But why is minimising surprise the very same as living longest? — Banno
Minimizing free energy means living a non-agitated, calm, life, with a minimum of energy use, in a silent dark room with optimal temperature and nothing happening. — Cartuna
So you are right that "your brain will not develop"; but a brain that does not develop would itself be a surprise — Banno
But why is minimising surprise the very same as living longest? — Banno
The “reduce-surprise/live-longer” hypothesis seems to contain some remnant of the assumption that surprise is somewhere “out there,” a real, objective and measurable property of the world. In fact, it is subjective and relative to the interpretation applied by the agent, i.e., always “in the eye of the beholder.”
Is this another free logic example? — Kenosha Kid
"Surprise" here has a special meaning... "the difference between an organism’s predictions about its sensory inputs (embodied in its models of the world) and the sensations it actually encounters". — Banno
same meaning I'm employing. — Kenosha Kid
Yes, same meaning I'm employing. We're quite surprise-a-philic if anything. — Kenosha Kid
One question that thus arises concerns the relation between all this talk about surprise minimization in the informational sense, and surprise minimization from the point of view of an intelligent agent. Perhaps it is too obvious to be worth stating, but we should also bear in mind that the two are remarkably distinct. One way to see this is to reflect that the state of the brain that most thoroughly – across all the time scales of adaptation – minimizes informational surprise may, at times, be a state that corresponds to a very surprising event or percept as far as the agent herself is concerned. For example, if I perceive a pink elephant in the middle of the room, that percept must itself be the one that – taking all those time scales (i.e., experience) into account – most effectively minimizes the long-term average of surprise about such data, conditioned on a model (again, in the inclusive sense of model). We should thus remind ourselves that even surprise relative to our best model can be tolerated, as evidenced by surprisingness to the conscious agent who may often – though not too often on pain of death – find herself in quite surprising and unexpected situations.
Physicist: From the point of view of the free-energy formulation there is no need to recourse to any other principles. Of course, one might find that one’s favorite principle emerges from a particular application of the free-energy principle; however, the whole point of the free-energy principle is to unify all adaptive autopoietic and self-organizing behavior under one simple imperative; avoid surprises and you will last longer.
Philosopher: The “free-energy principle” (see e.g., Friston and Stephan, 2007; Friston, 2010a) suggests that all biological systems are driven to minimize an information-theoretic (not thermodynamic, though the two are mathematically close) quantity known as “free energy.” Free energy, as here defined, bounds surprise, conceived as the difference between an organism’s predictions about its sensory inputs (embodied in its models of the world) and the sensations it actually encounters. In this discussion, surprise is used explicitly as a measure of improbability from information theory. This is also known as surprisal or self information.
The affective state of surprise isn't what's intended by surprise minimisation. Worth keeping in mind it's a technical term in the underlying theory. — fdrake
If biological systems, including ourselves, act so as to minimise surprise, then why don't we crawl into a dark room and stay there? — Banno
We should thus remind ourselves that even surprise relative to our best model can be tolerated, as evidenced by surprisingness to the conscious agent who may often – though not too often on pain of death – find herself in quite surprising and unexpected situations.
I know children are powerfully rewarded when they experience novelty as long as they feel safe. — frank
Conditions for those experiments are a bit suspect. They put a mouse in a cage with a lever containing some kind of drug. With nothing else to do, bored to exasperation, they'll pull the lever — Manuel
What the alternative, because the mice get food in a different pattern, they're just not going to eat? — Manuel
The article specifies that events with high surprisal are surprising in the common sense of the word. — frank
and admittedly,In this discussion, surprise is used explicitly as a measure of improbability from information theory.
And the connection to free energyAlthough the psychological notion of surprise is distinct, events with high surprisal are generally surprising.
With this simple addition, we are now in a position to consider behavior and self organization; however, the same basic principle remains – namely, minimizing free energy or surprise.
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.