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SUMMARY:Life as we know it - Karl Friston (Institute of Neurology\, Univer
 sity College London)
DTSTART:20140508T143000Z
DTEND:20140508T153000Z
UID:TALK51801@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Mandy Carter
DESCRIPTION:How much about our interaction with – and experience of – 
 our world can be deduced from basic principles? This talk reviews recent a
 ttempts to understand the self-organised behaviour of embodied agents – 
 like ourselves – as satisfying basic imperatives for sustained exchanges
  with our world. In brief\, one simple driving force appears to explain ne
 arly every aspect of our behaviour and experience. This driving force is t
 he minimisation of surprise or prediction error. In the context of percep
 tion\, this corresponds to (Bayes-optimal) predictive coding that suppress
 es exteroceptive prediction errors.  In the context of action\, simple r
 eflexes  can be seen as suppressing proprioceptive prediction errors. We 
 will look at some of the phenomena that emerge from this formulation\, su
 ch as hierarchical message passing in the brain and the perceptual inferen
 ce that ensues. I hope to illustrate  these points using  simple simulat
 ions of how life-like behaviour emerges almost inevitably from coupled dyn
 amical systems – and how this behaviour can be understood in terms of pe
 rception\, action and action observation.
LOCATION:Lecture Theatre\, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit\, Chaucer
  Road
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