Overview

How the purposive behavior of living systems outstrips the constraints of the free energy principle. How the purposive behavior of living systems outstrips the constraints of the free energy principle. Since 2005, Karl Friston's proposal that the principle of free energy minimization underpins the purposive behavior of living agents has evolved through thousands of publications. This principle's central move is to formalize the drive for self-preservation in terms of a single probabilistic imperative- to survive, a living system must consistently exhibit the same ""most likely"" pattern of activity over time. Despite the simplicity of this central claim, the free energy principle's complexity and rate of development have previously made it difficult to identify and evaluate. In A Drive to Survive, Kathryn Nave offers an extended critical analysis of the strengths and limitations of Friston's proposal. Nave shows that the free energy principle's capacity to account for the biological origins of purposiveness is undermined by its applicability to any stable inanimate system. As this triviality has become apparent, so advocates have begun to reframe the free energy principle as a means to eliminate, rather than explain, the notion of distinctively biological purposiveness. This, Nave proposes, gets things the wrong way around. The triviality of free energy minimization does not prove that there is no difference in kind between living agents and ordinary machines, but rather it reflects that the framework cannot capture the intrinsic instability and unpredictability that distinguish the former.

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Reviews

""A Drive to Survive, written by Kathryn Nave, is a timely and incisive critical assessment of the Free Energy Principle (FEP) — arguably the most ambitious attempt yet at formulating a ""physics of the sentient system."" Nave's book will appeal to anyone interested in grasping both the scope and the limitations of the FEP as a candidate for a grand unifying theory of life and mind."" –Perception ""[A] thorough analysis of the promises of a trendy theoretical frame-work in the cognitive sciences....the work of Nave constitutes an important reference for understanding the limits of physical reductionism....the book is very well written and pleasant to read."" —History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences

Author Information

Kathryn Nave is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, investigating the biological roots of agency, autonomy, and intelligence. Outside of academia, she has worked as a science and technology journalist for outlets including Wired, The Guardian, The Economist, and The New Statesman.

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