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Designing a Curious Machine Intelligence That Actually Thinks

An interview with Karl Friston, a computational psychiatrist and an architect of an AI developed to emulate natural intelligence using active inference, physics and fuzzy logic.

Grant H Brenner MD DFAPA
8 min readFeb 11, 2025
Tara Winstead / Pexels

Dr. Karl Friston, a distinguished psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and pioneer of modern neuroimaging, is a leading expert on intelligence, both natural and artificial. I’ve followed his work with growing interest as he and his team uncover the principles underlying mind, brain, and behavior through fundamental physics and Bayesian inference. The natural world’s complexity emerges from a few deceptively simple principles.

One principle is that natural systems seek to reduce surprise through exploration, minimizing what is called free energy-the energy available to do work. Thought, brain, and mind operate in an evolutionary manner, constantly improving predictions and reducing errors through feedback loops of perception and action. Natural systems seek to minimize “free energy”, reducing surprise and finding the path of least resistance- closely related to the physics principle of “least action”.

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Grant H Brenner MD DFAPA
Grant H Brenner MD DFAPA

Written by Grant H Brenner MD DFAPA

Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst, Entrepreneur, Writer, Speaker, Disaster Responder, Advocate, Photographer

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