Does the metaphysical dog wag its formal tail? The free energy principle and philosophical debates about life, mind, and matter.

According to Bruineberg and colleagues, philosophical arguments on life, mind, and matter that are based on the free energy principle (FEP) (i) essentially draw on the Markov blanket construct and (ii) tend to assume that strong metaphysical claims can be justified on the basis of metaphysically innocuous formal assumptions provided by FEP. I argue against both (i) and (ii).

Making life & mind as clear as possible, but not clearer

Neuroscience needs theory. Ideas without data are blind, and yet mechanisms without concepts are empty. Friston’s free energy principle paradigmatically illustrates the power and pitfalls of current theoretical biology. Mighty metaphors, turned into mathematical models, can become mindless metaphysics. Then, seeking to understand everything in principle, we may explain nothing in practice. Life can’t live in a map.

In and Out of Sync: an Example of Gestalt Therapy

This article emphasizes the importance of synchronization in changing patients’ dysfunctional patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to functional ones. Furthermore, the concept of synchronization in psychotherapy is delineated herein, showing its feasibility through the free energy principle. Most sync-oriented publications focus on the therapist-patient relationship. In contrast, this article is focusing on the therapeutic process, especially by analyzing how dysfunctional units—both in an individual’s mind, as well as in social relationships—assemble in synchrony and how psychotherapy helps to disassemble and replace them with functional units. As an example, Gestalt psychology and Gestalt psychotherapy are demonstrated through the lenses of synchronization, supported by diverse case studies. Finally, it is concluded that synchronization is opening a gateway to understanding the change dynamics in psychotherapy and, as such, is worth further study.

In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world

Integrating neurons into digital systems to leverage their innate intelligence may enable performance infeasible with silicon alone, along with providing insight into the cellular origin of intelligence. We developed DishBrain, a system which exhibits natural intelligence by harnessing the inherent adaptive computation of neurons in a structured environment. In vitro neural networks from human or rodent origins, are integrated with in silico computing via high-density multielectrode array. Through electrophysiological stimulation and recording, cultures were embedded in a simulated game-world, mimicking the arcade game ‘Pong’. Applying a previously untestable theory of active inference via the Free Energy Principle, we found that learning was apparent within five minutes of real-time gameplay, not observed in control conditions. Further experiments demonstrate the importance of closed-loop structured feedback in eliciting learning over time. Cultures display the ability to self-organise in a goal-directed manner in response to sparse sensory information about the consequences of their actions.

Affect-Logic, Embodiment, Synergetics, and the Free Energy Principle: New Approaches to the Understanding and Treatment of Schizophrenia

This theoretical paper explores the affect-logic approach to schizophrenia in light of the general complexity theories of cognition: embodied cognition, Haken’s synergetics, and Friston’s free energy principle. According to affect-logic, the mental apparatus is an embodied system open to its environment, driven by bioenergetic inputs of emotions. Emotions are rooted in goal-directed embodied states selected by evolutionary pressure for coping with specific situations such as fight, flight, attachment, and others. According to synergetics, nonlinear bifurcations and the emergence of new global patterns occur in open systems when control parameters reach a critical level. Applied to the emergence of psychotic states, synergetics and the proposed energetic understanding of emotions lead to the hypothesis that critical levels of emotional tension may be responsible for the transition from normal to psychotic modes of functioning in vulnerable individuals. In addition, the free energy principle through learning suggests that psychotic symptoms correspond to alternative modes of minimizing free energy, which then entails distorted perceptions of the body, self, and reality. This synthetic formulation has implications for novel therapeutic and preventive strategies in the treatment of psychoses, among these are milieu-therapeutic approaches of the Soteria type that focus on a sustained reduction of emotional tension and phenomenologically oriented methods for improving the perception of body, self, and reality.

Active strategies for multisensory conflict suppression in the virtual hand illusion

The perception of our body in space is flexible and manipulable. The predictive brain hypothesis explains this malleability as a consequence of the interplay between incoming sensory information and our body expectations. However, given the interaction between perception and action, we might also expect that actions would arise due to prediction errors, especially in conflicting situations. Here we describe a computational model, based on the free-energy principle, that forecasts involuntary movements in sensorimotor conflicts. We experimentally confirm those predictions in humans using a virtual reality rubber-hand illusion. Participants generated movements (forces) towards the virtual hand, regardless of its location with respect to the real arm, with little to no forces produced when the virtual hand overlaid their physical hand. The congruency of our model predictions and human observations indicates that the brain-body is generating actions to reduce the prediction error between the expected arm location and the new visual arm. This observed unconscious mechanism is an empirical validation of the perception–action duality in body adaptation to uncertain situations and evidence of the active component of predictive processing.

