Michael Levin and Karl Friston: How Free Energy Shapes Everything
Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal
Curt Jaimungal
4.6 • 606 Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2025
⏱️ 73 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | We've all conversed extensively about information previously, but what is the meaning of this information? |
| 0:07.4 | What precisely is the distinction between information and meaning? |
| 0:13.3 | For me, what I'm really interested in, and I'm not going to try to give a mathematical definition or anything, but what I'm really interested in is this, |
| 0:21.4 | this polycomputing perspective where you focus on the observer. So there are some, there's some |
| 0:27.0 | given set of physical events, and there are one or more observers that are choosing how to parse |
| 0:33.0 | what they're, what they're observing in different ways. So that might be time scale, |
| 0:38.7 | that may be granularity, and then the ways in which they fill in things that aren't actually in the data at all relative |
| 0:44.7 | to their expectations and most importantly the way in which they will use that you use the patterns |
| 0:52.3 | in that data to do something moving on to into the future, right? |
| 0:56.4 | So, so adaptive utility of whatever's there. That's, that, that to me is the most interesting |
| 1:00.9 | thing about information. It's on the receiving end and how much processing and creativity is |
| 1:05.6 | used by agents to do something interesting with it. |
| 1:09.8 | Carl, do you have any disagreements as to how information becomes meaningful to a cell or an organism or to a society? |
| 1:18.2 | And what's precisely this difference between information and meaning? |
| 1:22.2 | Yeah. So I just recapitulate what Mike has just said, but using language of the physicist. So I think you'd have to start just by acknowledging that most of the physics that's brought to the table to explain this kind of self-organization that has some meaning for the things that are self-organising rests upon |
| 1:45.1 | information theory. So you have very elemental concepts such as self-information, which is just |
| 1:51.1 | the implausibility of an event as enumerated by the negative block probability. The average |
| 1:58.3 | of self-information would be entropy, and that's an important measure. |
| 2:02.4 | And then you can work up to sort of things like free energy as an information theoretic measure |
| 2:09.2 | of the quality of any self-organization. But I think to sort of speak to Mike's point and to your |
| 2:16.5 | question about the distinction between |
| 2:18.1 | information in an information |
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