The Energy Homeostasis Principle: A Naturalistic Approach to Explain the Emergence of Behavior

It is still elusive to explain the emergence of behavior and understanding based on its neural mechanisms. One renowned proposal is the Free Energy Principle (FEP), which uses an information-theoretic framework derived from thermodynamic considerations to describe how behavior and understanding emerge. FEP starts from a whole-organism approach, based on mental states and phenomena, mapping them into the neuronal substrate. An alternative approach, the Energy Homeostasis Principle (EHP), initiates a similar explanatory effort but starts from single-neuron phenomena and builds up to whole-organism behavior and understanding. In this work, we further develop the EHP as a distinct but complementary vision to FEP and try to explain how behavior and understanding would emerge from the local requirements of the neurons. Based on EHP and a strict naturalist approach that sees living beings as physical and deterministic systems, we explain scenarios where learning would emerge without the need for volition or goals. Given these starting points, we state several considerations of how we see the nervous system, particularly the role of the function, purpose, and conception of goal-oriented behavior. We problematize these conceptions, giving an alternative teleology-free framework in which behavior and, ultimately, understanding would still emerge. We reinterpret neural processing by explaining basic learning scenarios up to simple anticipatory behavior. Finally, we end the article with an evolutionary perspective of how this non-goal-oriented behavior appeared. We acknowledge that our proposal, in its current form, is still far from explaining the emergence of understanding. Nonetheless, we set the ground for an alternative neuron-based framework to ultimately explain understanding.

The Meaning of Leshma

This chapter reflects on the term leshma and what the word means. During the author's time at the yeshiva, the term has thus become a way to gather together and ponder on a range of moments that display the productive and agonizing tension between goal-oriented behavior and actions that are devoted to their own moment. The chapter suggests that the focus on leshma was fostered by a passage of Talmud, which the author happened to encounter just a couple of weeks into his kollel year. It explains that the notion of leshma — in the “larger” sense of studying or doing anything for its own sake, and not as a means to an end — also echoes the threatened and perhaps vanishing understanding of a “liberal education” as worthwhile in its own right. Ultimately, the chapter shares a set of anecdotes and musings that the word continues to evoke, and perhaps that will serve better than any definition could.

Behavior is Reward-oriented

Delving further into development, adaptation, and learning, this chapter considers the potential of reward-oriented optimization of behavior. Reinforcement learning (RL) is motivated from the Rescorla–Wagner model in psychology and behaviorism. Next, a detailed introduction to RL in artificial systems is provided. It is shown when and how RL works, but also current shortcomings and challenges are discussed. In conclusion, the chapter emphasizes that behavioral optimization and reward-based behavioral adaptations can be well-accomplished with RL. However, to be able to solve more challenging planning problems and to enable flexible, goal-oriented behavior, hierarchically and modularly structured models about the environment are necessary. Such models then also enable the pursuance of abstract reasoning and of thoughts that are fully detached from the current environmental state. The challenge remains how such models may actually be learned and structured.

THE UYGHURS FROM MODULAR COMMUNITY TO PARTISAN NATION

The study of ethnicity has long been shaped by a conflict between two broad positions, one of which may be called the circumstantialist or instrumentalist position, and the other the primordialist or affectivist position. The primordialists view ethnic sentiments as something existing prior to and not dependent on goal-oriented behavior and hence not subject to calculation. The circumstantialists, however, view ethnicity as a product of particular circumstances in which contingent groups, usually at the behest of elites within those groups, broaden and reconceptualize their particular group interests as being derived from a common primordial substance, thus generating ethnicity. These circumstantialist or instrumentalist arguments as a rule assume that the particular circumstances where such group redefinitions and extensions prove useful are either unique to, or at least much more common in, the modern age. Thus the circumstantialist approach usually implies a modernist one.