The dark room problem
If biological systems, including ourselves, act so as to minimise surprise, then why don't we crawl into a dark room and stay there?
Here's an article that attempts to provide a summation of the thinking around this problem: Free-energy minimization and the dark-room problem Roughly speaking, the answer seems to be that finding oneself in a dark room with no surprises would itself be too surprising...
But why is minimising surprise the very same as living longest?
Here's an article that attempts to provide a summation of the thinking around this problem: Free-energy minimization and the dark-room problem Roughly speaking, the answer seems to be that finding oneself in a dark room with no surprises would itself be too surprising...
But why is minimising surprise the very same as living longest?
Comments (201)
Minimizing free energy means living a non-agitated, calm, life, with a minimum of energy use, in a silent dark room with optimal temperature and nothing happening. Eating natural stuff, sleeping a lot, without thinking. I think your dreams get pretty wild though. Your brain will not develop (as torturing rats has shown). Eventough dreams try to accomplish this. You theoretically will live longer, but probably die of boredom or go mad.
So lockdown is a boon for all!
No, I think the discussion in the article explains why the formula you suggest is not quite right.
So you are right that "your brain will not develop"; but a brain that does not develop would itself be a surprise; and hence enough to get one outside. At least, that seems to be roughly the article's argument.
I see what you mean. So to evade the thrill of that surprise you escape the dark room to meet other surprises? On return to the dark room though, the non-evolving won't be a surprise no more though. Maybe for your unconsciousness, which might react again by sending you out, or making you dream to evade the surprise of not evolving.
Friston states where the flaw in this lies...
The whole "darkened room" angle only has legs for the naive realist.
Bayesian mechanics is about the pragmatic problem of taming the "blooming, buzzing confusion of reality" - the sensorium of the newborn - and turning it into a useful model of "the world as it would be with us in it". That is, a semiotic unwelt, or system of interpretance.
So whether we are talking of semiosis at the level of genes, neurons, words or numbers, the game is the same. Biology is negentropy in command of entropy production. It is a state of far from equilibrium thermodynamics (ie: dissipative structure) where some autonomous/emboddied self is in charge.
That is what Friston's Bayesian mechanics captures. Selfhood emerges to the degree the natural uncertainty of any dissipative environment can be made predictable and thus controllable.
It is not the world that must be made stable and boring. That is always going to be chokka with uncertainties. It is the ability to then forge a constant sense of intentional self within that blooming, buzzing confusion that is the task. It is selfhood that must be made stable and boring ... which is something most of us successfully achieve as we become creatures frozen into familiar routines and familiar concerns as the "way of life that defines us as being us, and not someone else". :razz:
Applying the minimization of free Gibbs energy to psychology is contrived. When free energy decreases entropy increases, but to form biological organisms in the first place the free energy has to increase. There is nothing that forbids the free energy from increasing during lifetime. There is no reason to expect that systems strive for minimizing free energy. Especially not biological systems, which take in energy to combat entropy reduction and preservation of ordered structure. Why should an animal strive for maintaining the status quo only, which is indeed achievable in dark rooms? Isn't there proof that this is not the case? A dark room might be a total surprise, totally unexpected, and will increase free energy. Luckily!
Not that I noticed...?
"Surprise" here has a special meaning... "the difference between an organism’s predictions about its sensory inputs (embodied in its models of the world) and the sensations it actually encounters".
Yes, same meaning I'm employing. We're quite surprise-a-philic if anything.
But why is minimising surprise the very same as living longest?
That doesn't appear to be the case. Children would expect novelty, and be surprised at its absence. Hence, they are curious.
In article:
The affective state of surprise isn't what's intended by surprise minimisation. Worth keeping in mind it's a technical term in the underlying theory.
On these conditions, the dark room would not matter, the organism would just "do stuff", to release energy and go back to oblivion. This tendency of doing stuff for the sake of it would carry on to most species as a residue of very primitive impulses. A dark room provides no stimulus and no potential reward. It would be safe, until the organism starves.
Better to release that energy doing something, while trying to be mindful of minimal safety precautions. Everything is going to perish anyway so, there's not much risk. In the grand scheme of things, living a few more months or years, is nothing compared to experiencing many things in a short time frame.
Novelty is rewarded with dopamine in just about all animals.
But again, why should minimising surprise be the very same as living longest? It seems that in the account given in the article, it's not just that minimising surprise leads to long life, but that they mean the same thing.
I'm missing something. Can some explain it?
And in the beginning of the article, the Philosopher has also laid down the point of free-energy:
This is the principle of adaptation. The better one can interpret the sensory input of their environment, the better they can adapt for survival or whatever is needed to live as long as possible. The information theory deals with what's expected -- less surprise, or uncertainty, or unexpected, better prediction.
I don't know about that. I know children are powerfully rewarded when they experience novelty as long as they feel safe.
It's why falling in love is so intoxicating. That's all dopamine.
It's not clear based on what they say. Perhaps we should distinguish surprise from stimulus and think of it as a kind of continuum. An organism would want to avoid surprises, meaning life-threatening situations, while seeking stimulus, a way to channel and then release energy.
Unless one stipulates that surprises must be avoided for survival. Then perhaps surprise is a bad term and we'd need a new one, such as "threat".
Research with mice shows it's not just stimulus that produces a hormonal reward. It's surprise.
Going back to the OP:
Quoting Banno
With our without pink elephants and interesting edge cases, it isn't true that we minimise surprise in the way Banno is suggesting. In particular:
is not at all (ahem) surprising, since there is no general rule of aversion to surprise, nor is one needed to explain why people don't run at spikes, off cliffs, or into animal enclosures.
Quoting frank
:up: And they need to be taught safety. Most young children are pretty fearless about climbing out of their cots (or up to the cookie jar). Certainly there are self-preservation instincts at work as well.
Conditions for those experiments are a bit suspect. They put a mouse in a cage with a lever containing some kind of drug. With nothing else to do, bored to exasperation, they'll pull the lever: it could be good or it could be bad. It's better than endless staying still.
When they recreate these experiments in a social setting, with many mice containing other stimulating things like small mounds and wheels and the like, barely any mouse opts for the lever. Some do, but a very small amount, which sounds correct given a sample group.
I was thinking about the one where they dropped food in a pattern for a while and then started randomly breaking the pattern. The result was a dopamine hit and accompanying frenzied behavior.
I can quote it from a book if you're interested in the details.
Why is that surprising? It's a novelty and they still get food.
I think we're assuming surprises must be negative or have negative connotations.
I don't doubt that experiment, but I don't see what is revealing about it. What the alternative, because the mice get food in a different pattern, they're just not going to eat?
They got used to a pattern and then they were surprised by a random deviation from the pattern.
The result was a dopamine release, which speeds up the heart and creates a sense of well being. Dopamine is the reason animals explore around in their environment. It's the reason they don't just hide in the dark.
It makes sense given those circumstances.
Further, I am no advocating the argument in the linked paper, but raising it as an interesting topic.
Most of the posts here seem therefore off topic.
The article specifies that events with high surprisal are surprising in the common sense of the word.
Your posts are not the least bit surprising, tho.
Really? Where, exactly?
We have
and admittedly,
And the connection to free energy
Show me where it says it is used in the "common sense' sense.
Did you not read the passages you quoted?
...and here "better" means less surprising?
This is the part I've not been able to get a handle on: why is minimising surprise the very same as living longest?
What is it about minimising free energy that is the same as fitting in to one's environment?
No, there's no confusion as to what they mean by surprise. I provided the quotes where you could see this. The issue that's being raised is that there's then an anomaly between what we expect for how agents should behave -- they should head to the dark room (in a manner of speaking); and what agents actually do -- they don't seem to avoid surprises, or (improbability) unlikely events.
Quoting Banno
If free energy is the difference between expectation/prediction and actual sensory input, then the lower the free energy, the better the agent's prediction of its environment.
Yes, you are right, and I agree. Lower free energy implies adaptive fitness.
This was what brought on my confusion:
And to get that, we also need that adaptive fitness implies lower free energy. It must just be my getting used to a new way to see adaptive fitness.
Cheers.
:chin: Darkness represents, in the context of our world where clarity is visually-defined, a state of not knowing or unknowing i.e. darkness, the room that's dark, is the precise reason why we possess a startle response. When the sun dips below the horizon and night creeps in, surprises, unpleasant ones, are just round the corner. I thought that we already passed that waypoint many hundred thousand years ago and that's the reason we have the startle reflex - we react faster, buying us time for fight/flight! I dunno.
People will assume 'surprise' to mean the everyday 'surprise' unless the technical term is outlined.
In simpler terms it merely refers to differing from the norm and something I find interesting about the 'Free energy principle' - in terms of the cognitive neurosciences - it how this plays off Inhibition of Return (IOR) in terms of awareness and attention.
Quoting Banno
Because 'minimising' doesn't mean 'eradicating'? I don't really understand this question unless you took 'minimising' to mean 'reduce to nothing'. It might also be a case of conflating this in terms of 'evolution,' 'information theory' and actual 'physical energy'?
Are these two the same thing though?
I'm sure @Alexandre Harvey-Tremblay has something to say about this. He's of the opinion that if something, anything, isn't mathematizable, it's nonsense. I tend to agree but in a broader sense - if the mathematics can't be rendered into ordinary language without weirdness à la quantum physics then, the mathematics must be nonsensical, right? It's only fair to think/say so, no?
In all likelhood this is a case of poor analogy. A dark room is the quintessential state of unknowing - imagination runs wild and what happens is activation of fear-driven explore mode and possibilities, possibilities, and more possibilities; in other words uncertainty. Put simply, a dark room = [math] \infty[/math] information, it's overflowing with surprises.
[math]\log_2 \infty = ?[/math] Shocking!
