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is a schematic representation of a Markov blanketed system. The gray circle delineates the Markov blanketed system that separates internal states (int) from external states (ext). The blanket states, sensory states (sen) and active states (act) are displayed as surrounding the internal states. The arrows depict modes of influence. External states influence only one another or sensory states, while influenced only by active states or one another. Internal states are influenced only by sensory states, influencing only active states. In terms of modes of influence, internal states are separated from external states. (figure taken from Bruineberg et al., 2018)
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The free energy principle (FEP) purports to provide a single principle for the organizational dynamics of living systems, including their cognitive profiles. It states that for a system to maintain non-equilibrium steady-state with its environment it must minimise its free energy. It is said to be entirely scale-free, applying to anything from part...
Citations
... Ever since the scope of the FEP was broadened to include biological systems, it has been suggested that it can be integrated with enactivism to form a single unified approach to life and mind (e.g., Kirchhoff and Froese 2017;Allen and Friston 2018;Ramstead et al. 2018b;van Es and Kirchhoff 2021;Wiese and Friston 2021;Korbak 2021). 2 Recently, however, the idea of such integration has come under attack from both camps. On the one hand, Michael Kirchhoff (2018) has argued that in contrast to the FEP, the theory of autopoiesis is too internalist in its explanatory focus, making it hard for it to accommodate cognition in its framework-and even if the concept of autopoiesis was expanded as it is in later enactive literature (e.g., Thompson 2007), the enactive conception of cognition as 'sense-making' is at odds with the FEP's contentless view of cognition. ...
This chapter explores the possibility of integrating the enactive and the Free Energy Principle’s (FEP) approaches to life and mind. Both frameworks have been linked to the life-mind continuity thesis, but recent debates challenge their potential integration. Critics argue that the enactive approach, rooted in autopoiesis theory, has an internalist view of life and a contentful view of cognition, making it challenging to account for adaptive behavior and minimal cognition. Similarly, some find the FEP’s stationary view of life biologically implausible. Here, I address recent challenges in integrating the FEP and enactivism, thereby focusing on the life-mind continuity thesis. I suggest that the FEP, without explicitly defining life and mind, can be used to model the autopoietic dynamics of organisms. Additionally, I argue that the enactive conception of cognition as sense-making overcomes issues associated with contentful views of cognition. Furthermore, I refute the misinterpretation of the FEP’s assertion of stationary organisms, allowing for the modeling of enactive adaptive behavior through free energy minimization. Ultimately, I offer a constructive and interactionist approach to life and mind, transcending internalist and externalist perspectives.
... Tschantz et al. showed how their simulated agent could learn to engage in chemotaxis by means of processes of expected free-energy minimization. We go on to argue that adaptive active inference may well provide formal tools for modeling sensorimotor autonomy (drawing on previous work by Kirchhoff et al., 2018;Ramstead et al., 2021;van Es and Kirchhoff, 2021). 1 Our aim in this paper is to argue that the FEP could potentially serve as a modeling technique for designing artificial agents 1 Note that it remains an open question what the precise relation is between the simulation-based chemical agent and actual chemical agents. There are good reasons to think that in models of active inference agents, the similarity is sufficiently tight to infer properties about actual chemical agents on the basis of simulation-based models of chemical agents (see Kirchhoff et al., 2022 for further defense of this claim). ...
... It doesn't matter for modeling purposes if this assumption is true. A number of papers argue on this basis that strictly speaking the FEP has nothing to say about the organizational properties of the complex adaptive systems it purports to model (Ramstead et al., 2020b;van Es and Hipólito, 2020; van Es, 2021). These authors argue the FEP should be understood in purely instrumental terms as a scientific tool for predicting the observable behavior of adaptive systems. ...
... 5 The FEP is broad in terms of the systems to which it applies. Swinging pendulums, Watt governors and pebbles have all been argued to count as systems that can be described as minimizing free energy in their dynamic coupling with the environment (Kirchhoff and Froese, 2017;Kirchhoff et al., 2018;Baltieri et al., 2020;van Es and Kirchhoff, 2021). Two coupled pendulums A and B can, for example, be described as modeling each other's motion. ...
