The Markov blankets of life: autonomy, active inference and the free energy principle

By Michael D. Kirchhoff, Thomas Parr, E. Palacios, Karl J. Friston, Julian Kiverstein. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 2018

372 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This work addresses the autonomous organization of biological systems. It does so by considering the boundaries of biological systems, from individual cells to Home sapiens, in terms of the presence of Markov blankets under the active inference scheme—a corollary of the free energy principle. A Markov blanket defines the boundaries of a system in a statistical sense. Here we consider how a collective of Markov blankets can self-assemble into a global system that itself has a Markov blanket; thereby providing an illustration of how autonomous systems can be understood as having layers of nested and self-sustaining boundaries. This allows us to show that: (i) any living system is a Markov blanketed system and (ii) the boundaries of such systems need not be co-extensive with the biophysical boundaries of a living organism. In other words, autonomous systems are hierarchically composed of Markov blankets of Markov blankets—all the way down to individual cells, all the way up to you and me, and all the way out to include elements of the local environment.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Cognitive Neuroscience, History and Philosophy of Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e1d3f7eb3bf11a0881d9417df8071ca663eefbaf

Citations in the corpus

• In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world (2021, neutral): “These findings accord with the proposed role of a Markov blanket, providing a statistical boundary of the system to separate it into internal and external states (Kirchhoff et al., 2018; Palacios et al., 2020).”