The pertinent parts of the article:
and
This is the notion of surprise I and (I think) are talking about. The brain models its environment based on past sensory input. When it finds something surprising, i.e. that the model could not predict, it rewards itself with a hit of dopamine. On an evolutionary scale, sure, we may have evolved the above to maximise evidence to optimise that model. However the answer to the question stands. There are other, better, more factual reasons why we fear dark caves.
However I can tell that you have a very precise idea of how the mode of discussion should go, so I'll make this post my last. But for the record, the article does answer your question (read to the end).
Nice of you to say so, but it was a hurried reply to a confused OP. I can do better. :smile:
First, it is obvious that to be able to predict the world with minimal error is going to be a way to live longer. Or even more importantly - from a true Darwinian perspective - maximise your reproductive success. So that “mystery” is easily dealt with.
Then the actual Darkened Room issue.
Perhaps it is clearer in Friston’s more recent Markov Blanket reformulation of his arguments, but an enactive/semiotic approach to cognition is all about the coupling of the organism to its world by a cybernetic feedback loop of action and sensation.
An organism’s actions on the world are a source of certainty. It is like a hypothesis that you intend to test, You can at least be certain of what you plan to do in terms of acting on the world.
The world itself is then the source of surprise. While you act with the certainty of an intention that is going to make some change to the world, the world is coming back at you the other way as the cause of any sensory uncertainty.
The trick is then to act in ways that only increase your certainty about the sensations you will experience. If the certainty of your actions effectively reduces the uncertainty of your sensations, then the two sides of the equation are tightly coupled in a way that optimises your ability to exist in the world.
It is all you have to do. Minimise the surprises that would otherwise stop you smoothly meeting your needs as a living organism. Zero surprise means every wish is being effortlessly met. Sensory prediction error is used to calibrate habits of action. You are winning to the degree your plans for your future don’t encounter the unexpected.
But an organism lives in the world. It exists because it can tame environmental uncertainty through its actions. It can feed itself, protect itself, reproduce itself, etc. It can act in ways that reduce the world’s uncertainty.
So it doesn’t need to retreat to the refuge of a darkened room to escape the environment’s capacity to surprise. That move might seem to remove the source of sensory uncertainty, but it would also remove the certainty represented by the organism’s store of habits of action. The whole system of cognition would collapse. As it does in sensory deprivation conditions.
Not really. Finding your lost keys might be a pleasing surprise. A sudden increase in your world certainty. Spotting the lurking tiger is something different, a sudden increase in your world uncertainty.
A dopamine hit locks in a goal state. You get tunnel focus on the natural next action of grabbing your keys. Dopamine fixes a habit of action - hence is associated with addiction.
But an increase in uncertainty leads to a drop in serotonin, and increase in noradrenaline. You get hit by neuromodulators that cause you to cast around anxiously for some better predictive model of the world.
So surprise is information uncertainty. But if you are looking for lost keys, you at least know they are somewhere and what you want them for. The unpredictable bit is where they will show up as an environmental sensation. The dopamine happiness is about being immediately back on track in a surprise minimised world.
A lurking tiger is a much greater source of uncertainty. You didn’t predict it and you are not sure what is the best thing to do about it. The sensory surprise of seeing it doesn’t spell the end of your state of uncertainty but the start of it.
But we obviously don't, animals neither. Empirical observation makes it crystal clear to us. Somehow the article seems to alters "surprise" common definition as to make it sound similar to "danger". Not all surprises are bad. And especially we humans are by nature curious creatures. So we mostly seek for surprises instead of avoiding them.
Quoting Banno
It isn't.
For me it is just one more example of how many people love "problems" and "paradoxes". Creating them out of nowhere,complicating things unnecessarily only as to come as "savors" later to suggest the "solution"? Or maybe just to give their name to a" problem" or "paradox"? Who knows.
I'm not talking about you here, but for the author of the article.
Sorry but I see no " dark room problem" at all here.
Indeed:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
and
Quoting Kenosha Kid
The problem is in trying to model all human behaviour according to one general rule when in fact it is an interplay between many physical processes evolved at different times in different environments, some overriding. Our fear of lurking tigers _is_ quite different from our innate curiosity for the novel, and should be treated as such.
[quote=Hilaire Belloc]Always keep-a hold of nurse - for fear of finding something worse! [/quote]
Good advice, but impossible in the long run.
Well said.
Did you hear about the vegan who tried to eat all the cows so there'd be no more cows to eat?
Serotonin is an H&N chemical, so that's expected.
*Dopamine got the nickname “the pleasure molecule” based on experiments with addictive drugs. The drugs lit up dopamine circuits, and test participants experienced euphoria. It seemed simple until studies done with natural rewards—food, for example—found that only unexpected rewards triggered dopamine release. Dopamine responded not to reward, but to reward prediction error: the actual reward minus the expected reward. That’s why falling in love doesn’t last forever. When we fall in love, we look to a future made perfect by the presence of our beloved. It’s a future built on a fevered imagination that falls to pieces when reality reasserts itself twelve to eighteen months later. Then what? In many cases it’s over. The relationship comes to an end, and the search for a dopaminergic thrill begins all over again. Alternatively, the passionate love can be transformed into something more enduring. It can become companionate love, which may not thrill the way dopamine does, but has the power to deliver happiness—long-term happiness based on H&N neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, vasopressin, and endorphin. It’s like our favorite old haunts—restaurants, shops, even cities. Our affection for them comes from taking pleasure in the familiar ambience: the real, physical nature of the place. We enjoy the familiar not for what it could become, but for what it is. That is the only stable basis for a long-term, satisfying relationship. Dopamine, the neurotransmitter whose purpose is to maximize future rewards, starts us down the road to love. It revs our desires, illuminates our imagination, and draws us into a relationship on an incandescent promise. But when it comes to love, dopamine is a place to begin, not to finish. It can never be satisfied. Dopamine can only say, “More.”". -- The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity--and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race, Lieberman
Dark rooms are threatening. They promise surprise. We don't know if there is a mountain bear in the cave, we don't see the scorpions and the snakes. Darkness does not decrease the surprise element; it increases it. We are not in control, because we don't see, or don't see the details well enough.
We sleep in the dark because we are basically defenseless in both the dark and in our sleep. So we combine the two, marry the two, and get two birds stoned under one hat.
When I read that sentence I immediately thought of Friston (who is indeed the lead author). Sean Carroll had a podcast with him, where they touched upon the dark room (non-)problem, among other things. It's pretty complicated stuff (at least for someone with no relevant background) that's hard to grasp without getting into some details of information theory, probability, Markov blankets and all that. People shouldn't jump to conclusions based on a short paraphrase.
It may be worth mentioning that the idea of prediction error (surprise) minimization and predictive processing in general has been kicking around in cognitive science for some time. Other notable people actively working on it are Andy Clark (of The Extended Mind) and Jakob Hohwy. Friston's particular contribution is in bringing the Helmholtz free-energy approach to bear on the problem, and then trying to extend it beyond cognitive science to living systems in general.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Sure, but also keep in mind that there can be multiple subsystems that can be described by that model, of varying complexity and operating concurrently on different timescales.
This is typical of AI logic. Very much like antinatalism which, as per @180 Proof amounts to, paraphrasing, "destroying the village to save the village". Another instance is that of negative utilitarianism's riddle of whether we should kill everybody to reduce suffering. AI "thinks" exactly like this but the problem is:
[quote=H. L. Mencken]For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.[/quote]
There seems to be two ways of minimizing surprises:
1. To reduce possibilities. This is the dark room problem. AI (false)"solution".
or
2. Anticipate (correctly) which possibilities will actualize. One needs a good model of reality to do this. Human (non-AI) (real) solution.
So whoever thought of the dark room problem is basically switching between AI logic and human logic - the dark room is a valid solution for an AI but not so for a human and other animals too I suppose.
:chin:
To me, the problem lies in the utilization of these principles.
The computational theory of mind and the conflation of brains and creatures invariably leads to such problems.
An insect crawls to a dark spot in a room or outdoors for the reason that it'll escape notice and thus no nasty surprises (predators)! The insect does have an accurate model of reality - predators, quite literally, everywhere. The AI solution, "surprisingly", is a good one. Silly humans!
Where's the paradox?, you ask.
Well, the darkness in which an insect hides is, from the vantage point of another living organism, full of surprises. Juxtapose that with the concealed insect's state of fewer surprises.
But Friston is creating a mathematically general theory of the modelling relation that distinguishes all bios from all a-bios. He is giving neuroscience its own proper physicalist foundation - Bayesian mechanics - to wean it off the Universal Turing Machine formalisms that want to treat the brain as a representing and simulating computer.
When he talks of surprise, it is as a technical term within a new mathematical structure. He brings together many existing information theoretic concepts - surprisal, mutual information, free energy - under the one general set of equations. So the theory is broad enough to cover the mind of a bacterium as much as a human.
First you find the common base principles of what a biotic modelling relation with the world is all about. Then you can start to worry about the complexities of the specific implementations.
Perhaps the probability of being surprised in conditions where a creature is unable to use its senses overrides the probability of being surprised in conditions where it can.
:ok: To stay in the dark is to level the playing field. Yes, I can't see (you) but neither can you (see me)! Plus, I could be a predator for all you know, vice versa of course :grin: The darkness is brimming with possibilities - food/as food.
It appears that the idea/point is not to reduce surprise but to increase it. :chin:
The theory here is sort of like that. You need to destroy surprise in order to be surprised. You have to create a baseline where the world is made as predictable and unsurprising as possible. That then allows you to experience the counterfactuality of events which are actually surprising - events that have personalised meaning or information because they must force you to revise your beliefs about the world.
Surprise can’t exist in the usual sense if everything that happens counts as something out of the blue. That becomes just randomness.