Accessing Active Inference Theory through Its Implicit and Deliberative Practice in Human Organizations

Active inference theory (AIT) is a corollary of the free-energy principle, which formalizes cognition of living system’s autopoietic organization. AIT comprises specialist terminology and mathematics used in theoretical neurobiology. Yet, active inference is common practice in human organizations, such as private companies, public institutions, and not-for-profits. Active inference encompasses three interrelated types of actions, which are carried out to minimize uncertainty about how organizations will survive. The three types of action are updating work beliefs, shifting work attention, and/or changing how work is performed. Accordingly, an alternative starting point for grasping active inference, rather than trying to understand AIT specialist terminology and mathematics, is to reflect upon lived experience. In other words, grasping active inference through autoethnographic research. In this short communication paper, accessing AIT through autoethnography is explained in terms of active inference in existing organizational practice (implicit active inference), new organizational methodologies that are informed by AIT (deliberative active inference), and combining implicit and deliberative active inference. In addition, these autoethnographic options for grasping AIT are related to generative learning.

The Emperor's New Markov Blankets

The free energy principle, an influential framework in computational neuroscience and theoretical neurobiology, starts from the assumption that living systems ensure adaptive exchanges with their environment by minimizing the objective function of variational free energy. Following this premise, it claims to deliver a promising integration of the life sciences. In recent work, Markov Blankets, one of the central constructs of the free energy principle, have been applied to resolve debates central to philosophy (such as demarcating the boundaries of the mind). The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we trace the development of Markov blankets starting from their standard application in Bayesian networks, via variational inference, to their use in the literature on active inference. We then identify a persistent confusion in the literature between the formal use of Markov blankets as an epistemic tool for Bayesian inference, and their novel metaphysical use in the free energy framework to demarcate the physical boundary between an agent and its environment. Consequently, we propose to distinguish between ‘Pearl blankets’ to refer to the original epistemic use of Markov blankets and ‘Friston blankets’ to refer to the new metaphysical construct. Second, we use this distinction to critically assess claims resting on the application of Markov blankets to philosophical problems. We suggest that this literature would do well in differentiating between two different research programs: ‘inference with a model’ and ‘inference within a model’. Only the latter is capable of doing metaphysical work with Markov blankets, but requires additional philosophical premises and cannot be justified by an appeal to the success of the mathematical framework alone.

“Project for a Spatiotemporal Neuroscience” – Brain and Psyche Share Their Topography and Dynamic

What kind of neuroscience does psychoanalysis require? At his time, Freud in his “Project for a Scientific Psychology” searched for a model of the brain that could relate to incorporate the psyche’s topography and dynamic. Current neuropsychoanalysis builds on specific functions as investigated in Affective and Cognitive (and Social) Neuroscience including embodied approaches. The brain’s various functions are often converged with prediction as operationalized in predictive coding (PC) and free energy principle (FEP) which, recently, have been conceived as core for a “New Project for Scientific Psychology.” We propose to search for a yet more comprehensive and holistic neuroscience that focuses primarily on its topography and dynamic analogous to Freud’s model of the psyche. This leads us to what we describe as “Spatiotemporal Neuroscience” that focuses on the spatial topography and temporal dynamic of the brain’s neural activity including how they shape affective, cognitive, and social functions including PC and FEP (first part). That is illustrated by the temporally and spatially nested neural hierarchy of the self in the brain’s neural activity (second and third part). This sets the ground for developing our proposed “Project for a Spatiotemporal Neuroscience,” which complements and extends both Freud’s and Solms’ projects (fourth part) and also carries major practical implications as it lays the ground for a novel form of neuroscientifically informed psychotherapy, namely, “Spatiotemporal Psychotherapy.” In conclusion, “Spatiotemporal Neuroscience” provides an intimate link of brain and psyche by showing topography and dynamic as their shared features, that is, “common currency.”