Karl Friston — the world’s most-cited neuroscientist and architect of the Free Energy Principle — joins me for a conversation about how brains make sense of reality, why we seek uncertainty, what beauty is, why psychedelics dissolve our usual models of the world, etc

We talk about predictive processing, active inference, surprise, Bayesian belief updating, jokes, curiosity, trauma, beauty, psychedelics, and the strange possibility that life itself is a kind of controlled hallucination.

Read my Substack essay that frames part of this conversation: Beauty is a Loophole https://micahzarin.substack.com/p/bea...

0:00 — Karl Friston cold open
0:36 — Intro
1:04 — The Free Energy Principle, briefly
7:20 — Technical neuroscience
27:10 —jokes
33:33 — Curiosity
38:19 — uncertainty
48:24 — Goblins
52:40 — Psychedelics
1:13:31 — Awe, beauty, trauma, and dissolving old models
1:38:10 — Curiosity
1:41:29 — Karl Friston’s life advice