The brain desires salience. It has to discover the signal by first eliminating the noise.
Any kind of science needs to be driven by evidence, not a desire for totalising unity. We do not accept theory on the grounds that it's neat, but on its accord with observation.
That, and a theory that insists we minimise surprise by maximising surprise is just incoherent.
Quoting apokrisis
He defined surprise in the article; I quoted it above. Yes, a human is only one example of a biological system, but you only need one counterexample to falsify a law.
The idea that this is what _evolution_, rather than a biological system, does is quite interesting. Generally, I tend to see nature working in the guise of optimisation procedures, and free energy minimisation is an optimisation procedure. The problem again is that there are already optimisations that better fit the facts. Essentially equating surprise minimisation with fitness might be neat, but it's not really explanatory. Evolution isn't really trying to minimise surprise; it's trying to maximise fitness.
Someone mentioned children - fresh minds, tabula rasa. To younglings, the world is full of surprises because they haven't had time or are in the process of constructing a faithful model of the world, one which would help them to anticipate events, prepare for them, etc. and then they mature into adults. As adults, growing older is just another name for accumulation of empirical data to refine said model which is an asymptote for actual/true reality. My guesstimate is the model any person develops should be a good map of the territory by the 25th year of life if it's to be of any use at all.
:up: Well said.
As a model of neurophysiology, it goes back to the first efforts at mind science in the 1800s. What is new is to cash out the story as actual maths and physics.
Psychology went down the wrong path of trying to found itself on computer science in the 1950s. Now it can join biology in rooting itself in the maths and physics of dissipative structure theory.
The Hard Problem gets sorted at root if mind, like life, is shown to be a physical principle from the getgo.
Friston positions Bayesian mechanics as the new fourth branch of physics - following on from classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics.
So Kuhn was wrong about paradigms? Whatever.
(Do you see how you just employed the data processing paradigm that Bayesian mechanics replaces to try to argue against Bayesian mechanics? Oh the irony.j
Quoting Kenosha Kid
You are creating your own confusion by talking about surprise as if it were just a “feeling” here and not an information theoretic metric.
Check out Friston’s recent Markov Blanket and Unified Theory of Unified Theories presentations if you want to get beyond the verbiage and kick the tyres of the actual maths.
Agreed. But what is also key is that the map of the territory is one that is a map of the territory with oneself in it as well. So it isn’t a map with the whole world represented, it is a map of the route you want to take to complete your self-defining life mission. It is a map of yourself as much as a map of the world you must inhabit.
This is the difference between a Cartesian representational model of what the brain does - the computer science model - and an enactive or embodied view of cognition. Our neural models of the world are maps which embody a personal point of view.
Yep. That's the argument.
That has absolutely nothing to do with it.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm not arguing against Bayesian mechanics. Not liking turkey doesn't make me a vegetarian.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, the definition is quoted above. I know your initial MO was to claim that, by disagreeing, I must be employing a different definition, but it's a tad late for that now. I'm speaking of it in the same terms as the paper, both as a metric to optimise and, as per the paper, how it ought to be used scientifically, i.e. in predicting outcomes. And, as I said, I'm quite sympathetic to viewing nature in terms of parameter optimisation, that's my go-to. But, again, just because I like duck, doesn't mean I like turkey, and this is a turkey.
:yawn:
Quoting Kenosha Kid
And yet where you correctly quote surprise as it is defined by Friston as....
You then go on to discuss it in terms of some pop-neuropsychology bullshit...
Quoting Kenosha Kid
A "hit" of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens triggers a switch from acting on habit to responding with focused attention. The prefrontal cortex is also "hit" with dopamine so as to underwrite the fixing of the moment in working memory.
It is not about subserving a feeling - even if it might feel like something to be alerted, focused, engaged. It is about a certain kind of surprise or prediction error that leads to a positive orientation response. A global decision to approach closer and explore, gather more information.
Then surprise or prediction error can trigger the opposite form of orientation response if that is judged more appropriate. We can flinch, pull away, prepare for fight or flight (or even simply freeze). The brain's hierarchy gets "hit" by other neuromodulators like noradrenaline - a transmitter with information processing consequences like jacking up the signal/noise ratio of our neuronal responses. When facing radical uncertainty - like a lurking tiger - the brain tilts towards a willingness to jump to rapid conclusion based on limited data and prior experience.
So going off on some riff that surprise = dopamine = reward is just telling me you haven't studied the role that neuromodulators play in the complex information economy of the brain.
There is a hell of a lot more to it all. Which is why it is so valuable that Friston might boil all the complexity down to its simplest possible mathematical expression.
Evolution doesn't try anything. Evolution is just a human invention, replacing a notion of god and his creation of life. There is no such thing as evolution standing above life, trying to create maximally fit life. It is life itself that evolves, not life guided by evolution. And life evolves in ways that are fit for the habitats they evolve in.
Likewise, it's nonsense to say that life evolves under the strict influence of selfish genes which shape the vessels they are in in order to procreate themselves, or that memes guide human behavior in order to spread them. Of course, gene prolongation and memes hopping from mind to mind is what happens (like evolution) but life is not ordered by them (nor evolution).
There are parameter maximization parameters indeed. If there is only the expected around, then the free energy will be tuned to the minimum (or entropy to a maximum) for which life will stay alive. Living in a dark room, how much of an unexpected event it might be, temporarily creating increase of free Gibbs energy, will become a state one gets used to, and a state of minimal free energy will arise.
Is it really though? No, although the theory here seems to imply that (that life, once there, is a drive towards minimal free Gibbs). The dark room state will create rest at first, but then the excitement kicks in. Like fish kept in dark water develop big eyes. There is a need to encounter surprises or challenges. To exist in a world with surprises. Staying in a dark room will drive one mad. It might be a surprise to end up in it, but that's not the surprise one needs. Though occasionally it's nice. Like going to sleep temporarily reduces free energy. Maybe there are even people who want to stay asleep their whole lives, I dunno (didn't I hear it sung: "I am tired, I am weary. I could sleep for a thousand years. A thousand dreams, that would awake me. Different colors, made of tears").
Living in a dark room might prolong life, but only for people not expecting anything.
Quoting Kenosha KidThe difficulty with the surprise avoidance theory is that, even here, it provides an answer: the cave is to be avoided precisely because it holds surprises. You are right to draw attention tot he methodological issue, which seems to me to be the same as that addressed by Watkins, and used as the basis for a previous thread: namely that if any action on the part of an organism can be explained as avoiding surprise, then the explanatory value of the theory is zero. Those who see it as true in some a priori fashion (Apokrisis?) will always be able to explain any given observation in terms of the theory, but at the cost of introducing ad hoc hypotheses to make it fit.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I would not be at all surprised to see in a few years a crusading pedagogue explaining how the only way to teach kids is to minimise the surprises to which they are exposed. And there will be schools that follow that advice, with mixed success.
But then, it is fascinating to see ideas from different areas coming together in a more unified theory. The explanatory power of surprise avoidance will take years, and much subtle empirical evidence, to evaluate.
Did we do a thread on that article? Perhaps its time for another look. Clark is a co-author on the Free-energy minimization and the dark-room problem article of the OP.
But the theory actually states that life expresses the drive to avoid becoming randomised by its environment.
It gets confusing because life and mind must also be able to do work. The free energy principle is being treated here as a statement that the goal of life and mind is to do no work - retreat into a dark room and do nothing. But what it actually is saying is that the goal of minimising free energy is how a baseline for personal being gets established. The first requirement is to be able to have a structure of belief about the world - a reality model - that is not immediately being entropified away into uncertainty. That baseline is then what sets the scene for the second thing of actually getting to work on the world.
In constructing some state of certainty, some meaningful or autopoietic distinction is made between the self and the world. And that epistemic cut between the world and the self is what allows us to deal with entropy or information uncertainty to the degree it has some practical interest for us.
So the model is of course a structure with high negentropy - and island of wisdom afloat in a world of dissipation or entropy increase. There is a historical investment in some structure of learnt habit. And now the free energy principle is about maintaining that investment by minimising the need to make any changes to it.
But that just then limits the need to make change and promotes enduring stability. The environment is of course going to continue to demand adaptive change to the neural model. However, that change is now focused just like a Brownian ratchet. Encountering uncertainty leads to adaptation or learning by the model, rather than randomising it - eroding our historically constructed structures of belief.
The free energy principle imposes a thermodynamic direction on the modelling relation the organism has with its world. By pre-filtering noise, what comes through is by definition salience - a meaningful signal. So what should ordinarily act to scramble a structure of certainty - increase a model's entropy - instead only is allowed to increase its negentropy.
If you can wedge the forwards steps, you can milk a randomising environment for its energy in Brownian ratchet fashion.
Coincidentally, this same principle is also the biggest paradigm shift to hit theoretical biology in the last decade. It is how life operates down at the quasi-classical nanoscale, as with kinesins and other molecular machines.
Probably won't ever achieve it though.
:up:
Why do you think that dopamine response evolved? Why do you think children are naturally drawn to novelty? Just for the luls? It's there to maximise information for building models about our environments.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm dismissing it in terms of its fidelity to actual biology. That will have different degrees of importance to different people, of course.
Quoting Banno
Tbf I've never argued that this was even a good question. There really _are_ optimisation procedures for ensuring that biological models of environments (not just mental models, but in the physical makeup of the organism) are a good fit for the environment you find them in. Nonetheless, I like night-diving. It's excellent! And the only time I'm apt to have to deal with that environment is... when I'm night-diving.
