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Free Energy Principle random video

Neuroscientist Karl Friston on the Markov blanket, Bayesian model
evidence, and different global brain theories

videos | December 15, 2016

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Free Energy Principle — Karl Friston

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The video is a part of the project British Scientists produced in collaboration

between Serious Science and the British Council.

The Free Energy Principle originally emerged from systems neurosciences as a

way, a principled way, of understanding what the brain does and how it does it.
Subsequently, the principles proved to be so simple and so powerful that they
have been applied in a variety of contexts. So one could almost regard the free
energy principle as an organizing principle for any living system that shows the
characteristics of life.

So, the reason I start like that is that there are two roads to explaining or
understanding the free energy principle. You can either start from the
perspective of people like Helmholtz in the 19th Century trying to understand
unconscious inference in the brain and build a story through analysis by
synthesis and psychology through to current and exciting developments in
machine learning – things like Geoffrey Hinton’s Helmholtz machine. And then
how that has become contextualized in the enactivist or the embodied cognition
context. I’m generalizing these notions and you end up with the free energy
principle or you can start from the top and just ask very simple questions about
what it is to be alive? And, if you are alive and you exist, what sorts of behaviors
must you show? And in fact, if you answer those questions you end up with
exactly the same answers that you would have got had you followed the historical
route.

For brevity I’ll take the high road. I’ll go from the minimalist assumption that
things exist and then try and unpack that and show how one can get to notions of
the brain as an inference engine sometimes called the Bayesian brain hypothesis.

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The brain as one of the best examples of an organ that is actively constructing Most viewed
explanations through its own sampling of the world. So, this inactive perspective
is very important because not only does the brain then have to explain all the 1 Pamela Heaton

sensory input, it also has to choose which sensory input to sample. It is in charge Music and
of gathering information, evidence for its own predictions and own beliefs about Neurodevelopmental
the world. But I’ve jumped ahead so now I have to explain to you why is it that Disorders

any system that exists will behave as if it has a model of the world and it’s trying
to gather evidence for its own model of the world. 2 David Gems
Sex Differences in
Aging
So, the story starts just by acknowledging that if you want to talk about
something there has to be a separation between the thing you are talking about
3 Daniel Müllensiefen
and everything else. And, if there were no boundaries there would be nothing. Does Music Help Us
Because there would be no distinctions between the thing and not that thing. Sleep
Statistically speaking that distinction or that boundary is called a Markov blanket.
It’s just a mathematical way of separating states of some abstract world system: 4 Peter Jones

organism, culture, life, cell, brain into things that are internal to the boundary that Love and Pain
are owned by that system and things that are outside the boundary that are
external to the system. So, it could be a cell and its milieu, it could be a
phenotype, it could be me and my environment. Well, at any scale there has to be 5 Anson Mackay
Human Impact on
this division. Now, the very existence of that separation, that Markov blanket, in
Freshwater Ecosystem
conjunction with the assumption that that system exists over time tells you
something quite profound about the behavior of the internal states and the
6 Michele Dougherty
states that constitute the Markov blanket. Moons of Jupiter

This is a bit abstract but it is actually quite simple. The Markov blanket has two
bits to it. There’s the sensory states that are just defined because they don’t 7 Diana Omigie

influence the external states but they do influence the internal states. So sensory Musical Taste
information, for example, would be mediated by sensory states as they get from
the outside world into my internal world, my brain. And there are active states
that go in the other direction. So, they influence external states but are not 8 Karl Friston

influenced by the external states. They are actually dependent upon the internal
states. If I take me as a model of my world, my active states would be how I am
currently moving, whereas my sensory states would be the activities of my
photoreceptors, all those sensory organs and sensory epithelia I had at my
disposal.

Let’s put that Markov blanket aside for one

moment and just think what it means for a
system to exist over periods of time. What that
means is that it is effectively resisting a
dispersion by random fluctuations. Perhaps the
simplest example would be if I dropped or placed
a drop of ink in a cup of water then almost
Clinical Brain
immediately it would start to disperse as random
Imaging
fluctuations disperse all the molecules around.
Neuroscientist Sylvain
And, I would not call that drop of ink a living drop Baillet on CT scanning, the
of ink because it has dispersed. If, however, I way MRI works, and other
placed a drop of ink in some water and then to techniques that
revolutionized medicine
your amazement you saw it gather itself up, then
relax a bit, and gather itself up again, like it was
breathing as if time was reversed.  You would say there’s something very peculiar
about that drop of ink. It’s almost as if it was living and you become quickly
convinced it was alive. And the only reason you would endow it with the property
of self-organized life, biotic self-organization is that it’s not dispersing. And, the
only reason it’s not dispersing is that all of its internal states and its Markov
blanket that separates it from the rest of the water are moving towards the
center of the drop. The flow of the molecules of the system is exactly countering
the dispersive forces that are trying to disperse it throughout the water. Now that

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flow, operationally, or mathematically, can provably be shown to be simply

moving uphill on the probability distribution of where the ink molecules should
be. And that probability distribution mathematically is also the same as
something called Bayesian model of evidence.

