Understanding Consciousness

In this episode, I talk about how Karl Friston's research shines some light on how to learn better.

In the first half of this episode I discuss about what I learnt from Karl Friston's videos on youtube, namely, the predictive coding and Markov blanket. In the second half of the episode I discuss the inner world of consciousness and how metaphors are a powerful way to gain some interesting insights about the mind.

Trying to understand the free energy principle is the crucial next step in trying to make sense of the theories about consciousness.

Link to research paper: https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/The%20free-energy%20principle%20A%20unified%20brain%20theory.pdf

Link to my video on Entropy and Maxwell's demon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScnelNSyKm4

Donald Hoffman's research has grabbed our attention and our most cherished views of reality are under doubt.

How do you find the next steps when the last effort failed?

We go through Bayes Theorem of Probability and try to see how the brain uses actions to learn better.

Research Paper: https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niz012

We understand the context of the new paper which is a study of how the brain acts as a scientist, trying new hypothesis on reality.

What is the concept of free energy and what does it tell about the nature of mind?

We go through the conclusion of the paper and find some interesting implications about the nature of voluntary and involuntary actions

We go through the experimental setup, what it takes to ensure good, clean, sparkly data, and realise some harsh reality about the nature of finding truth.

You can read and download the paper here: https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niy013