So okay we can say "Ah but yeah no the algorithm doesn't know which environments we have to adapt to in future, so it's best to sample them all." So then which is it? If the phrase "minimising surprise" must mean not living in dark caves because we don't have a model for that, and exploring things not in the model to prepare us for future surprise-minimisation, i.e. both X and !X, it's not a good definition. The article reminds me of bad psychologists and sociologists who pick the statistical tests to give closest to the desired answer, except it fudges its meaning over scales instead.
This might be above your pay grade, but listen to Friston and he tells you he understands that he offers only a generalised theory of everything. To then use that as the basis of models of particular functions or systems is another matter. Of course that becomes a more ad hoc exercise - even if just for the reason that the beautiful theory must be spoilt by random historical accidents. :razz:
Australia got the kangaroos, Europe got the cows, New Zealand got the moa. The general logic of ecology demands large vegetation munchers to balance the entropic equation, recycle the material negentropy and keep it within the system. And while kangaroos, cows and moa are all equally good solutions at that level of explanation, the reasons why they are all such different solutions becomes a matter of historical accident as far as we can tell.
Again, what matters is that Friston offers a mathematics - Bayesian mechanics - which captures the essence of the semiotic modelling relation in a way that the mathematics of Turing computation doesn't.
It is counterfactually an improvement on the kind of logicist paradise that has pervaded the study of life and mind up until now.
Neuroscientists and biologists always knew that organisms aren't simply machines. Friston provides a general mathematics that supports that.
Quoting Banno
If folk are too dumb to understand what is actually being said, then sure.
Quoting Banno
There is a vast amount of empirical evidence already. Helmholtz put psychology on a scientific footing in the 1800s by showing that prediction was the basis of cognition and sensation.
But then along came computer science and its logical atomism. The machine model of reality. Psychology lost its way for a good while, especially in the Anglo world.
That baseline is achieved indeed by maintaining a certain free energy that's needed to live a life. In order to maintain that minimal required energy (a maximum possible entropy, above which the system collapses to a lower free energy, like a mixture of gas molecules reducing their free chemical potential energy if not kept below a certain temperature), there have to occur as less surprises as possible. The status quo can be maintained. If unexpected things happen, the free energy has to increase. Excitement occurs. Information increases, depending on the new situation. Free energy and information temporarily rearrange, and a new status quo will be achieved. After which the situation is familiar and free energy will diminish again. One can arrange life to meet as little surprises as possible, like seek sanctuary in a dark room, but surprises are needed in life.
This is a reasonable conclusion.
Do you read what I say? Of course once you can prevent the environment from increasing your belief uncertainty, you then lock in the possibility of ratcheting belief in the direction of ever-broader uncertainty.
It is monotonic to claim "children are naturally drawn to novelty". They have a natural need to learn and construct a stable neural model of the world. They have a natural need to take the random, over-connected, mess of synaptic connection which they are born with and prune the thickets back to give them useful shape. They have a natural need to act on the world and so discover the good and bad consequences that might follow.
Your framing of the issues is too one note.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
And you are simply wrong on that score. You don't appear to understand the theory, so no surprise you don't understand what could count as legitimate criticisms of it (and I believe there are criticisms, such as that Friston is so physicalist that he doesn't give sufficient place to the role that semiotic code principles play in actually being the ratcheting mechanism at the heart of the Markov Blanket).
A cave is no dark room. I know exactly what to expect in the dark sleeping room. A dark cave may hold surprises. But why not enter it? Because it would increase free energy? That would be the result. Trying to be a minimum would not be the cause of not entering though.
I'm sure there is some dark room in which burgers are smellingly inviting you.
Why do you care?
You seem hell bent on missing the point. Fill yer boots obvs.
Quoting apokrisis
:rofl: Okay, strong argument, I got no counter. Peace out.
Well, the discussion is about the avoidance of dark rooms because there might be surprises in there, and minimal free energy considerations would keep you away from it. Still you wanna increase your free energy to find out what's in the dark room, maybe the fridge.
Sure, caves are for things that crawl, dark rooms for philosophising. Both the big momma redback and I were surprised when I picked up the pot the other day, and she found that her cave was not as quite as she had supposed. She moved to the less surprising gap under the cupboard, I unsurprisingly put on some gloves. See how well both these behaviours are explained by surprise avoidance?
The problem for the surprise minimisation hypothesis is explaining why Kenosha Kid goes night diving as well as why the spider likes dark crevices.
And it ain't there yet.
Did you read this thread?
Quoting TheMadFool
And I have no idea what you're saying here. Is this an example of absurdity?
You mean a certain entropy throughput that sustains its "far from equilibrium" structure. Work must be invested in keeping the structure in a continuous state of repair.
In a darkened room, the brain will still be expending just as much energy in its metabolism.
Quoting Cartuna
The science says that the energy budget of the brain is surprisingly constant.
That is because focused attention is about shutting stuff down as much as turning stuff up. If faced with a duck-rabbit stimulus, or the ambiguity of a Necker cube, neurons favouring one interpretation get cranked up, and those favouring the alternative are actively suppressed.
Quoting Cartuna
Again, you just absolutely miss the whole point of the Bayesian argument. Life is the ability to surf nature's entropic gradients.
As an energy mechanism it is a Brownian ratchet. And as an information mechanism, it is a Bayesian ratchet.
And there you have it. A unified theory of ratchets. :lol:
Quoting Banno
Dunno. Dark rooms for philosophizing? What's to be found in them? Philosophical surprises? How is a dark room defined for philosophical purposes?
You certainly failed to offer any counter.
You quoted Friston saying one thing, then you went off on some riff about your everyday definition of surprise as "novelty". I pointed out that your use of novelty is ambiguous. It covers surprises that are both good and bad. Yet you wanted to stick with the idea that all novelty has positive valence ... because dopamine.
Fair summary?
I had in mind Descartes' "oven", in which he did his meditating. Perhaps an armchair in a comfy room with a laptop is the modern equivalent, the least surprising thing hereabouts.
I don't think so. Though it depends on the room. If it's dark and empty, no surprises will be there. You will do nothing at some moment. The free energy minimizes, to sustain the basic needs for life. But the urge for surprises will drive your brain to get in form. Free energy will increase.
That's what I do. I sit in my armchair and reach reasonable conclusions. No surprises there.
But surprisingly the sun is shining, so I'm off to look for more spiders under pots.
Point being, despite some protestations to the contrary, it is still not clear how this fits in with thermodynamics and information theory.
Aah, I get you now. Literal dark rooms to withdraw in. The need for surprises in the mind is overt in there. All hail to the dark room. "Dark room honey, I will follow". I can remember being in love and on the first night we entered the dark space of a small cargo ship we encountered. Free energy was increased in large amounts.
You like surprises obviously. New stuff increases your free energy. You brain aquires new forms, accompanied by entropy loss. A rather technical term to say you long for the spider under the pot.
Yes, you can pick something (dark caves), apply it one way (our models wouldn't be fit for such an environment, maximising present surprise), and get the desired answer. Or pick something else (going night-diving), apply it in a completely different way (curiosity adds information to our model, minimising future surprise), and get a very different answer. That's not encouraging.
Its not that there's no relationship either between gap analysis of this kind and e.g. fear of the dark, wariness of tigers, etc. which is why it's obviously going to have touchpoints with how nature actually works. But these things are generally mediated in myriad ways antithetical to what the article is talking about. Fear of the dark, of rustling bushes, etc. aren't actually to do with differences in prediction versus environment, real or imagined, but have been selected for by another, quite different optimisation algorithm that isn't minimising that gap but maximising a predominance of features in a way that largely bypasses environmental modelling, preferring a better-safe-than-sorry bias toward interpreting mundanity as surprise.
The red herring being that I made a judgment about _why_ such a theory might be attractive (totalising) and why it wouldn't work (treating many things as one thing). But that was quite a peripheral point.
Because we'd starve or die of boredom?
Don’t be evasive.
Not clear to you or not clear to the neuroscientists that drive Friston’s stellar h-index ranking. Shome difference shurely?
What about when surprise becomes confusion?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Indeed, as I noted earlier, a theory that explains everything, explains nothing. Quoting apokrisis
Both. I can minimise surprises by picking the garlic that will rot if left much longer. But in stead I came back to this surprisingly entertaining thread. Both of my actions are apparently explained by thermodynamics, and so thermodynamics explains nothing.
That is, again, the theory is interesting but incomplete.
Interestingly this seems to me to be much the same complaint that @Cartuna made in the Consciousness, Mathematics, Fundamental laws and properties thread - the tendency to overreach.
Well yes, that too haha
Quoting Banno
And there's another problem. We _like_ confusion. The history of science is predicated on the attraction of surprise and confusion. There's nothing sweeter than an observation that doesn't fit the model. Moths to a flame.
Quoting Banno
Aye.
Everyone has their opinions but not the receipts it seems.
Quoting Cartuna
You are taking this free energy thing too literally.
The clever thing Friston does is exploit the bridge that exists between the mathematical formalisms of physical entropy and information entropy.
Others do that too. Stan Salthe has his infodynamical general theory of life and evolution. Fundamental physics makes the connection in terms of blackholes and event horizons.
So there is a dual description to be had. Life and mind can be viewed physically as Brownian ratchets, and informationally as Bayesian ratchets - both sides of the coin being able to swim against the general entropic tide.
But you can’t save physical energy for other kinds of metabolic work by going into a dark room or even sitting in an armchair and thinking less. The separation of the two forms of “work” is also a key part of the story.
That is where Pattee’s epistemic cut, or Friston’s Markov blanket, come in. It is also why the brain can seem somewhat like a computer - a device for which the cost of switching the state of its physical gates is a constant, and so drops out of the picture as a drag on the act of computing anything.
A computer can generate nonsense or do something useful. The energy cost in terms of electricity coming out the wall, heat radiated into the environment, is the same. Human brains seem to operate in a similar fashion at times.
