flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Translating Predictive Coding Into Perceptual Control | Slate Star Codex

slatestarcodex.com · 15,158 words · saved by 1 readers

Wired wrote a good article about Karl Friston, the neuroscientist whose works I’ve puzzled over here before. Raviv writes: Friston’s free energy principle says that all life…is driven by the same universal imperative…to act in ways that reduce the gulf between your expectations and your sensory inputs. Or, in Fristonian terms, it is to minimize free energy. Put this way, it’s clearly just perceptual control theory. Powers describes the same insight like this: [Action] is the difference between some condition of the situation as the subject sees it, and what we might call a reference condition, as he understands it. I’d previously noticed that these theories had some weird similarities. But I want to go further and say they’re fundamentally the same paradigm. I don’t want to deny that the two theories have developed differently, and I especially don’t want to deny that free energy/predictive coding has done great work building in a lot of Bayesian math that perceptual control theory can

Translating Predictive Coding Into Perceptual Control | Slate Star Codex Home About / Top Posts Archives Top Posts Comments Feed RSS Feed Slate Star Codex Blogroll Economics Artir Kel Bryan Caplan David Friedman Pseudoerasmus Scott Sumner Tyler Cowen Effective Altruism 80000 Hours Blog Effective Altruism Forum GiveWell Blog Rationality Alyssa Vance Beeminder Elizabeth Van Nostrand Gwern Branwen Jacob Falkovich Jeff Kaufman Katja Grace Kelsey Piper Less Wrong Paul Christiano Robin Hanson Sarah Constantin Zack Davis Zvi Mowshowitz Science Andrew Gelman Greg Cochran Michael Caton Razib Khan Scott

Explore this link on the map →

related reading