On the (Platonic) Nature of Things
Karl Friston · University College London · Theoretical neuroscience
Overview
Karl Friston is the architect of the free energy principle and active inference — the idea that any system that persists must act and perceive so as to minimize surprise relative to a generative model of its world. A Markov blanket is what lets us speak of an “agent” at all: the statistical boundary separating internal states from the environment. Through the Platonic-Space lens, the priors and attracting states inside that generative model start to look like the formal patterns a system is built to expect and return to — the “nature of things” it presupposes. This talk is expected to connect active inference to the symposium's central question of where stable forms come from: not as transcendent ideals out in a separate realm, but as the lawful structure that self-organizing, boundaried systems must encode to keep existing.
AI-generated overview based on the talk title and the speaker's published work; the authoritative recording is on the symposium YouTube playlist.