Why Every Brain Metaphor in History Has Been Wrong [SPECIAL EDITION]
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What childhood observation influenced Karl Friston's theories?
Let me tell you a little story. 1960s, in the summer, a little kid named Carl was playing around in the back of his garden. And he noticed all of these wood lice crawling around, you know, the little insects that can curl up into a ball. And what he noticed was that depending on whether they were in the sun or in the shade, they would move faster or slower. They behaved differently. And that's it. Carl grew up to be Professor Carl Friston, one of the most cited neuroscientists alive. He's been on this channel before, more times than I can count, and that childhood observation about wood lice, it never left him. He spent decades developing what he calls the free energy principle, which tries to explain all of behavior with one equation.
Perception, action, learning, why you scratch your nose, all of it, Friston claims, comes down to minimizing a single mathematical quantity. There's an old physics joke, assume that we can model a spherical cow in a vacuum. The joke is about how scientists grotesquely simplify messy reality to tame it. The free energy principle might be the ultimate spherical cow. It promises to explain self-organization, this bewilderingly complicated phenomenon, with something so emaciated we might as well call it tautological. Even Friston himself agrees with this, by the way. This is what he said to us last time we spoke with him. The free energy principle... is not meant to be complicated or difficult to understand.
It's actually, you know, almost tautologically simple. So the whole free energy principle is just basically a principle of least action pertaining to density dynamics, the dynamics of the evolution of not densities, but conditional densities. That's just it. This is before thermodynamics, this is before quantum mechanics. It's just about conditional probability distributions. So what do we do with this? Has Friston actually found some deep truth about how minds work? Or is he doing what many scientists do, which is mistaking the simplification for the actual thing? Well, it turns out there's a philosopher who has spent an incredible amount of time thinking about this exact problem. Professor Marvita Chiramuta teaches at Edinburgh University.
Her book, The Brain Abstracted, is basically about what happens when neuroscientists simplify brains to study them, what gets captured, what gets lost.
One of the answers that might seem obvious to people is that we pursue science because we're curious. We just want to know how the world works. We want to reveal, discover the underlying principles of the universe, which apply in all cases. Switching off the idea that you're just interested in nature for its own sake out of curiosity and saying, okay, how can we engineer these systems to actually do things that we want? getting them to behave in artificial ways if those simplifications sort of allow you to achieve your technological goals there's no in principle problem with oversimplification if you're gonna say i'm not just interested in nature for its own sake i just want applied science
I should say, by the way, that The Brain Abstracted probably influenced my thinking more in 2025 than anything else. She's an inspirational lady. I look up to her very much. And certainly thinking back on many of the episodes we've done in 2025, I can see her influence in the questions I ask and how I think about things. So here's her starting point. Scientists have to simplify. We're limited creatures trying to wrap our heads around systems way more complex than we can actually comprehend. Our working memory holds maybe seven items. Our attention is more scattered than a group of toddlers with iPads. We die after 80 years if we're lucky. So we build models, right? We leave stuff out on purpose. We tell ourselves stories about how the world works.
But the question is, why does any of this even work at all? Science is a humanistic endeavor, right? The purpose of science in the universe is to make the universe intelligible to us. Not to control it. not to predict it, and not to exploit it.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What childhood observation influenced Karl Friston's theories?
0:00–5:02
2
How does the Spherical Cow Problem relate to scientific simplification?
5:02–10:42
3
What is the Kaleidoscope Hypothesis proposed by Francois Chollet?
10:42–18:55
4
Is software truly a representation of spirit according to Joscha Bach?
18:55–28:00
5
What cultural illusions surround the concept of AGI?
28:00–34:29
6
How do prediction and understanding differ in the context of AI?
34:29–41:59