Talk:Karl J. Friston

Conflict of Interest

This page doesn't seem like it should even be an article. It seems like a promotion of this scientist than a page of encyclopedic content. I thought the person who is the subject of the article might be involved in editing this and when looking at the View History tab, I see it has been edited multiple times by a user called "Kfriston". This "Kfriston" user was the one who added that Karl Friston is an authority in neuroscience without any references. I know this is not conclusive that Friston is violating Wikipedia's guidelines by editing his own page, but it's very suspicious. In any case, this page could use some attention, because it is of poor quality. Monsterman222 (talk) 21:50, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Publications

The publications section lists a very small subset of Friston's publications. It is not clear why these particular publications have been chosen to represent his work. It does not contain his most cited papers on SPM, nor his theoretical work on the free-energy principle. Falk (talk) 03:29, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

A funny little comment on Fristons models and priors

According to Karl Friston (see Friston 2010), all unconscious living systems have to maximize p(s│m) [with s: sensory state, m: model (or map)] in order to be able to live, i.e., to fight against dissolving or disintegration.

Interestingly, in this implicit equation above (with a probabilistic function or map!), m is given or presupposed, as is the separation between m and s.

However, only a "conscious" living system (e.g., I) "knows" of "having" "maps" (including differentiated "sensory maps") and that I may be a "map-maker". But even "conscious" living systems have to live, so even for them the equation above still holds, albeit now with a slight difference: maximize p(s*│m*) AND p(s│m), and that is why scientists have had to make up artificial experimental tests in order to test their "conscious" maps (e.g., functional hypotheses, etc.).

It is clear that the body (including "genomic maps" "inherited" from "the past") is far better at this optimization process than scientists, because the body does this constantly and full time (whereas most scientists only work part time nowadays). That is why professional soccer players (i.e., unconscious Bayesian machines) are so favoured and payed in "our" world -- because they have (nearly) "made it" on an unconscious level, whereas understanding and testing scientific maps or models may be much more difficult (and only in existence for some 400 years or so).

But all these probabilities mentioned above are smaller than 1, so the only option for scientists (given a messianic prior) is to wait until Judgement Day (where the whole truth will become unveiled anyway) while working and earning money endlessly...

Only for mapologists -- having become "conscious of" (i.e., having been able to map) all maps and biases and priors WITHOUT having to "act" upon some seemingly "outer world" -- the following equation holds:

p(m│m*) = p(m*│m) = p(m│m) = p(m) = p(s*│s) = p(s│s) = p(s)

This means: having reached the horizon (where "life" ≡ "death" ≡ Nirvana ≡ Samsara ≡ COSMOS ≡ I )...