Is there an organizing principle for all intelligent life? ... At a time when the AI community is stepping back from traditional algorithms in deep and reinforcement learning, this line of questioning is garnering increasing attention.
AI experts believe building a true intelligence requires a deeper understanding of the premium standard for biological intelligence, the “final frontier” of scientific discovery: the human brain. Still, if the brain were simple enough for us to fully understand its mechanics and describe it so succinctly, then would we be too dumb to discover such a principle?
Karl Friston, the most-cited neuroscientist alive, doesn’t think so. To be alive, Friston says, is to act in ways that reduce the gulf between your expectations and your sensory inputs. He calls his idea the Free Energy principle.
Anthropologists have long noted that the repetitiveness of ritual results in a lack of information—what information could be gleaned from endless repetition, such as extending the same greeting or reciting the same prayer day after day? Rappaport recognized that what emerges from ritual repetition and invariance is a sense of certainty and veracity. Consequently, the moral messages carried by ritual seem correct, their arbitrariness is transformed to necessity, and they seem natural and continuous with the physical world