Thought Economics — Thought Economics — Interviews with the World's Greatest Thinkers

Editor’s pick Culture, Society, Sports & Arts

The Brain in the Dark: A Conversation with Professor Karl Friston on Perception, Free Will and Whether Machines Can Be Conscious

In this interview, I spoke to Professor Karl Friston, the neuroscientist behind the free energy principle, about why the brain perceives from the inside out, where free will fits into a predictive mind, what separates us…

Dr. Vikas Shah 27 min read

Read the interview

Latest interviews

Browse the archive →

Voices in the archive

Notable interviewees

See all interviewees

Entrepreneurs

Artists, Creatives, Sports & Entertainers

Thinkers

Nobel Prize Winners

World Leaders

From the archive

Three thousand moments. Three picked at random.

“The things that are trivially easy for humans turn out to be extraordinarily difficult for machines, and vice versa. I cannot do the square root of a large number in my head, but my pocket calculator can do that instantly. But my pocket calculator still cannot make me a cup of coffee.”
— Hon Weng Chong
“The strangeness of reality was apparent long before the advent of quantum mechanics. The history of science is a sequence of revelations, each showing that the true nature of things is not what it seems to the casual observer. Quantum mechanics, however, takes this weirdness to a new level.”
— Scott Aaronson Theoretical computer scientist specializing in quantum computing and computational complexity
“All conflicts are different with their particular history and reasons. I think that inequality within societies and between regions has become a key cause for conflict, exacerbated by rapid information dissemination, as people are (now) more aware of inequalities...”
— Martti Ahtisaari Finnish President & Nobel Peace Prize Winner for Mediation Efforts

Browse all 3,000+ quotes

Browse the archive

By topic

All topics
  1. 01 Business & Economics The End of Hand-Written Code: A Conversation with David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) on AI, Omarchy and the Future of Programming 365 interviews
  2. 02 Culture, Society, Sports & Arts The Brain in the Dark: A Conversation with Professor Karl Friston on Perception, Free Will and Whether Machines Can Be Conscious 239 interviews
  3. 03 Politics & Policy Who Decides What a Country Is? Michael and Liam Bates on Sealand, Sovereignty and Belonging 172 interviews
  4. 04 Science & Technology The Brain in the Dark: A Conversation with Professor Karl Friston on Perception, Free Will and Whether Machines Can Be Conscious 141 interviews
  5. 05 Health & Medicine Different, Not Wrong: A Conversation with Dave Plummer on Autism, Task Manager and Coding with AI 75 interviews
  6. 06 Nobel Laureates Markets, Morals and the Road Ahead: A Conversation with Nobel Laureate Professor Alvin Roth 21 interviews

Stay with the ideas

A monthly letter from Thought Economics.

Long-form conversations with world-leading thinkers, delivered to your inbox. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.