7 Oct 2026 04:00
BI 247 Maxim Raginsky: A Control Theory View on Brains and AI
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Maxim Raginsky is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Max describes himself as interested in probability and stochastic processes, deterministic and stochastic control, machine learning, optimization, and information theory. Today we mostly lean on his control theory expertise, although you'll here his knowledge is vast in many other domains, even some neuroscience. I wanted his control theory perspective on neuroscience, AI, and biological autonomy, so we dance around a lot of topics related to those. Max also writes a substack called The Art of the Realizable, from which I drew during parts of our conversation.
- Maxim Raginsky
- Substack: The Art of the Realizable.
- Related papers
- Control-related episodes
Read the transcript.
0:00 - Intro 3:07 - Low energy lifestyle 4:27 - Engineering and philosophy? 13:52 - Brains vs AI 19:45 - Inferring the inside from behavior 30:57 - Analog vs digital 41:32 - Is the brain a control system? 46:50 - Willems control 1:02:12 - Control vs cybernetics 1:13:26 - A control perspective on AI vs brains 1:17:46 - AGI 1:21:48 - Turing 1950 1:29:07 - Perceptual control theory and active inference 1:40:09 - Passive control in the brain? 1:41:48 - Computation 1:43:36 - Counting spikes
