Zooming out, Friston’s core idea is a direct consequence of thermodynamics: for any system (like an organism) to persist in a state of low entropy (e.g. 98°F) in an environment that is higher entropy but contains some exploitable order (e.g. calories aren’t uniformly spread in the universe but concentrated in bananas), it must exploit this order. Exploiting it is equivalent to minimizing surprise, since if you’re surprised there some pattern of the world that you failed to make use of (free energy).
I haven’t yet understood the mathematical details of Friston’s arguments. I’ve been told that some of them are flawed. But it’s plausible to me that the particular mathematical argument you’re pointing at here is OK. However, I doubt the conclusion of that argument would especially convince me that the brain is set up with the particular sort of architecture described by PP. This, it seems to me, gets into the domain of PP as a theoretical model of ideal agency as opposed to a specific neurological hypothesis.
Humans did not perfectly inherit the abstract goals which would have been most evolutionary beneficial. We are not fitness-maximizers. Similarly, even if all intelligent beings need to avoid entropy in order to keep living, that does not establish that we are entropy-minimizers at the core of our motivation system. As per my sibling comment, that’s like looking at a market economy and concluding that everyone is a money-maximizer. It’s not a necessary supposition, because we can also explain everyone’s money-seeking behavior by pointing out that money is very useful.
I haven’t yet understood the mathematical details of Friston’s arguments. I’ve been told that some of them are flawed. But it’s plausible to me that the particular mathematical argument you’re pointing at here is OK. However, I doubt the conclusion of that argument would especially convince me that the brain is set up with the particular sort of architecture described by PP. This, it seems to me, gets into the domain of PP as a theoretical model of ideal agency as opposed to a specific neurological hypothesis.
Humans did not perfectly inherit the abstract goals which would have been most evolutionary beneficial. We are not fitness-maximizers. Similarly, even if all intelligent beings need to avoid entropy in order to keep living, that does not establish that we are entropy-minimizers at the core of our motivation system. As per my sibling comment, that’s like looking at a market economy and concluding that everyone is a money-maximizer. It’s not a necessary supposition, because we can also explain everyone’s money-seeking behavior by pointing out that money is very useful.