Does Karl Friston’s neuroscience point to non-dualism?
Seeing | Neuroscience | 2026-03-27
Prof. Karl Friston, PhD, FRS, FMedSci
Hans Busstra, MA
Prof. Karl Friston is the most cited neuroscientist in the world, renowned for pioneering the framework of active inference and for developing the influential Free Energy Principle (FEP). In this conversation with Hans Busstra, Friston touches on the metaphysics of his FEP, which surprisingly points to non-dualism instead of materialism, as widely assumed. According to Friston, space and time, the self, and even the FEP itself are mere stories, useful fictions with real explanatory power, which do not give us direct access to the noumenal reality.
Selected papers by Karl Friston:
Friston, K. (2019). A free energy principle for a particular physics. arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.10184. https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.10184
Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2787
Friston, K. (2019). A free energy principle for a particular physics. arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.10184.https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.10184
A great FEP explainer video starting with the Hollow Mask illusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPj9D9LgK2A
0:00 Introduction
4:19 The metaphysical shift in neuroscience: back to Plato
7:13 On the ideas of Helmholtz
12:40 The phenomenal and the noumenal, I think therefore I am
16:38 If you would be coupled directly to the world, you would cease to exist
21:37 What’s missing from all of physics
24:34 The cell as the first boundary in our universe
25:38 Is it a physics of life
28:49 The free energy principle is just a principle of least action
31:30 Hans on his difficulty in understanding the term ‘free’ in the free energy principle
35:28 What is ‘surprise’ mathematically
39:48 The gift of Richard Feynman, who came up with the free energy principle
44:50 Karl Friston on his early career as a clinical psychiatrist
53:45 The hollow mask illusion as an example of false inference
59:11 On predictive coding
1:03:41 Is the free energy principle a mathematics of conspiracy theories
1:10:21 The free energy principle in ensembles and what it can tell us about bi-party politics
1:13:15 Are there selves within a bigger self Karl Friston on IIT vs FEP
1:14:45 What are the axioms of the free energy principle
1:18:09 On how Markov blankets scale up
1:20:25 Is the free energy principle a theory of consciousness
1:26:02 FEP is about doing instead of being
1:28:20 Why is it bad not to minimize complexity
1:30:59 Markovian blanket and the metaphysics of what is outside of it
1:36:07 On ‘compressing’ the microphone
1:37:50 What is the ideal level of model making
1:40:39 What is our deepest model of the world
1:50:16 The free energy principle in relationship to the hard problem of consciousness
1:52:48 How our models create pasts and futures
1:56:44 On the tautology of your self as a model
1:58:24 Predictive coding applied to itself
2:00:49 Mary in the black and white room
2:07:06 On Karl’s rather mathematical reading of William James
2:09:36 The free energy principle is itself a story
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