For sure. It appears to be one of those fake philosophical posers intended to stoke the careers for those on both sides of the debate. Andy Clark has form here. :wink:
Quoting Banno
Aren’t you just playing Buridan’s ass here?
Why continue to pretend you don’t understand that the free energy principle is the constraint that drives adaptive learning? Is it to substantiate the impression that you have as little new to learn about the world whether you are picking your garlic or “engaged” in biological theories of everything?
What a pose.
That's why, in my humble opinion, (religious) miracles are a scientific obsession and yet if you look at what Hume says - a miracle should only be believed if its falsity is even more miraculous - it would seem that scientists are extremely reluctant, even openly hostile, to give due consideration to miracles (basically counterexamples to the laws of nature). I just don't get it.
How many sigma before you accept such exceptions as signal rather than noise?
Let’s get real about the scientific method.
I think it's a question of the reliability of the evidence. One of the key features of miracles is that they're not reproducible. The Stern-Gerlach experiment is. They were both mysterious at some time, but the latter was reproducible, and therefore credible.
That said, there is an obsession with miracles and spirituality in the sciences at a lower (pop-sci) level, so I guess some people are looking into the kinds of thing you mean. I recall a New Scientist article on a theory about how the parting of the Red Sea might actually have occurred.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19489-how-wind-may-have-parted-the-sea-for-moses/
^ Not sure if the same one. I remember the article being much older. Could be a reprinting, or the date it went digital.
Did you mean arse?
That the free energy principle is the constraint that drives adaptive learning is what is in contention.
Quoting apokrisis
Sound advice. To start, let's not take as fact that which has yet to be demonstrated.
But it is not beyond the realms of possibility that curiosity itself drops out of the odd and obtuse considerations of thermodynamics - indeed, somehow, I suppose it must be so, if we are physical entities.
The question then is, is this the right calculation, or is there another, or is further nuance needed?
The point being, the point is unsettled.
Should have enough to last until mid winter, baring any surprises.
But surprisingly there is a film crew about to arrive. I wonder what surprises they are avoiding. Best go have a wash.
Yeah, you can't learn or build jack without it.
No, if put that way. I'm lazy to go back to that article to lift a passage, but there's the comment, I think, by the Theorist regarding the relativistic nature of surprises, and the subjective response to surprises by the agents -- as in, a "surprise" relative to what?
Yes, exactly the question. That's why if you factor in the relativistic nature of surprises to some agents, then quantifying the free energy becomes muddled. The formulation is problematic.
Was the spelling ambiguous or just the semantic intent? :wink:
Quoting Banno
For it to be in contention, folk would first need to demonstrate they understood it.
The link between dopamine and drug addiction is that opiates are chemically similar to dopamine. Drug addiction is the power of dopamine in spades.
A little dopamine keeps a state of focused attention/intention locked in. A sudden flush of dopamine wipes the slate clean. That explains the apparently contradictory effects.
H&N neurotransmitters have more to do with focus. Dopamine literally makes you think about what you don't have. It takes your focus away from, well, H&N.
No, it doesn't wipe anything in clean.
Lieberman again? His dichotomy of desire dopamine and control dopamine is one way of talking about the contrasting actions of dopamine in the striatum and prefrontal, I guess.
The lost keys form the driving desire - the long-range working memory intention. The found keys become the happy resolution - stop, see, here is what you were looking for.
What happens a lot (regarding the neurosciences) is researchers say one thing then journalists run with it and misrepresent it. This is probably something that happens more in the neurosciences than most other fields as it is effectively a new field of research and the amount of ground to cover within it grows exponentially day by day.
Aye! Aye! The alleged miracle must be, as scientists say, reproducible and before that vetted carefully for reliability.
It's just that miracles, the religious kind, bespeak two human tendencies:
1. A rather scientific bent of mind. Lawrence Krauss (physicist) remarks in an interview that scientist's go to their workplaces with one and only one aim - prove their colleagues wrong. This I read to mean that scientists are on the lookout for disproving counterexamples to existing, universally endorsed theories (scientific miracles) like Einstein's relativity for example.
2. Attributing any such counterexamples to existing theories, scientific and otherwise, to the divine. This is the point of contention between science and religion. Scientists would consider any modified hypothesis that has god(s) in it to be inordinate/inappropriate, preferring rather to modify/replace the theory that's been disproved with another that fits the new data but still minus god(s). I guess science is in the business of answering how? questions rather than why? questions and saying a miracle is god's doing doesn't tell us anything at all as to how god did it?
I digress I suppose but the human proclivity for miracles, something that has, as far as I can tell, a high surprisal quotient, seems to contradict the dark room problem's predictions. That's itself a shocking revelation, right?
The free energy minimization theory is incorrect then, no?
I wonder what this has to do with a theory of everything vis-à-vis psychology.
There's no need to reply to my post. I feel it's a tangent to the main issue.
LK is rather narrow-minded. If reproducibility were the norm, a lot of science wouldn't exist. Stuff being reproducable is a methodological imperative narrowing scientific knowledge. Adhering strictly to it inhibits scientific progress. "But it has to be reproducable". The big bang would be a miracle. And it is a miracle!
God can interfere by means of hidden variables constituting the wavefunction. He could make wavefunctions in the atmosphere collapse in a controlled way to make a lighting flash strike you. I don't think he does though. He probably just leaves us alone.Turning water in wine is more complicated. The watery wavefunction is not fit. He just can't make winey atoms appear next to water ones.
I’ve said that it is only a “problem” premised on a fundamental misunderstanding of Friston’s Bayesian approach.
Banno is trying to do his usual thing of causing mischief and standing innocently on the sidelines.
You picked a rather peripheral article, a comment. Friston's background is in fMRI and computational neuroscience, and that is the inspiration and the main source of evidence for his free energy model, not so much high-level psychology. These would be a better place to start if anyone is looking for more substance:
A free energy principle for the brain (2006)
The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? (Nature Reviews 2010)
:ok: Good to know. Thanks.
A point well made. However, I'm led to believe that there are other ways - scientifically valid ones - to verify that the Big Bang actually happened. Miracles, like the Big Bang CMBR, should leave a trail of bread crumbs we can use to reconstruct it. Such is lacking or so I'm told.
Quoting Cartuna
I thought that was a open-and-shut case: the hidden variables question i.e. there are none and QM is complete in its probabilistic qualities.
It's not shut by far. This is what the majority of physicists want to belief. They just shut up and calculate, leaving a trail of confusion in philosophers who try to solve Schrödinger's cat, Wigner's friend, and the measurement problem. There are no experiments done which exclude their existence. Maybe they even constitute space. Connecting gravity to QM (which doesn't imply a quantum gravity though).
There is no sensible reply. How would that look like? Untill now, hidden variables are just an assumption. But more "satisfying" than the orthodoxy ruling.
Sometimes truth is not all that matters, plus most truths are, well, boooooring! Isn't that why the fantasy genre is doing so well in the video game market? Between truth and fun, no one in his right mind will choose the former. Truth! Bah!
I totally agree. To every claim that one has found a ToE on can counter that it is just a fantasy in the mind's eye, constructed to evade the the abundance we see and experience. You can even sanely-minded contend that reality as encountered in video games is the physical reality and every deviation from it an illusion. No matter what physicists might say. You have to be carefull though on high roofs, because there reality is lying to you.
Keep it up...
Well, take it up then...
:ok: whatever you mean.
I mean the metaphysics of the dark room.
It's muddled thinking that paves the way to the biggest breakthrough. Together with fuzzy logic. It's an explosive cocktail. Fuzzy mud.
Bizarre is about right. The dark room is barren, so why would it be attractive for survival? I don't get it. Where's the food? Or are we assuming an infinite source of sustenance? And how is that at all useful as a model? I think that's what you were getting at before, @TheMadFool, am I right?
Even assuming infinite sustenance or leaving it out of the equation somehow, the model is still unappealing to me. We supposedly discovered fire because lightening struck some kindling. I can't imagine any such perfectly isolated environment for an "organism" to retreat into.
It would seem that "exploration" can be readily explained as something that you do because the pond dried up, or you're all out of berries, and I guess "play" has social origins or whatnot.
Quoting Banno
It is for the contrived definition of "living" that seems to be used here, almost entirely by definition. If life is nothing but avoiding non-anticipated stimuli, then minimising non-anticipated stimuli means living longer?
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I'm over here struggling to think of an example. Not of a biological system, but of an ecosystem that would even vaguely resemble this "dark room".
Quoting Kenosha Kid
:up:
Best leave it on the backburner for the moment. Good day.
It is a sign of a strength of the free energy principle that the bogus “dark room problem” is the best opposition that might be mustered.
If the only line of attack on an idea relies on a fundamental misrepresentation of the idea, then it’s critics are doing a mighty poor job.
The free energy principle describes the minimisation of surprise in the context of being active. That the organism is busy and striving in a challenging environment is what is taken for granted as the situation being optimised by the cognitive process.
Take away the challenging environment and you don’t even have some gap between the certainty of your actions, and the uncertainty of the world, to be minimised.
The Dark Room Problem
Again the point is made that an explanation for everything is an explanation for nothing.
And again, the key discussion in relation to this is Watkins. Here's a link to his article: Confirmable and influential metaphysics. There's a thread on it elsewhere in the forums. I commend section seven, in which Watkins shows how to rationally assess what he calls "haunted universe" statements, such as "every action can be explained in terms of avoiding surprise".
SO there is no conclusion to be reached yet, only an interesting area to perhaps follow.
@TheMadFool, there's your metaphysical evaluation. The rhetoric in this thread is also well worth attending to.
Edit: fixed URL for Watkins article. The topical thread is at https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/9909/confirmable-and-influential-metaphysics/p1
The thing is that this idea is based on the most significant fundamental error. It tries to oversimplify human behavior, which is wayyyy more complex,with a naive way. Connecting it with one only aspect.