Biological agents can act in ways that express a sensitivity to context-dependent relevance. So far it has proven difficult to engineer this capacity for context-dependent sensitivity to relevance in artificial agents. We give this problem the label the “problem of meaning”. The problem of meaning could be circumvented if artificial intelligence researchers were to design agents based on the assumption of the continuity of life and mind. In this paper, we focus on the proposal made by enactive cognitive scientists to design artificial agents that possess sensorimotor autonomy—stable, self-sustaining patterns of sensorimotor interaction that can ground values, norms and goals necessary for encountering a meaningful environment. More specifically, we consider whether the Free Energy Principle (FEP) can provide formal tools for modeling sensorimotor autonomy. There is currently no consensus on how to understand the relationship between enactive cognitive science and the FEP. However, a number of recent papers have argued that the two frameworks are fundamentally incompatible. Some argue that biological systems exhibit historical path-dependent learning that is absent from systems that minimize free energy. Others have argued that a free energy minimizing system would fail to satisfy a key condition for sensorimotor agency referred to as “interactional asymmetry”. These critics question the claim we defend in this paper that the FEP can be used to formally model autonomy and adaptivity. We will argue it is too soon to conclude that the two frameworks are incompatible. There are undeniable conceptual differences between the two frameworks but in our view each has something important and necessary to offer. The FEP needs enactive cognitive science for the solution it provides to the problem of meaning. Enactive cognitive science needs the FEP to formally model the properties it argues to be constitutive of agency. Our conclusion will be that active inference models based on the FEP provides a way by which scientists can think about how to address the problems of engineering autonomy and adaptivity in artificial agents in formal terms. In the end engaging more closely with this formalism and its further developments will benefit those working within the enactive framework.
... Others adopt a different tone that suggests that FEP has overcome the limitations of the enactive approach, or subsumes or absorbs autopoietic and enactive theories (e.g., Allen & Friston, 2018; "FEP subsumes autopoiesis, " Korbak, 2021Korbak, , p. 2747; "FEP provides an implementation of enactivism, and in a sense supersedes or absorbs classical (i.e., autopoietic) formulations, " Ramstead et al., 2021, p. 59). Finally, in contrast to the latter, some propose that enactive ideas can be used to fill in gaps and resolve problems in the FEP framework (Kirchhoff & Froese, 2017;van Es & Kirchhoff, 2021). ...
Several authors have made claims about the compatibility between the Free Energy Principle (FEP) and theories of autopoiesis and enaction. Many see these theories as natural partners or as making similar statements about the nature of biological and cognitive systems. We critically examine these claims and identify a series of misreadings and misinterpretations of key enactive concepts. In particular, we notice a tendency to disregard the operational definition of autopoiesis and the distinction between a system’s structure and its organization. Other misreadings concern the conflation of processes of self-distinction in operationally closed systems and Markov blankets. Deeper theoretical tensions underlie some of these misinterpretations. FEP assumes systems that reach a non-equilibrium steady state and are enveloped by a Markov blanket. We argue that these assumptions contradict the historicity of sense-making that is explicit in the enactive approach. Enactive concepts such as adaptivity and agency are defined in terms of the modulation of parameters and constraints of the agent-environment coupling, which entail the possibility of changes in variable and parameter sets, constraints, and in the dynamical laws affecting the system. This allows enaction to address the path-dependent diversity of human bodies and minds. We argue that these ideas are incompatible with the time invariance of non-equilibrium steady states assumed by the FEP. In addition, the enactive perspective foregrounds the enabling and constitutive roles played by the world in sense-making, agency, development. We argue that this view of transactional and constitutive relations between organisms and environments is a challenge to the FEP. Once we move beyond superficial similarities, identify misreadings, and examine the theoretical commitments of the two approaches, we reach the conclusion that far from being easily integrated, the FEP, as it stands formulated today, is in tension with the theories of autopoiesis and enaction.
