Philip Ball: belief

Transcript context

…I have some general questions about science for you. I read Karl Friston with the free energy principle, the notion that it makes sense to understand systems as somehow minimizing the difference between the state of affairs prevailing at a moment and the goals of an organism. In psychology, this translates into some view of minimizing surprise. Things somehow happen so that what the agent expects and what happens — those two are brought together. Are these useful ideas or are they just semantic reorganizations? Are scientists picking up on this? What’s the status of all this work? This is the so-called free energy principle that Karl Friston — Karl is a neuroscientist at UCL here — has been a central proponent of, and I see different views on this. I think it’s too early to say to what extent it will be useful. I find it a very interesting idea. A lot of neuroscientists are looking into ways in which they might be able to use this idea to formulate and maybe even to answer questions. It is something that can be formalized. There is a mathematical theory behind it. But others have said — and I think this is a common complaint I might have about these kinds of . . . In some ways, they tend to be theories of everything, or theories of a very big thing, at least. Sometimes, in order to be so, they become so abstract, so mathematically abstract that it becomes very hard to see how you relate the ideas — which are interesting and maybe even productive in themselves — but how to relate them to the lab work that a biologist, that a neuroscientist is doing. How does it relate to what they’re actually finding out? How does it help them to pose new questions and to construct and devise new experiments? At the moment, it feels to me as though it’s at the stage of quite an abstract idea that people are trying to find ways of turning into something more concrete to address a specific problem — whether it’s in neuroscience or elsewhere, or maybe even computer science — to see whether it’s going to be useful. I applaud the fact that we have theories like this that are very general theories that are trying to understand something. In this case, Karl thinks that in some sense, it can be considered a generalized theory of agency. Whether or not that’s true, I think that a generalized theory of agency is absolutely something that science needs. I have a number of friends who seem to be quite worried that they have too many microplastics in their testicles and in their bodies more generally. Is there serious evidence behind that worry?…

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