Well sorry but the idea itself is misrepresented on its own from the very beginning.
Not that of course this theory can't attribute useful thoughts, but that's all.
Yes. Darwin’s theory of evolution really hammered home that point. Nothing useful can ever result from talk about absolutely general constraints.
I mean what’s with physics and its obsession with the least action principle? Do these guys understand anything about how explanations work?
That is another misrepresentation.
Although I agree that as a formalism, it doesn’t tackle the code side of the semiotic modelling relation. Friston’s Markov blanket is a general physical description of the epistemic cut. But it doesn’t talk about the “how” of the machinery that enables such a cut to actually be made in nature.
There are four levels of such code I would identify. Genes, neurons, words and numbers. Each produce their “worlds” or Umwelt. Only humans have verbal and mathematically constructed Umwelts or world-models.
So yes, there is one general story to be had - a semiotic theory of everything. That is implied in Friston’s approach, but not mathematically expressed in direct fashion. The fact that there needs to be a machinery of semiosis - some system of encoding - is implied by the Markov blanket formalism, but not to be found in that formalism.
And as you protest, humans are more complex. We have words and numbers that lift us beyond the semiotics of neurons and genes. We have social semiosis and techno semiosis. Friston’s free energy principle was directed primarily at the problem of neurosemiosis, and has been expanded to - sort of - include biosemiosis.
So I have plenty of “criticisms” of Bayesian mechanics. But I think it helps to have actually understood what Bayesian mechanics might claim.
Quoting fdrake
Hence the theory of evolution inspired wider research that was itself confirmable or falsifiable; and so on. Conservation laws are each examples of scientific statements that are neither falsifiable nor verifiable, but which have the singular advantage of underpinning expansive and efficacious explanations. They work.
Quoting dimosthenis9
Indeed, it does. So the question becomes one of how successful it is at doing so. It might be - indeed it seems likely - that this approach will lead to a better understanding of the function of various neural bits and pieces. It seems less likely that it will be able to explain why one person likes vanilla yet the other chocolate. And it will not demonstrate why you should vote Green. The temptation to look to unifying explanations is to be avoided if it leads to oversimplification.
You do realise that that point is something specifically contained in the Bayesian maths of Friston’s approach?
The trade off between model complexity and model accuracy is the algorithm driving the whole optimisation process.
Perhaps you haven’t read that far and discovered your generalised truism now has been given a formal mathematical description?
You do understand that I am agreeing with you that this is an interesting area of research? But you seem to think that this little exercise has explained consciousness. That strikes me as overreach, and it seems I am not alone.
I'm too old to watch videos. If you have a point you wish me to understand, write it or link to an article.
I'm not sure that's it. The argument is apparently along the lines that avoiding non-anticipated stimuli explains not only individual behaviour but environmental fit with respect to evolution. That's an astonishing claim, if it can be maintained.
It might do that in your mind. You do tend to argue a hell of a lot from "instinct" rather than reasoned fact.
I just think it funny that your instinctive generalisation - the one you just tried to use against Bayesian mechanics - is in fact the principle found at the core of Baysesian mechanics ... it being a generalised theory of reality modelling itself.
Quoting Banno
Interesting. You and your weasel words. If it is so "interesting", why are you so unwilling to invest the time needed to have a valid criticism of it rather than your usual "instinctive doubts".
Quoting Banno
I love it. Classic Banno argument - tailored to pander to the Dunning-Krugerism of an internet forum. "You confident, me doubt, and look at all the others who also don't understand what is being said but are just as eager to knock down tall poppies."
Quoting Banno
I only asked you to scroll to a single slide at minute 53. The fact that you don't want to disturb your cosy solipsism says it all.
That has to be the lamest excuse ever made.
(No wait. That would be "lunch is calling". Or "The spiders under my flower pots and the rotting garlic in my garden are suddenly more important than this internet discussion I started but which seems now to be biting me on the butt." I forgot that you are the master of lame reasons for fading from sight as soon as anyone calls you out on your BS.)
Well as I wrote before, sure it has to offer some useful thoughts. And maybe it also become a step for a better idea. Who knows.
But it's not the idea that troubles me mostly, it's the supposed purpose that this idea tries to serve. To explain human behavior like that. I find it naive and that's where my biggest objection is.
This - not so much this article, but your complaint that PP/PEM seems to have an explanation for everything - reminds me of a common creationists' complaint about the theory of evolution, which often follows a series of failed challenges to its ability to explain evidence. The fact that a theory can explain all evidence doesn't distinguish between a good theory and a vacuous theory. And there is no way to establish which is the case other than scrutinizing the theory and how it purports to explain evidence. There are no easy shortcuts here to dismissive judgements.
Another thing to note is that there are different ways to respond to a challenge. One is to make a positive argument that the challenge misses its target, e.g. by conducting a decisive test, or by showing that what is alleged to be the case necessarily is not the case. Another is to argue that the challenge may not hit the target. For example, when creationists rhetorically ask "what good is half a wing?" one response is to argue that the equivalent of "half a wing" can be adaptive (maybe not for flying). This second mode of response doesn't provide an additional argument for the theory, but it does forestall the challenge and tasks the challenger (or alternatively the defender) with going deeper and doing more work. This is how we can view Friston's response to the "dark room" challenge in the comment article that you shared.
Cheers.
But that's the exact base that he builds his argument on.Even if not expressed in mathematics,he uses mathematics to serve that initial premise he makes.
I don't dismiss the idea of free energy principles totally. It sure has some food for thought, maybe in different fields also. But, imo, the way it is presented make people not to take it seriously and dismiss it all together.
Maybe if it was presented differently would be much more helpful as people to take notice on it . And be serious about it. Somehow, in that way, I think it underestimates its own self.
Not sure this is the right word. It seems to me that the very sophistication of the approach leads some to over-applying it.
And I don't mean the authors of the articles referred to here, who seem almost surprised at the potential of their theorising, but those who might take their work as already having solved the problems of consciousness.
Yeah probably isn't the right word indeed.But the meaning it's the same. Just couldn't find an appropriate word to summarize what you wrote above.
Well, not quite. We want a theory that rules out things that are contradicted by the evidence.
Quoting SophistiCat
Yes! I quite agree. Small steps.
Edit:
Quoting SophistiCat
Just to be sure, I'm not saying that PP/PEM seems to have an explanation for everything; but that it would be wrong to read it as having an explanation for everything. Does anyone here do that? Perhaps.
You are a curious chap. If you are indeed the messenger, why do you keep disappearing at the very moment you are asked to deliver the message you claim to bear?
You said, aha!, the problem with all totalising generalisations is that they risk leaving out particulars essential to telling the larger story. I said, check this single slide. You can see that the totalising generalisation makes that same totallising generalisation - but now as a mathematically specified and biologically relevant fact.
Now you want to seek cover as the victimised. You want to answer reasoned argument with social game playing.
Well I guess when you are hoist by your own petard trying to play one game, you must scramble to make it a different game instead.
I dunno. The more common complaint might be that Friston seemed to have changed names for his story so many times down the years. When I first met him 25 years ago, it was all about coupled neural transients and generative neural networks. Then it became Bayesian brains, Free-energy principles, Markov blankets, a Unified theory of unifying theories.
So there have been a ton of different presentations. Much ink spilt. And now he has come up with equations - a general model condensed to a single slide or two. He has proposed a Bayesian Mechanics.
If nothing else, this is huge because it allows neuroscience to finally kick computationalism and Cartesian representationalism out the door.
Cognitive neuroscience started off with the idea that the brain is a prediction machine. The formalisms were already there in the 1800s with Helmholtz and his mathematical definition of free energy, Bayes and his theory of probability.
But then the science of mind got infecting by computer-mania in the 1950s. The maths of the Universal Turing Machine tool over at the putative new foundations. This resonated nicely with the Cartesian representationalism of popular culture where consciousness is treated as the witnessing of some kind of data display.
So now we have Friston emerging as at the top rated cognitive scientist of his age because - as well as also sorting out the maths that underpins the credibility of functional neuroimaging - he returns neuroscience to the wisdom of the 1900s. He unifies the maths needed to ground formal cognitive theory in the 21st Century.
Anybody who studies neuroscience, or even biology in general, always knew life and mind aren't merely machines - neither Newtonian physical machines nor Turing computation machines. But it was difficult to resist the mathematics of those paradigms for as long as neuroscience hadn't established a maths of cognition it could call its own.
That in a nutshell is what is at stake.
Now of course Friston's claims to arrived at a final maths of everything cognitive needs challenging. I've already detailed the challenges I find warranted.
But this "darkened room problem" is a tedious misrepresentation of the maths. And as I say, if this is the best you have got, you ain't got nothing.
Not sure about sign of strength, and as you quoted I hardly see my comment as the best opposition. I was responding mostly to the OP and what I quickly read in some of the other comments, as well as the linked article itself, which I find difficult to parse. I've re-read your comments and thankfully you seem to be arguing for something different, and this "Markov blanket" is a much more interesting idea. Thanks for the video link, it looks interesting. I wil need more time to digest it.
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting apokrisis
This makes more sense.
Quoting apokrisis
I think I get it now, and discussion in terms of this framework would be more interesting. Unfortunately, the language and form of the article and the "dark room" idea are confusing, it seems not only for me.
I am also unsatisfied by the computationalism in popular representations of neuroscience.
Sorry to add to the "tedious misrepresentations". Other than the video, is there maybe a more up-to-date article on this topic that you can recommend?
I think you have some misunderstanding here.
