Tim Scarfe: evaluation

Transcript context

…people have written about this philosophically. I think Vanja Weiss has written a paper about this and I think Aneel Seth speaks to this argument in a recent behavioral and brain science paper. It may not be possible and certainly from the point of view of efficiency it's highly unlikely that von Neumann architectures are the kind of things that would conform to Let me reverse. To be is to pursue a path of least action in accordance with the free energy principle. To be conscious does not excuse you from that. So if you want a conscious machine, you have to have a machine that perceives a path of least action. Via the Dzynski equality, that has to be true both thermodynamically and informationally in terms of conditional probability distributions. If you don't pursue that path of least action you can't be and you can't be conscious for a nontrivial amount of time. And I can see you want to ask a question, so I'll interject. Well, need to say Maxwell pointed me to Anil's where he defends biological naturalism. And of course, even Searle said that the biological substrate is an existence proof. He's not saying it has to be biology. But Keith and I certainly agree that it there's something about the substrate, which is which is very important. I wanted to talk a little bit about viruses. As as you know, I'm a bit of an externalist. I've never been able to completely pin you down, professor Friston, because there have been so many interpretations of the free energy principle that that lean internalist and externalist and even, the the hybrid version, which Maxwell also wrote a paper about. But I'm fascinated in this idea of diverse intelligences. And for example, could a virus be intelligence? And, I I spoke with David Krakauer, and he said intelligent things do inference, and they have representations, and they're adaptable. And we are a little bit, you know, we're bit chauvinistic about our brains, aren't we? Because our brains seem to have a privileged status. But what say you are viruses? Or, actually, we we read your paper with, Calvo, predicting green, really radical plant predictive processing. And in that paper, you gave a beautiful account of how even plants could be doing inferencing. And and that to me seems it it seems incredible because I I'm I'm I'm amenable to the idea, But it it seems to me intuitively that plants are not as sophisticated as as we are. So it comes back to this line that Keith was talking about before that if you go too far down the stack, it's an account of we let's call it pan intelligence, where you have a tiny little bit of intelligence even if you go all the way down the stack. Have you spoke to Mike Levin? Yes. Relatively recently. About a year ago. Right. Yeah. I I mean, you know, it would be nice to revisit him. I mean, that that that that is exactly his big question at the moment. And and, of course, he has as an intellectual accomplice, Chris Fields, with him as well. So the 2 of them are really pursuing this notion of basal cognition, that there is intelligence everywhere. And it's just a question of how we conceive of it and how we test for it. And indeed his argument, Mike's argument is that you have to design the right experiments. It's an empirical question. Is this virus intelligent or not? Well you have to design the right experiments to disclose or evince its intelligent behavior and Mike would claim that by many metrics, many rules yardsticks that we use to measure adaptive intelligent behavior. Yeah. Slime molds and viruses and xenobots are incredibly intelligent. And, you know, I I think he's fighting against the chauvinism that you mentioned, the intelligent things are just properties of things like you and me, creatures like you and me and our brains. And that kind of cognitive capacity and competence can be found everywhere. So I you know, I and I'm very sympathetic to that. But it does tread on the toes of the vague argument. You know? I certainly don't think that viruses have the same expressive kind of agency that we were talking about. And indeed, you know, the counter argument to the vague notion of intelligence and or consciousness is of course hitting you in the face when you read that Strange Things paper. I'm talking about categorically different natural kinds that do and do not have for example a causal power or influence of ex active states on internal states. You're either 1 of these or you're 1 of these. I'm not so sympathetic to the view that, you know, a virus…

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