Talk:Karl J. Friston

Conflict of Interest
This page 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 )...

FRISTON, Karl J. (2010): The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11, 127-138.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:1205:C68D:47C0:2052:B3F5:1909:DEB1 (talk) 10:23, 16 June 2014 (UTC)

Scientists Have Now Themselves Become Guinea Pigs
Friston is far less knowledgeable than given credit for. He still adheres to Dennett instead of understanding top-down (TD) principle which Dennett barely alludes to in his concept of multiple drafts. In fact of course, Friston and Dennett both ignore evolution, much as they cite it, as having the vertebrate & esp. mammalian brain evolved as a finely honed linguistic information processing machine that is functioning flawlessly. Their basic misunderstanding begins with the idea of conscious states while professing simultaneously to talk about consciousness as a process. But Antonio Damasio has taught us that consciousness is a movie in the brain, in which the owner makes his appearance, a better way to think of self-reference than Hofstadter's rather vague strange loops. The Damasio movie is processed in the brain at gamma frequency, normally about 40 Hz but slower in idle moments, though ramping up to 100 Hz in emergency situations. Its frames, usually 12 at 40 Hz, are being processed successively in the visual system at centers V1 (striate occipital cortex), V2, ..., V5 in the temporal lobe, before subsumed in Brodmann area BA10 for total assessment of the instantaneous scene, all the while massively under TD-feedback: "...And the fibers running upstream and downstream are of comparable sizes. An enormous amount of information apparently runs backward in the system. Although the precise function of these backward (efferent) pathways is not known, it seems clear that these fibers modulate processing of lower-level areas," Kosslyn (1994). The utterances of semi-educated scientists like Friston or Dennett would suggest their brains have been productive and their blatherings should be treated on the same level as guinea pigs are in biological laboratories. hgwb 20:57, 9 December 2018 (UTC) hgwb 01:26, 10 December 2018 (UTC) hgwb 01:26, 10 December 2018 (UTC)  hgwb 01:26, 10 December 2018 (UTC)   hgwb 01:26, 10 December 2018 (UTC)