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.
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.