Hmm, I guess it was a bit of cheap shot. But I think I was communicating something real, and disanalogous to what you wrote.
Specifically, everybody knows that both bacteria and humans have homeostasis, and that they maintain their bodily integrity under normal conditions etc. And FEP does not add any new information beyond that fact (cf. Section 1).
If you want to properly understand the human hypothalamus (for example), you should be aware that homeostasis is a thing! This is important background knowledge, albeit so obvious that one might think it goes without saying.
But it’s equally obvious that you cannot start with homeostasis and “derive” that the human brain has to look a certain way and do a certain thing. After all, bacteria have homeostasis too, and they have no brains at all.
Yet the FEP-adjacent discourse, in my experience, is full of claims (or at least suggestions) of that type: claims that we can start with FEP and derive all sorts of detailed contingent facts about how the brain is structured and what it does. But that can’t be right. It’s possible for a thing with homeostasis & bodily integrity to explore and model its surroundings, and it’s also possible for a thing with homeostasis & bodily integrity to NOT explore and model its surroundings. It’s possible for a thing with homeostasis & bodily integrity to turn on the light in a dark room, and it’s also possible for a thing with homeostasis & bodily integrity to NOT turn on the light in a dark room. Etc. Homeostasis & bodily integrity are just not enough of a constraint to get us to any of the interesting conclusions that people seem to ascribe to FEP in practice. And the applicability of FEP to bacteria is relevant evidence of that.
I don’t think the laws-of-physics discourse has any issues like that. The laws of physics are a ridiculously strong constraint. In fact, given initial conditions, the laws of physics are completely constraining. So when people say “X is a direct consequence of the laws of physics”, it’s probably fine.
Thank you for replying—and for the interesting post.
Your mention of homeostasis suggests an important conceptual distinction indicated by your discussion of feedback control systems. Basically, much of the interest in FEP among neuroscientists is due to the failure of concepts like homeostasis and feedback control to explain complex, dynamic, “goal-oriented” behavior. These concepts aren’t false; they just don’t work very well for some classes of interesting phenomena. It’s like pushing a car instead of driving it. You can get where you’re going eventually, you just wish you had some other way of doing it.
Perhaps an original post on the empirical situation leading up to interest in FEP and active inference would be useful, although I am not a historian and would undoubtedly give a summary more relevant to my background than to the modal neuroscientist.
Hmm, I guess it was a bit of cheap shot. But I think I was communicating something real, and disanalogous to what you wrote.
Specifically, everybody knows that both bacteria and humans have homeostasis, and that they maintain their bodily integrity under normal conditions etc. And FEP does not add any new information beyond that fact (cf. Section 1).
If you want to properly understand the human hypothalamus (for example), you should be aware that homeostasis is a thing! This is important background knowledge, albeit so obvious that one might think it goes without saying.
But it’s equally obvious that you cannot start with homeostasis and “derive” that the human brain has to look a certain way and do a certain thing. After all, bacteria have homeostasis too, and they have no brains at all.
Yet the FEP-adjacent discourse, in my experience, is full of claims (or at least suggestions) of that type: claims that we can start with FEP and derive all sorts of detailed contingent facts about how the brain is structured and what it does. But that can’t be right. It’s possible for a thing with homeostasis & bodily integrity to explore and model its surroundings, and it’s also possible for a thing with homeostasis & bodily integrity to NOT explore and model its surroundings. It’s possible for a thing with homeostasis & bodily integrity to turn on the light in a dark room, and it’s also possible for a thing with homeostasis & bodily integrity to NOT turn on the light in a dark room. Etc. Homeostasis & bodily integrity are just not enough of a constraint to get us to any of the interesting conclusions that people seem to ascribe to FEP in practice. And the applicability of FEP to bacteria is relevant evidence of that.
I don’t think the laws-of-physics discourse has any issues like that. The laws of physics are a ridiculously strong constraint. In fact, given initial conditions, the laws of physics are completely constraining. So when people say “X is a direct consequence of the laws of physics”, it’s probably fine.
Thank you for replying—and for the interesting post.
Your mention of homeostasis suggests an important conceptual distinction indicated by your discussion of feedback control systems. Basically, much of the interest in FEP among neuroscientists is due to the failure of concepts like homeostasis and feedback control to explain complex, dynamic, “goal-oriented” behavior. These concepts aren’t false; they just don’t work very well for some classes of interesting phenomena. It’s like pushing a car instead of driving it. You can get where you’re going eventually, you just wish you had some other way of doing it.
Perhaps an original post on the empirical situation leading up to interest in FEP and active inference would be useful, although I am not a historian and would undoubtedly give a summary more relevant to my background than to the modal neuroscientist.