This article applies the thesis of the extended mind to ambient smart environments. These systems are characterised by an environment, such as a home or classroom, infused with multiple, highly networked streams of smart technology working in the background, learning about the user and operating without an explicit interface or any intentional sensorimotor engagement from the user. We analyse these systems in the context of work on the “classical” extended mind, characterised by conditions such as “trust and glue” and phenomenal transparency, and find that these conditions are ill-suited to describing our engagement with ambient smart environments. We then draw from the active inference framework, a theory of brain function which casts cognition as a process of embodied uncertainty minimisation, to develop a version of the extended mind grounded in a process ontology, where the boundaries of mind are understood to be multiple and always shifting. Given this more fluid account of the extended mind, we argue that ambient smart environments should be thought of as extended allostatic control systems, operating more or less invisibly to support an agent’s biological capacity for minimising uncertainty over multiple, interlocking timescales. Thus, we account for the functionality of ambient smart environments as extended systems, and in so doing, utilise a markedly different version of the classical thesis of extended mind.
Where does enactivism fit on the question of realism or idealism for perception? In recent years all general positions have been argued to be adequate. I will argue that enactivism is neither realist nor idealist, and requires a completely different game altogether. In short: it is not idealist because it sees cognition as inherently world-involving, and isn’t realist because it emphasizes the agent’s role in shaping the world through our own historical, bodily activity. More generally, I argue that the question itself assumes a reified, abstract notion of perception. This introduces a wedge between organism and environment that is incompatible with enactivism’s view of organism and environment as mutually constitutive. This problematizes the intermediate position between realist and idealist extremes as has traditionally been argued for in enactivism. I also touch on the ethical implications of this question, and how enactivism provides a promising path to grapple with the contradiction of the objective, shared space and our individual, historically shaped encounters with it. In sum, I suggest it is time for enactivism to go off the beaten path, and lay its own path in walking again.
In this paper, by means of a novel use of insights from the literature on scientific modelling, I will argue in favour of an instrumentalist approach to the models that are crucially involved in the study of adaptive systems within the Free-Energy Principle (FEP) framework. I will begin (§2) by offering a general, informal characterisation of FEP. Then (§3), I will argue that the models involved in FEP-theorising are plausibly intended to be isomorphic to their targets. This will allow (§4) to turn the criticisms moved against isomorphism-based accounts of representation towards the FEP modelling practice. Since failure to establish an isomorphism between model and target would result in the former’s failure to represent the latter, and given that it is highly unlikely that FEP-models are ever isomorphic to their targets, maintaining that FEP-models represent their targets as they are, in a realist sense, is unwarranted. Finally (§5), I will consider what implications my argument in favour of an instrumentalist reading of FEP-models has for attempts at making use of the FEP to elaborate an account of what cognition exactly is. My conclusion is that we should not dismiss FEP-based accounts of cognition, as they would still be informative and would further our understanding of the nature of cognition. Nonetheless, the prospects of settling the philosophical debates that sparked the interest in having a “mark of the cognitive” are not good.
The free energy principle, an influential framework in computational neuroscience and theoretical neurobiology, starts from the assumption that living systems ensure adaptive exchanges with their environment by minimizing the objective function of variational free energy. Following this premise, it claims to deliver a promising integration of the life sciences. In recent work, Markov Blankets, one of the central constructs of the free energy principle, have been applied to resolve debates central to philosophy (such as demarcating the boundaries of the mind). The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we trace the development of Markov blankets starting from their standard application in Bayesian networks, via variational inference, to their use in the literature on active inference. We then identify a persistent confusion in the literature between the formal use of Markov blankets as an epistemic tool for Bayesian inference, and their novel metaphysical use in the free energy framework to demarcate the physical boundary between an agent and its environment. Consequently, we propose to distinguish between ‘Pearl blankets’ to refer to the original epistemic use of Markov blankets and ‘Friston blankets’ to refer to the new metaphysical construct. Second, we use this distinction to critically assess claims resting on the application of Markov blankets to philosophical problems. We suggest that this literature would do well in differentiating between two different research programs: ‘inference with a model’ and ‘inference within a model’. Only the latter is capable of doing metaphysical work with Markov blankets, but requires additional philosophical premises and cannot be justified by an appeal to the success of the mathematical framework alone.
