike enthusiasm” for the most unchildlike of statistical models, and the two men became friends.At the time, Hinton was living in a particularly noisy building in Camden. The neighbors’ water pipes were so loud that he built a soundproof box in a basement bedroom out of rubber and ¾-inch drywall where he and his wife could sleep.
The meeting left Friston’s head spinning. Inspired by Hinton’s ideas, and in a spirit of intellectual reciprocity, Friston sent Hinton a set of notes about an idea he had for connecting several seemingly “unrelated anatomical, physiological, and psychophysical attributes of the brain.” Friston published those notes in 2005—the first of many dozens of papers he would go on to write about the free energy principle.
The concept of free energy itself comes from physics, which means it’s difficult to explain precisely without wading into mathematical formulas. In a sense that’s what makes it powerful: It isn’t a merely rhetorical concept. It’s a measurable quantity that can be modeled, using much the same math that Friston has used to interpret brain images to such world-changing effect.
“We sample the world,” Friston writes, “to ensure our predictions become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
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