Evidence receipt / prediction
Published · transcript-backedKeith Duggar: prediction
10 Sept 2025 Machine Learning Street Talk Karl Friston - Why Intelligence Can't Get Too Large (Goldilocks principle)
“I think that there is a Goldilocks regime, means that we can only exist at this scale with, as you say, this sort of yin yang, this admixture of dissipative dynamics and conservative dynamics.”
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Keith Duggar
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- prediction
- Recorded
- 10 Sept 2025
- Publisher
- Machine Learning Street Talk
Transcript context
…So 1 thing that really fascinates me about this is, however, it is possible for us when we do construct large scale things that are intelligent like a corporation. You know, a corporation is seen as like a super intelligence, but we're only able to do that by putting in structure. Right? That maintains this balance of of the dissipative and and conservative flow. Right? Like, we have to put in organizational structure so that it continue to function at these larger scales. Right? Like, isn't that pretty pretty interesting? I mean, it's it's again this yin and yang thing that we run into all the time. Right? Where it's the balance between 2 2 forces. Like, between, say, complete order and complete noise or between dissipation and conservation. And you have to be almost on the edge of chaos, and it has to have a certain causal structure in order for it to to be intelligent. No, I agree entirely. And that sort of golden locks regime where you are on the edge of chaos, I think is quite specific to a particular scale. Certainly, could invoke a sort of strong anthropomorphic principle here and say yep, the kind of intelligence that we will recognize has to be at our scale. But I think there's something more fundamental than that. I think the very existence, if you subscribe as an externalist to quantum physics and Newtonian physics or Lagrange and classical mechanics. I think that there is a Goldilocks regime, means that we can only exist at this scale with, as you say, this sort of yin yang, this admixture of dissipative dynamics and conservative dynamics. You know, to reinforce this because the conservative dynamics is absolutely essential because it is that which causes this Poincare recurrence. Defines these strange attractors, which is the other way of licensing the notion of strange things. You always come back to somewhere near where you started, like Red Queen dynamics in theoretical biology. So you have to have the conservative, the circular motion just to have a routine, have biorhythms, replicate, reproduce many, many different levels at many different scales. But it's not it's always remarkable in the face of a dissipative itinerant world. Everything is changing all the time. And yet, we somehow sort of resist that change by being at the edge of chaos. Just oh, no. You're you're you're more anxious than I do to say something. Carry on. Please go on, professor Preston. No. No. Well, I mean, I'm just so fascinated by by your observation that with Gaia theory, for example, when we zoom out, the the the apparent phenomena seems less intelligent. And as you said, maybe intelligence is just what we recognize. And, when we spoke with Wolfram that time, he was talking about how we are computationally bounded as observers. And we we do this thing called abstraction, where we ignore details or even idealization where we deliberately distort the truth. And David Krakauer said that intelligence is doing more with less, and emergence is more is different. And, I mean, the earth is not doing it's not doing less. We just don't see what it's doing. But if it's if emergence is more is different, then that it licenses a fundamental reorganization of the underlying substrate, which means it it isn't actually doing the thing at the lower level anymore. It it's it's a fundamental coarse graining, and it's actually changing at the higher level. So which is it?…
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