What (if anything) does the Free Energy Principle Teach us about Consciousness? The Inner Screen Model

What (if anything) does the Free Energy Principle Teach us about Consciousness? The Inner Screen Model

With Maxwell Ramstead

Saturday February 17, 2024
9:00am PST | 12:00pm EST | 5:00pm GMT  |  6:00pm CET

2-hour session

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

This presentation is about whether we can learn anything about consciousness from the free energy principle (FEP). This presentation will first gently introduce the FEP to a general, nontechnical audience. The FEP says that anything with a Markov blanket will look as if it infers the statistics of other things “beyond” the blanket, to which it is coupled, but from which it can be separated. We will then discuss the “inner screen model” of consciousness that follows directly from applying the FEP to model known human neurophysiology. The ensuing neo-Cartesian model of consciousness provides a deflationary account of the “homunculus.”

Maxwell J. D. Ramstead is the Senior Director of Research at the VERSES AI Research Lab. Ramstead is also an Honorary Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, at University College London, in the United Kingdom, where he works with Professor Karl Friston within the Theoretical Neurobiology unit. Ramstead’s research focuses on the free-energy principle, Bayesian mechanics, multiscale formulations of active inference, and computational phenomenology.