Life and mind exist by constructing paths for entropy dissipation. The sun shining on bare rock winds up returning the radiation to space at the much cooler average temperature of about 60 degrees C. The same planet surface covered by a mature biofilm radiates at about 20 degrees C.
A small improvement so far as the second law is concerned. But even a small difference is one that counts and so is the path the physics will select for.
The problem for life (and mind) is then to separate its materiality from the entropy it transacts. To do better than bare rock, it has to invest in complex material structure. It must recycle its atoms, so to speak - keep them recirculating and so creating the path down which actual free energy becomes actual physical entropy.
This leads to a delicate balancing act in biology - a matter of considerable theoretical debate. Is life caused by the principle of maximum entropy production, or instead the contrary, the need to evolve towards a zone of minimum heat loss/maximum efficiency?
The solution is that existing as a degrader is indeed a delicate trade off. Plasticity and stability both count. An organism that grows too fast is like a cancer. It burns bright, but burns short.
Once you get this, the whole of ecology and evolutionary history follows. You need weeds, but then it is also natural that forest takes over. Complexity is good, but also the simplicity of bacteria is nature's other enduring pole or attractor.
So there is an optimisation function to be had. Yet - as a dynamical balance - it also affords a wide spectrum of solutions. And it is this scalefree variety that we must then expect to find actually expressed in nature.
And so it goes. Life has organised the earth from bacteria that can eat rock to the Gaian cycles that have stabilised the Earth's climate and retained its benign watery condition, its fine-tuned balance of CO2, its unusual reservoir of free oxygen, for several billion years longer than would be the case for the bare rock thermodynamic counterfactual.
Biology has figured it out. Life is self-maintaining, code-based, dissipative structure. But the status quo is a dynamical balancing act - always an optimisation, a trade off. Every organism has to have a goal that then defines it as a self in its world. There must be stored information - genetic information - that encodes the homeostatic set-point for the kind of species of thing it is. A weed or an oak, for example.
And neuroscience is recapitulating the same intellectual journey that biology got started on back in the 1960s. Mind is a higher level of organisation for constructing dissipative structure.
There are all kinds of mindful organisms. Bacteria included. They can sense environmental gradients. They can swim towards nourishment and away from toxins.
And mind continues the effort to solve the essential optimisation problem. To have stable existence as an organism, that organism must transact some quantity of entropy while extracting some sufficient degree of work from the dissipative flow it thus creates. It must repair, and even reproduce, the material body - the structure of metabolism - that achieves the feat of both serving the second law and also defying it by maintaining the integrity if its material structure.
Mind science thus doesn't talk about consciousness as such. In the lab, they talk about researching cognition as some self-optimising balance of attention and habit. Or voluntary and automatic processes. Or top-down and bottom-up information flows in a hierarchical architecture.
Always it is about detailed balance. The optimisation of two complementary factors.
So the idea of the minimisation of free energy speaks to that. There has to be some baseline of entropy production that supports its "other" of investing in negentropic structure. The structure that is doing the entropy production.
Nothing makes sense until the two sides of the equation are cybernetically coupled. Action and perception have to be coupled - as in Friston's Markov blanket formalism – so that together they will track the goal of being optimised in a way that produces both enough entropy, and also enough negentropy to "live the longest". Or better put, as I have said, "reproduce the most successfully".
Ecology amazed the world back in the 1960s with its maths modelling predator-prey relations and other systems-level facts about the dynamics of evolutionary processes. Biology could claim to have its own maths. And this maths was itself rooted in the right kind of physics - thermodynamics.
Friston continues the story.
You can easily search for Friston's recent papers - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2020&q=karl+friston&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5
But you will see how he is engaged in doing exactly what @Banno complains there is so far a lack of - and that is putting theory into practice.
If you want to start with the general theory, this video is the summary which he has been hawking around the past couple of years as the one for a less technical audience.
His next step beyond that is then sketched out in this other workshop presentation from June - https://youtu.be/T711im7ZgmU
I'm still here.
So if I get it straight, your main objection is the way Banno presented Friston’s idea here on this thread? Using the "dark room problem"? You find it misleading?
Quoting apokrisis
So in your opinion, and in a few lines what exactly this theory tell us about consciousness? Or what it implies at least as to rephrase it. Why you find it so huge?
It's not an ironic tone, my knowledge about this is only the article Banno linked. But as I read it I didn't get very enthusiastic about it and I wrote my objections above. I guess I just act lazy and I want you to give me the juice(hmm.. That sounded weird....).
The thing is that when you reduce a theory to very general and rough slogans, like "minimizing surprise" or "survival of the fittest," you will readily find both apparent examples and apparent counterexamples, which then prompts complaints that the theory is either contradictory or explains too much, or even both (@Kenosha Kid). The devil is in the details, as you acknowledge. Without getting into those details you can't really say anything one way or another.
I am sympathetic to your attitude towards totalizing theories. But there is a difference between a general unifying idea and a detailed treatment of a subject. Evolutionary biology as a whole is a complex and diverse field, appropriate for its complex and diverse subject. And yet Darwin's basic insight pervades it throughout. I think there is room for more such insights in cognitive science and biology.
By the way, looking Friston's publications, you can see a rather typical pattern where the further he gets from his own field, the wider he casts his net, the more diffuse and light on details and empirical support are his (team's) works, shading into pop-science and philosophy-lite. (There is also an inverse correlation with the number of citations...) Then again, if he got something essentially right, then these kinds of big-picture narratives can be valuable as setting directions for future research and providing an insight into large-scale patterns.
What I've seen of Friston's publications, including videos, shows a certain humility, or at least a reserved surprise at the general applicability of the mathematics. Not at all unseemly.
It's fascinating to watch, a real-time demonstration of the methodology of research programs. Overreach would be expected as the new model settles.
Banno compounded the confusion for sure. But my comment was directed at the dark-room problem itself. It is motivated by a misunderstanding of the theory it intends to question. And the misunderstanding is so obvious that I wonder how it got started.
Maybe someone else can spot it, but I see no reference in the paper to the supposed source of the dark-room problem. The authors just say...
... so the suspicion I voiced was that Andy Clark was pulling a smart career move to get some kind of controversy going. The dark room problem was an invention to draw attention, create a dialog, even if the lobbing of this "recurrent puzzle" into the conversation was going to be a patsy toss easily batted to the boundary by the home team.
Then as far as Banno goes, it seemed curious that he should pluck this paper out of the past just when I happened to be promoting Friston as having arrived at neuroscience's theory of everything in another thread. He will say that is an innocent coincidence of course.
And it is also curious that instead of pointing to the obvious misunderstanding of the free-energy principle used to motivate the dark room problem – which I feel he gets – he said his real interest was...
Quoting Banno
...which is the promotion of an even lamer quibble. How could one pretend to be baffled by that? And why did Banno ignore my point that the biologically correct reply would be that living long ain't so much the point as reproducing the most successfully. (Try maximising that by retreating into a darkened room with only yourself and your sexual fantasies.)
So the paper itself is a bit of a time waster. And Banno played his usual game of stirring the pot, claiming interest without being interested enough to spend 10 seconds clicking on a link and scrolling to a time stamp.
I'm not complaining of course. It is really funny that Banno's essential complaint against theories of everything are in fact exactly what one finds once one delves into the actual maths of the free-energy principle. Poetic justice when you blow yourself up with the very mine you tried to lay.
Quoting dimosthenis9
As I said, it puts neuroscience on its own secure mathematical basis. It gets neuroscience off computation - the Universal Turing Machine formalism - as the general theory of everything it has been employing. It underwrites the whole shift back to an embodied, enactive and semiotic approach to mind science.
I was asked to write an opinion piece for the 20th anniversary of a major neuroscience journal on what I thought was the biggest thing of the past 20 years. My answer is exactly this. The construction of a mathematical formalism with the generality of any other "physical mechanics" that mind science can now call its own.
Quoting SophistiCat
Yep. A totalising theory must still have some counterfactual impact on our thought. A new paradigm must be able to knock down the one it means to replace.
So Darwinian evolution killed a creationist account of life on Earth, for all practical purposes. And it would be nice if Friston's Bayesian Mechanics kills off Universal Turing Machines as the general paradigm framing mind science.
Yeah I read that in your previous post also.
So in general, if I get it right. For example in the "mind/ body problem" (physical /no psychical) you would use that theory as an argument in favor of the idealistic no physical nature of the mind. Right?
Not that it demonstrates or proves that, but I hope you get my point.
No surprises there. The Dark Room Problem was mentioned by Friston in the questions of a video you posted. The article in the OP came up on a search, and as the length of this thread shows, was worthy of its own discussion. You can have the credit, if it is important to you.
So far as the origin of the problem goes, when I went looking earlier, the earliest mention I found was the article in the OP - other articles refer to it. Others might have more success. Clark may be to blame, and if it was a "smart career move" that is because it spiked interest in the topic, so good for him.
And finally, as for "why is minimising surprise the very same as living longest?", this is an rough slogan fo the sort mentioned by . And in this case the details remain to be settled.
I'm not sure I understood your question. But I think the answer is that the computational approach to mind is inherently Cartesian, hence dualist and representationalist. Friston's approach is inherently semiotic, hence triadic and enactive.
And you can claim that semiotics sounds sort of idealist. But then it is an idealism that is a pragmatic realism. So not really idealism, but a way of fixing the fundamental issues around knowing the world that Kant raised.
Idealism is a broad church. But if you mean idealism in terms of some synonym of soul, spirit or consciousness as a monistic substance - one that stands opposed to matter as the other candidate monistic substance underlying reality - then no way am I making any argument in that direction.
What I am saying is that a triadic systems perspective - like Peircean semiotics, like Friston's Bayesian mechanics – does the best job of dissolving the tensions of the Cartesian notion that is "the Hard Problem".
