5. It’s very important to distinguish explicit prediction from implicit prediction—and FEP-adjacent literature is very bad at this
It’s hard to criticise this section because it doesn’t define “explicit” and “implicit” prediction. If it’s about representationalism vs. enactivism, then I should only point here that there are many philosophical papers that discuss this in excruciating detail, including the questions of what “representation” really is, and whether it is really important to distinguish representation and “enacted beliefs” (Ramstead et al., 2020; Constant et al., 2021; Sims & Pezzulo, 2021; Fields et al., 2022a; Ramstead et al., 2022b). Disclaimer: most of this literature, even though authored by “FEP-sided” people, does not reject represenationalism, but rather leans towards different ways of “unifying” representationalism and enactivism. I scarcely understand this literature myself and don’t hold an opinion on this matter. However, the section of your post is bad philosophy (or bad pragmatic epistemology, if you wish, because we are talking about pragmatical implications of explicit representation; however, these two coincide under pragmatism): it doesn’t even define the notions it discusses (or explain them in sufficient depth) and doesn’t argue for the presented position. It’s just an (intuitive?) opinion. Intuitive opinions are unreliable, so to discuss this, we need more in-depth writing (well, philosophical writing is also notoriously unreliable, but it’s still better than just an unjustified opinion). If there is philosophical (and/or scientific) literature on this topic that you find convincing, please share it.
Another (adjacent?) problem (this problem may also coincide or overlap with the enactivism vs. representationalism problem; I don’t understand the latter well to know whether this is the case) is that the “enactive FEP”, the path-tracking formulation (Friston et al., 2022) is not really about the entailment (“enaction”) of the beliefs about the future, but only beliefs about the present: the trajectory of the internal states of a particle parameterises beliefs about the trajectory of external (environmental) states over the same time period. This means, as it seems to me[1], that the FEP, in itself, is not a theory of agency. Active Inference, which is a process theory (an algorithm) that specifically introduces and deals with beliefs about the future (a.k.a. (prior) preferences, or the preference model in Active Inference literature), is a theory of agency.
I think this is definitely a valid criticism of much of the FEP literature that it sort of “papers over” this transition from the FEP to Active Inference in a language like the following (Friston et al., 2022):
The expected free energy above is an expectation under a predictive density over hidden causes and sensory consequences, based on beliefs about external states, supplied by the variational density. Intuitively, based upon beliefs about the current state of affairs, the expected free energy furnishes the most likely ‘direction of travel’ or path into the future.
The bolded sentence is where the “transition is made”, but it is not convincing to me, neither intuitively, nor philosophically, not scientifically. It might be that this is just “trapped intuition” on my part (and part of some other people, I believe) that we ought to overcome. It’s worth noting here that the DishBrain experiment (Kagan et al., 2022) looks like an evidence that this transition from the FEP to Active Inference does exist, at least for neuronal tissue (but I would also find surprising if this transition wouldn’t generalise to the cases of DNNs, for instance). So, I’m not sure what to make of all this.
Regardless, the position that I currently find coherent is treating Active Inference as a theory of agency that is merely inspired by the FEP (or “based on”, in a loose sense) rather than derived from the FEP. Under this view, the FEP is not tasked to explain where do the beliefs about the future (aka preferences, or goals) come from, and what is the “seed of agency” that incites the system to minimise the expected free energy wrt. these beliefs in choosing one’s actions. These two things could be seen as the prior assumptions of the Active Inference theory of agency, merely inspired by the FEP[2]. Anyways, these assumptions are not arbitrary nor too specific (which would be bad for a general theory of agency). Definitely, they are no more arbitrary nor more specific than the assumptions that maximum entropy RL, for instance, would require to be counted as a general theory of agency.
Note: I discovered this problem only very recently and I’m currently actively thinking about it and discussing it with people, so my understanding may change significantly from what I express here very soon.
It’s hard to criticise this section because it doesn’t define “explicit” and “implicit” prediction. If it’s about representationalism vs. enactivism, then I should only point here that there are many philosophical papers that discuss this in excruciating detail, including the questions of what “representation” really is, and whether it is really important to distinguish representation and “enacted beliefs” (Ramstead et al., 2020; Constant et al., 2021; Sims & Pezzulo, 2021; Fields et al., 2022a; Ramstead et al., 2022b). Disclaimer: most of this literature, even though authored by “FEP-sided” people, does not reject represenationalism, but rather leans towards different ways of “unifying” representationalism and enactivism. I scarcely understand this literature myself and don’t hold an opinion on this matter. However, the section of your post is bad philosophy (or bad pragmatic epistemology, if you wish, because we are talking about pragmatical implications of explicit representation; however, these two coincide under pragmatism): it doesn’t even define the notions it discusses (or explain them in sufficient depth) and doesn’t argue for the presented position. It’s just an (intuitive?) opinion. Intuitive opinions are unreliable, so to discuss this, we need more in-depth writing (well, philosophical writing is also notoriously unreliable, but it’s still better than just an unjustified opinion). If there is philosophical (and/or scientific) literature on this topic that you find convincing, please share it.
Another (adjacent?) problem (this problem may also coincide or overlap with the enactivism vs. representationalism problem; I don’t understand the latter well to know whether this is the case) is that the “enactive FEP”, the path-tracking formulation (Friston et al., 2022) is not really about the entailment (“enaction”) of the beliefs about the future, but only beliefs about the present: the trajectory of the internal states of a particle parameterises beliefs about the trajectory of external (environmental) states over the same time period. This means, as it seems to me[1], that the FEP, in itself, is not a theory of agency. Active Inference, which is a process theory (an algorithm) that specifically introduces and deals with beliefs about the future (a.k.a. (prior) preferences, or the preference model in Active Inference literature), is a theory of agency.
I think this is definitely a valid criticism of much of the FEP literature that it sort of “papers over” this transition from the FEP to Active Inference in a language like the following (Friston et al., 2022):
The bolded sentence is where the “transition is made”, but it is not convincing to me, neither intuitively, nor philosophically, not scientifically. It might be that this is just “trapped intuition” on my part (and part of some other people, I believe) that we ought to overcome. It’s worth noting here that the DishBrain experiment (Kagan et al., 2022) looks like an evidence that this transition from the FEP to Active Inference does exist, at least for neuronal tissue (but I would also find surprising if this transition wouldn’t generalise to the cases of DNNs, for instance). So, I’m not sure what to make of all this.
Regardless, the position that I currently find coherent is treating Active Inference as a theory of agency that is merely inspired by the FEP (or “based on”, in a loose sense) rather than derived from the FEP. Under this view, the FEP is not tasked to explain where do the beliefs about the future (aka preferences, or goals) come from, and what is the “seed of agency” that incites the system to minimise the expected free energy wrt. these beliefs in choosing one’s actions. These two things could be seen as the prior assumptions of the Active Inference theory of agency, merely inspired by the FEP[2]. Anyways, these assumptions are not arbitrary nor too specific (which would be bad for a general theory of agency). Definitely, they are no more arbitrary nor more specific than the assumptions that maximum entropy RL, for instance, would require to be counted as a general theory of agency.
Note: I discovered this problem only very recently and I’m currently actively thinking about it and discussing it with people, so my understanding may change significantly from what I express here very soon.
Ramstead et al., 2022b maybe recover these from the FEP when considering one as a “FEP scientist” in a “meta-move”, but I’m not sure.