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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…

Vikas Shah 27 min read

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Three thousand moments. Three picked at random.

“I want to take African rhythm and put it into classical music, European jazz, and symphonies. I want people to come together from all over the place, through music. That's my legacy.”
— Frédéric Gassita
“We're not just over-reliant—we're wholly reliant—on American technology across the entire stack. Our data sits in American cloud infrastructure; our hardware is American designed; our software and operating systems are overwhelmingly American; most of the AI systems people interact with are American, and so on.”
— Nick Clegg Deputy Prime Minister of the UK (2010-2015) & Liberal Democrat Leader
“True goodwill is cultivated over time through building customer relationships, fostering employee bonds, and nurturing ties with the community. But trying to pin a numerical value on goodwill, expecting it to annually increase or decrease on a balance sheet, is where the essence gets lost.”
— Sridhar Vembu Founder and CEO of Zoho Corporation, cloud computing company

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  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

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