Answering Schrödinger's question: A free-energy formulation

By Maxwell James D. Ramstead, Paul B. Badcock, Karl J. Friston. Physics of Life Reviews, 2017

339 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The free-energy principle (FEP) is a formal model of neuronal processes that is widely recognised in neuroscience as a unifying theory of the brain and biobehaviour. More recently, however, it has been extended beyond the brain to explain the dynamics of living systems, and their unique capacity to avoid decay. The aim of this review is to synthesise these advances with a meta-theoretical ontology of biological systems called variational neuroethology, which integrates the FEP with Tinbergen's four research questions to explain biological systems across spatial and temporal scales. We exemplify this framework by applying it to Homo sapiens, before translating variational neuroethology into a systematic research heuristic that supplies the biological, cognitive, and social sciences with a computationally tractable guide to discovery.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cbf4040cb14a019ff3556fad5c455e99737f169f

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Citations in the corpus

The free energy principle made simpler but not too simple (2022, neutral): “A brief review of the literature in this area will show that the majority of applications are in the neurosciences [124] with some exceptions: e.g., [180,181].”
A free energy principle for a particular physics (2019, background): “At each level of (self) organisation, the integrity of constituent particles is underwritten by the preservation of a Markov blanket that enables us to talk about ‘things’ (Ramstead et al., 2017) or, indeed, how things affect things (Constant et al., 2018).”