Dualism says there are two distinct realms of being and no good causal explanation of how they might then interact.
Triadic logic says there is an interaction. And then two distinct realms are what develop out of this fundamental connection.
So an ontology of opposed substances - matter and mind - is replaced by an ontology of a self-organising dichotomy. The unity of opposites which is the brain modelling its world in terms of its self-interest.
The self establishes itself in the world by becoming causally opposed to this world. An organism gains autonomy by finding a way to impose its desires on an environment.
This trick is achieved by the interaction that is the modelling relation. Friston puts that into the familiar language of differential equations.
Peirce described it in logic. Rosen described it in category theory. Friston uses now the kind of maths that even engineers can understand.
Think about it. UTMs are finite state automata. Almost immediately engineers could see how to turn an algebra of information - a digital encoding - into real world programmable machines.
But then computer science was also tinkering away with these other things called neural networks. They had some rules of thumb, but no fundamental theory. It was a promising project but stumbled along in the background.
Now Friston offers a geometric approach to information. It is all about trajectories on attractors. Instability, self-reference and complexity are all built in. And yet still, the chaos can be tamed enough to model it with a set of differential equations – providing you can apply the right constraints, the right learning environments.
So people can complain that they don't see a theory of consciousness in Friston's Bayesian mechanics. They can complain that the surprise a human feels is nothing like the surprisal - the free energy metric – that Friston's formalism minimises.
Fine. They just show that they don't even realise how deeply they are stuck in a Cartesian framing of the whole issue. They don't even begin to get the paradigm change being talked about.
You read the comments on YouTube videos? And yet you say you are too old to watch the videos themselves?
Meh. A curious approach to scholarship indeed.
Quoting Banno
How so exactly? Be specific and not general.
I don't watch videos - much. It seems inevitable that the young people take this easy rout, but I'd much rather a paper; doubtless it's habit, but the arguments are easier for me to follow, they have citations, and I can flick back and forth between paragraphs without fiddling if I miss something.
The video you shared caught my curiosity, I flicked through it looking for a paper, and found mention of the dark room.
Look, Apo, I'm flattered and all that you feel the need to make me the topic of this thread, but I don't owe you explanations or replies, and I'm sure others are finding this tedious.
Well idealism is a broad church indeed. If I could be more specific I meant mostly about the issue about the material or not nature of the mind.
I stand with the non material nature of the mind, which for sure as to exist requires material (brain) but on its own it's not something material also. Like material creates something non material. Interacting together. That's why I was so curious about.
Quoting apokrisis
Interesting. So it makes a distinction indeed and supports the interaction.
Quoting apokrisis
Well I also complain about that as to be honest. Wasn't very convinced but as I wrote it does have interesting things.And well your response was really useful.
Sure. And that takes about 10 seconds on Google. So....
The equation you seek to avoid is next to that caption in Box 1.
Quoting Banno
The familiar gambit. But look Banno, my complaint that you demonstrate disingenuity by claiming to be interested in something and yet failing to respond on that something as soon as it makes you look flat-footed. That is what I'm sure me and others find tedious.
Even on the simplest question, you play the wombat defence. You say a matter of interest is "why is minimising surprise the very same as living longest?".
And indeed that is not the argument a biologist would make, although an information theorist might.
So for the benefit of your interest, I explained. Darwinian selection would not be thought to maximise life span but maximise reproductive fitness. (Which is another one of those pesky risk-reward, complexity-accuracy, trade offs that the equation you don't want to look at models.)
Seen in that light - the need for an organism to get busy with the jiggy - the silliness of the dark-room problem because blindingly apparent. What the free-energy principle minimises is the prediction error in following the life course that achieves that goal. The Bayesian Brain becomes the Lagrangian of optimised reproduction.
Now you might not like the fact that you didn't immediately see this obvious answer. But getting in a huff, going off to fume while you inspect your rotting garlic and spider infested terracotta, is entirely you making the discussion all about you and your ego.
Blame me and claim it to be a form of flattery. But I know that you know that you know better.
All you have to do is respond to informed replies with a little more scholarly integrity. It's not as if I am setting a high bar even there.
Well, you keep falling into it. It works - utilitarianism in action; you should be pleased.
I'm not trying to present a comprehensive theory here - I just pointed to an interesting article. I've nothing to defend, and no more to say unless someone says something interesting...
Which hasn't happened this page.
That leads to the symbol grounding problem - how does a code do its job?
A code is "physic-less" not because it has no material base, but because that material base is constrained to be a single standard cost. So a symbol is physical dimensionality constrained to where it becomes a dimensionless point. Just a bare mark. Like a letter on a page, a spike on a wire, the switching of a logic gate.
It takes as much, and as little, effort to utter any grammatically-structure sentence. Each word is just a puff of air, whether I speak the ravings of a lunatic or recite a play by Shakespeare.
So codes have to have some physical base so they materially exist. But that entropic cost falls out of the equation if it is some tiny and inconsequential sum that is constant, no matter how random or magnificent might be the meanings embodied by symbol sequence itself.
In that way, the brain-mind does create a "safe place" which can stand outside the physical world so as to regulate the goings-on of that physical world.
For all practical purposes, a code puts the organism outside of the second law ruled world. For all practical purposes, the brain implements an idealist ontology - a realm that is like a virtual machine with absolute freedom of action.
But - as Friston models, and the second law demands - there is an electricity bill to pay to keep the lights on. Even small costs can add up. The brain-mind's idealism only makes metaphysical sense if the benefits of the free imagination are coupled to the costs of that free imagination over the long run.
Any model of mind has to include the two sides to the equation. Which is where we get back to the triadic systems view of consciousness.
Ah, you say, it tis but a scratch. More video I'm afraid. But you've seen this one.
Quoting Banno
Long life vs reproductive fitness? Hello. Anyone there? I can hear your heavy breathing on the line. Come on out and defend. Don't just play for stalemate. The invisible audience that you think is hanging on your every post is waiting to see something more interesting.
Thanks for that link: The free-energy principle: a rough guide to the brain? I notice that it was published in the "Opinion" section.
If you are satisfied that this stuff also explains evolution and consciousness, then I'm happy for you. For reasons already explained, I'm not so keen, but open to the possibility.
Note that it's not "long life vs reproductive fitness" with which I take issue, but "why is minimising surprise the very same as living longest?" Thanks to you and others, I've a better understanding of what's involved. I'm happy to await further research.
I don't think I'm the only one here who thinks that thinking this already settled is overreach.
Are we playing "posts-last-wins" now? I'm good at that.
Did I say explain or ground explanations?
Quoting Banno
So all you had to do was tell me you agreed. Instead you took the disagreeable path of pretending not to have heard.
Quoting Banno
Again, if a field finds its grounding, then things are not settled but properly (re)started. Don't misrepresent what I say so as to be able to claim to be right about what I never said.
And stop appealing to your invisible audience. You sound like a politician. Its Trump's go-to gambit for a reason.
Quoting Banno
So you say. I'll be the judge of that.
Apo, I did, several times.
I just made a cheese toasty, using a flatbread that was past it's "best by..." date, but which had been in the fridge, and had no obvious signs of mould. I put on the new Genesis album, quite loud, unaware that it was a rehash of their old stuff. But I enjoyed it, despite it lacking surprises.
There's the rub' it's just not obvious how what we do is result of our avoiding surprises. But it might be.
Quoting Banno
Now you just want to make me sad. Toasties and Genesis FFS's?
Quoting Banno
Not obvious to whom exactly? The Peircean collective wisdom?
Well why does Friston command an h-index of 253? (h-index of 20 = good, 40 i= outstanding, 60 = truly exceptional; h-index of typical PF poster, some comical negative value.)
You keep making these third person claims about your first person views. Again, that's political rhetoric not supported argument.
Because it's interesting, of course; but perhaps someone who thought in terms of the Peircean collective wisdom would mistake a high h-index for truth, or an approximation thereto.
Stan Salthe's lifecycle model of ecology will do that. It is the kind of more detailed theory that you demand.
You say it yourself. You've got old. Brittle and senescent, to use the technical terms. That you would have Genesis on the turntable, rather than Black Midi or Connan Mockasin, speaks to your reduced capacity to deal with environmental novelty (even if you have the other side of the trade-off in the conviction of your certainties, the wisdom of a lifetime of evermore entrenched habit.)
Quoting Banno
Yeah. Nobel prizes go to the most interesting theory of the year. I'd forgotten that's how it works.
Quoting Banno
But that is the pragmatic theory of truth you support yourself. The limit of exhaustive rational inquiry.
It is why you keep making plaintive appeals to an invisible audience who could only agree with your own good commonsense.
"No one agrees with you, Apo. Everyone agrees with me! Banno!!!"
(Tip: To be read in a Trump accent.)
A theory of how consciousness works would of course be very interesting, but I think we can agree that it would require more details. Minimising free energy is a very high-level idea, an abstraction at the level of thermodynamics and definitions of what constitutes information. I think we can agree that consciousness is more complicated than heat. Still, it's useful to have abstract frameworks because they guide the more detailed hypotheses, and limit the possibilities that are worth considering.
Quoting SophistiCat
:up:
It just tells us what kind of physics to root our life and mind science in.
Science believes it is constructing a hierarchy of theories. Neuroscience is explained by biology, biology by chemistry, chemistry by particle physics, particle physics by quantum mechanics.
The paradigm shift is to instead see that biology is rooted in the physics of thermodynamics. In particular, the thermodynamics of “far from equilbrium” dissipative structures, So not the science of material atoms, but the science of evolved or self organising physical complexity.
And even particle physics and cosmology themselves have made this paradigm shift. So even fundamental physics has abandoned simple atomism for the more complex view that reality as a whole is a dissipative structure,
Hence Friston is just doing the work to catch neuroscience up.