I can’t, I don’t have time to go into it but it is a beautiful observation that the
defining dynamics of any system that does not dissipate over time is that they on
average will move or their states will flow so as to maximize model evidence,
Bayesian model evidence. So, that means that if a system exists then it will
appear to maximize Bayesian model evidence, it will appear to be a little Bayesian
engine. It will appear as if it has a model of its world. Why? Well, because that
system, let’s now go back to the Markov blanket that comprises the active and
sensory states and the internal states that are encompassed by the Markov
blanket. The law, the rule which says that all of the states must maximize model
evidence which is also known as marginal likelihood, that is also an inverse upper
bounded by free energy, hence the free energy principle. All of those states have
to maximize marginal likelihood or minimize free energy including action. That
means, action and sensations on the internal states are all doing the same thing.
Which means that we can understand the internal states say of the brain as
modeling the world because they are maximizing the Bayesian model evidence
for me or a model of the world. At the same time, my action is also trying to
maximize the evidence for my model of the world. So, put very simply almost by
definition I am in the game of garnering information that maximizes the evidence
by my own existence and that’s basically the free energy principle. It’s a corollary
or a consequence of any system that doesn’t dissipate, it looks as if it has to
behave as if it is maximizing actively soliciting information from the environment
and modelling that information as a model of the environment to maximize the
evidence for its own existence. And that’s where we started with the long history
of the Helmholtz’s notion of unconscious inference right through to modern day
machine learning formulations for example, the Helmholtz machine of Geoffrey
Hinton and Peter Dayan.

That can be unpacked at many many different levels and it has provided a very
useful framework within which to understand how that free energy principle is
complied with by the biology, and the anatomy and the physiology of the brain.
What it tells you is that the anatomy of any system has to contain with it a model
of the environment in which that system is immersed. Which means that if we live
in a world that has some deep hierarchical structure, in which there is action at a
distance, for example, so that the color of objects around me is determined by
the instant light as it comes almost instantaneously to my eye, or a falling body is
caused by gravity then my brain must recapitulate that causal structure and of
course it does.

The very fact that we have nerve cells with long slender connections connecting
each other at a distance speaks exactly to the causal architectures of the world
that we inhabit have this action at a distance and this sparse connectivity.
Furthermore, the hierarchical structure of the world is recapitulated in the
neuronal structures that constitute the hierarchies of the connectome or the
hierarchical disposition of functionally specialized brain areas.

You can go further, if the brain is truly a statistical model of the world it inhabits,
can we understand some fundaments of brain organizations such as the
distinction between what and where streams in the brain? So a very powerful
observation, a principle of functional specialization is that where processing for a
stream of brain areas roughly down here and a more dorsal stream is concerned
with what. That may be a simple reflection of the fact that we live in a universe
where different things can be in different positions. So that we can statistically
separate the whatness from the whereness. If we lived in a universe where

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whenever something moved it also changed its nature, we couldn’t do that. So,
just by looking at the brain I can tell you the sort of universe that you inhabit
under the free energy principle, under the assumption that your brain has
become a model of the environment that it inhabits.

The free energy principle has been quite useful from my perspective and that of
my colleagues largely because it shows the connections between previous
theories. There are many global brain theories that have been brought to bear.
For example, the principle of minimum redundancy, maximum efficiency, notions
of the brain extracting as much information as it can from the environment.

There are other theories that speak to how we

select and value certain behaviors. It’s useful to
see how all of these become special cases of a
variational principle, one of which this is the free
energy principle. Which means that you can now
talk to different disciplines and see how one
particular construct, theoretical and or the
Social Neuroscience
empirical evidence speaks to another theoretical
Neuroscientist Mahzarin
construct and essentially see how they are
Banaji on the role of
approaching the same problem from different functional MRI in social
perspectives. Because you’ve got a principal neuroscience, ways our
framework it also allows you to make a very brain perceives social world,
and the origins of human
particular hypothesis about the process theories consciousness
that would conform to the principle.

So, all I’ve said so far is that in principle every internal state, every action that I
made, every sensation that I gather should be at the service of minimizing
variational free energy or maximizing marginal likelihood. How? How do you do
that? How does a brain do that? But, if you know what the objective function is, if
you know what the process, what the imperatives are you can then cast it in
terms of processes. For example, I can say: “well this minimization of variational
free energy or maximization of Bayesian model evidence is a hill climbing or
gradient descent algorithm. So, I can now write down a differential equation
where everything, every neuronal state, physiological variable in the brain now
becomes describable as a differential equation given other states in the brain.
And, if that equation is true then I can now go and map the variables to
physiological processes.

And if one plays that game you can go an enormous way in starting to
understand not just the anatomy but also the physiology and also you can
generate questions because there are alternative processes, that don’t conform
with the same principle, so does the brain use sampling techniques to maximize
model evidence or does it use hill climbing optimization schemes, variational
schemes. So, you start to generate a whole testable raft of hypotheses pertained
to the process theory that are all consistent with the overarching principle.

Karl Friston
Professor Institute of Neurology, University College London; Wellcome
Principal Research Fellow and Scientific Director

biology brain British Scientists cell energy neuroscience

systems neuroscience

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