Tag Archives: Claude Shannon
Entropy, Intelligence and Life
This posting forms part of the talk ‘Intelligence and the Brain’. On its own, here, it provides an as-simple-as-I-can-make-it introduction to the ideas underpinning Karl Friston’s ‘Variational Free Energy’ theory which link what the brain is doing to create intelligence to … Continue reading
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Tagged Bayesian brain, Claude Shannon, entropy, Erwin Schrödinger, Free Energy, information theory, intelligence, Karl Friston, life, Maxwell's demon, Schro
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Talk: Intelligence and the Brain
What is ‘intelligence’? What is the brain actually doing? How is intelligence physically realised in the brain? Quite how the brain manages to achieve what it does remains elusive. It’s true that almost every day there are news stories that … Continue reading
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Tagged agents, Andy Clark, Bayesian brain, Blue Brain Project, chaos, Claude Shannon, connectome, cortical columns, Daniel Dennett, Donald Campbell, entropy, evolutionary epistemology, Extended Intelligence, Extended Mind, free will, Howard Gardner, Human Brain Project, Intelligence Amplification, Isaiah Berlin, James Surowiecki, Karl Friston, Karl Popper, Konrad Lorenz, Lamarck, maximum entropy principle, Maxwell's demon, negentropy, Paul MacLean, Philip Tetlock, physicalism, posentropy, prediction, Rodney Brooks, Sodium Potassium pump, subsumption, Tamar Gendler, Triune brain, variational free energy, W. Ross Ashby, wisdom of crowds
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Talk: Free Will / Free Wont
Most people will assert that they feel they have free will yet most contemporary philosophers and neuroscientists, when pressed for an opinion, will suggest it is just an illusion. Some will half-joke that we only have ‘free won’t’ instead. If … Continue reading
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Tagged alief, Benjamin Libet, Claude Shannon, conscious will, cryptography, Daniel Dennett, Daniel Wegner, Facilitated Communication, free will, free won’t, information theory, John-Dylan Haynes, physicalism, Rodney Brooks, Stanley Milgram, subsumption, Tamar Gendler
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Quantifying Freedom: Part 1
Why Bother? In ‘Freedom Evolves’, Daniel Dennett sets out his thesis of how freedom has increased alongside biology up the evolutionary scale, e.g.: Transition from plants to animals: Organisms can avoid catastrophic events by moving. Cooperation and the benefits of … Continue reading
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