Keith Duggar: belief

Transcript context

…I see. And 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.…

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