The anticipating brain is not a scientist: the free-energy principle from an ecological-enactive perspective

By Jelle P. Bruineberg, Julian Kiverstein, Erik Rietveld. Synthese, 2016

344 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, we argue for a theoretical separation of the free-energy principle from Helmholtzian accounts of the predictive brain. The free-energy principle is a theoretical framework capturing the imperative for biological self-organization in information-theoretic terms. The free-energy principle has typically been connected with a Bayesian theory of predictive coding, and the latter is often taken to support a Helmholtzian theory of perception as unconscious inference. If our interpretation is right, however, a Helmholtzian view of perception is incompatible with Bayesian predictive coding under the free-energy principle. We argue that the free energy principle and the ecological and enactive approach to mind and life make for a much happier marriage of ideas. We make our argument based on three points. First we argue that the free energy principle applies to the whole animal–environment system, and not only to the brain. Second, we show that active inference, as understood by the free-energy principle, is incompatible with unconscious inference understood as analagous to scientific hypothesis-testing, the main tenet of a Helmholtzian view of perception. Third, we argue that the notion of inference at work in Bayesian predictive coding under the free-energy principle is too weak to support a Helmholtzian theory of perception. Taken together these points imply that the free energy principle is best understood in ecological and enactive terms set out in this paper.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d923112dbf3c46d792b9d1172dd8fa69a68e3386

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Citations in the corpus

Vanilla PP for Philosophers: A Primer on Predictive Processing (2017, background): “Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958573024 11 | 18 skeptical position is maintained by Jelle Bruineberg (see Bruineberg 2017 and Bruineberg et al. 2016).”
Ecological-Enactive Cognition as engaging with a field of relevant affordances (2018, background): “On our (Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014; Bruineberg, Kiverstein, and Rietveld 2016) interpretation, Friston’s Free Energy Principle applied to living organisms is about improving the individual’s grip on the environment.16 Crucially, Friston argues that you can predict the structure of the embodied…”
Answering Schrödinger's question: A free-energy formulation (2017, neutral): “This inferential aspect leads us to notions like embodied inference [44,45], the Bayesian brain [46], the Bayesian cell [27], and even a Bayesian culture [29,47].”
A nice surprise? Predictive processing and the active pursuit of novelty (2018, background): “But as a kind of spin-off from all this deep (and language-enriched – see (Lupyan and Clark 2015)) model-building activity, we humans also began to construct complex social and physical environments. Our human minds are now marinated in the unique statistical baths of a succession of such designer w”