Consciousness and Free Energy

Just a post to capture a couple of unconnected links:

(1) Sue Blackmore and Deepak Chopra revisiting their decade old “Battle of the Worldviews” disagreement at Tucson 2022 “Science of Consciousness” conference.

Only managed to listen to half of it – not enough actual dialogue and Stuart Hameroff’s chairing doesn’t really help … but some interesting content where – as Sue points out – they have a large measure of agreement and shared experience. (Falters almost entirely on very basic language about what being real and/or illusory/imagined means … before anyone can talk about any explanatory processes, physical or otherwise. Ho hum.)

(2) A brand new paper with Karl Friston on the author list attempting to “introduce” Bayesian Mechanics / Free-Energy-Principle / Active-Inference / Markov-Blankets ….

(Hat tip to Kevin Mitchell for the sceptical link. In fact he has a thread on his reading it:

Maybe I’ll ask a few questions as I go along…

— Kevin Mitchell (@WiringTheBrain) May 26, 2022

I consider that anthropic perspective very important … it’s not just a distraction. The subjective view is fundamental to Solms’ “Crossing the Rubicon”.)