A free energy principle for a particular physics

By Karl J. Friston. 2019

308 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This monograph attempts a theory of every 'thing' that can be distinguished from other things in a statistical sense. The ensuing statistical independencies, mediated by Markov blankets, speak to a recursive composition of ensembles (of things) at increasingly higher spatiotemporal scales. This decomposition provides a description of small things; e.g., quantum mechanics - via the Schrodinger equation, ensembles of small things - via statistical mechanics and related fluctuation theorems, through to big things - via classical mechanics. These descriptions are complemented with a Bayesian mechanics for autonomous or active things. Although this work provides a formulation of every thing, its main contribution is to examine the implications of Markov blankets for self-organisation to nonequilibrium steady-state. In brief, we recover an information geometry and accompanying free energy principle that allows one to interpret the internal states of something as representing or making inferences about its external states. The ensuing Bayesian mechanics is compatible with quantum, statistical and classical mechanics and may offer a formal description of lifelike particles.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a44cf961a4495f5a789dfa240e2675f7fffa615e

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Citations in the corpus

Action and Perception as Divergence Minimization (2020, methodology): “We compare to active inference in detail in Appendix A. Generalized free energy (Parr and Friston, 2019) studies a uniﬁed objective similar to ours, although its entropy terms are deﬁned heuristically rather than derived from a general principle.”
The math is not the territory: navigating the free energy principle (2021, methodology): “The static solution to the Fokker-Planck equation is a probability density termed the Nonequilibrium Steady State density, or NESS density (Friston 2019; Friston and Ao 2012).”
The free energy principle made simpler but not too simple (2022, unknown): “The emerging picture here is that biotic systems feature solenoidal flow, in virtue of being sufficiently large to average away random fluctuations, when coarse-graining their dynamics [5].”