Good theories make testable predictions. — RogueAI

And do the tests claim the theory is true? Or do they make the more modest epistemic claim that the theory seems pragmatically reliable in terms of the purposes you had in mind? It works reasonably enough in terms of the new things it allows us to do.

Which of these standards do you want to hold mind science to?

If the claim that some computer has property "is conscious" can't be tested, that would be a problem. — RogueAI

You are demanding truth. And yes, that is impossible. Get over it.

Science promises pragmatism. And so one suggested test of artificial consciousness is the Turing proposal. Interact with the machine and see if it behaves exactly like all the other meat puppets that surround you - the people you might call your family and friends, and to whom you pragmatically grant the gift of being conscious.

You will never know whether it is actually true that you Mom has a mind. But for all practical purposes, I'm sure you act as if you believe that to be the case.

Two kind of things belonging to the same stuff. They are inseparable. So actually there is a unity. — Cartuna

So there is just the one "stuff". You are making some kind of panpsychic claim in regards to your ontological commitments?

Come on, be clear.

On the outside the stuff is material, on the inside, it's consciousness. On the boundary, they are one and the same. — Cartuna

This formula of words now brings you closer to my Peircean semiotic account - the ontology I am happy to commit to as the motivation for theory-spinning.

On the one side is matter - or the Brownian mechanics of dissipative structure. :razz:

On the other side is mind - of the Bayesian mechanics of modelling structure.

The central issue is then the one already well familiar in theoretical biology - Howard Pattee's symbol grounding problem. How does a molecule become a message?

And biology has also found the answer over the past decade or so. Genes code for motor proteins - Brownian ratchets. At the nanoscale of material physics, there is a "magic" convergence of all forms of energy - elastic, mechanical, electrostatic, chemical, thermal. They all happen to have the same scale - a physical equivalence that allows them to be "costlessly" switched from one form into another. All biology has to do is build the switches - the molecular machines that ratchet work for free from doing the switching.

So this the boundary between a-bios and bios, physics and life - a zone of criticality that just happens to exist for appropriate mixtures of molecules in a watery solution in a typical range of temperatures for a planet like ours.

Life was an accident waiting to happen. It just needed a coding mechanism - RNA. The coding system needed to be able to produce nanoscale switches or entropic ratchets - enzymes. The rest was evolutionary history.

And what goes for life also went for mind. Genes model their worlds at one level of semiotic engagement. Neurons took it to a new level of the same essential world modelling process.

As science, this is all so new that hardly anyone has heard about it. But an excellent primer is Life's Ratchet by biophysicist Peter Hoffmann.

Anyway, there is a theory of mind I reject - panpsychism - because it is the kind of theory that just conflates to create its unity. As a theory, it fails by being "not even wrong".

Then there is a theory of mind I endorse - pansemiosis. And I could write a whole book about that. :nerd:

But that reinforces, rather than helps dispel, an instinctive distrust of theories that explain everything. — Banno

It might do that in your mind. You do tend to argue a hell of a lot from "instinct" rather than reasoned fact.

I just think it funny that your instinctive generalisation - the one you just tried to use against Bayesian mechanics - is in fact the principle found at the core of Baysesian mechanics ... it being a generalised theory of reality modelling itself.

You do understand that I am agreeing with you that this is an interesting area of research? — Banno

Interesting. You and your weasel words. If it is so "interesting", why are you so unwilling to invest the time needed to have a valid criticism of it rather than your usual "instinctive doubts".

But you seem to think that this little exercise has explained consciousness. That strikes me as overreach, and it seems I am not alone. — Banno

I love it. Classic Banno argument - tailored to pander to the Dunning-Krugerism of an internet forum. "You confident, me doubt, and look at all the others who also don't understand what is being said but are just as eager to knock down tall poppies."

I'm too old to watch videos. — Banno

I only asked you to scroll to a single slide at minute 53. The fact that you don't want to disturb your cosy solipsism says it all.

That has to be the lamest excuse ever made.

(No wait. That would be "lunch is calling". Or "The spiders under my flower pots and the rotting garlic in my garden are suddenly more important than this internet discussion I started but which seems now to be biting me on the butt." I forgot that you are the master of lame reasons for fading from sight as soon as anyone calls you out on your BS.)

Theories of consciousness are, in principle, unverifiable. — RogueAI

Does science, in principle, verify or falsify its hypotheses?

And would neuroscience talk about the feelings of insects in terms of them being composed of similar matter to humans - some matching proportion of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, other trace elements? Or would the arguments have to be made in terms of having significantly similar "neural structure"?

Sorry to be nit-picky. But folk so often use the Hard Problem as something to hide behind. They want to avoid the arduous work of actually being intimately familiar with what the science of mind has to say. It is so much easier to stand outside and agree not to even bother to try.

Heh, I'll even save you the trouble of looking. Skip to minute 53 of this presentation to see the equations.

The temptation to look to unifying explanations is to be avoided if it leads to oversimplification. — Banno

You do realise that that point is something specifically contained in the Bayesian maths of Friston’s approach?

The trade off between model complexity and model accuracy is the algorithm driving the whole optimisation process.

Perhaps you haven’t read that far and discovered your generalised truism now has been given a formal mathematical description?

It tries to oversimplify human behavior, which is wayyyy more complex,with a naive way — dimosthenis9

That is another misrepresentation.

Although I agree that as a formalism, it doesn’t tackle the code side of the semiotic modelling relation. Friston’s Markov blanket is a general physical description of the epistemic cut. But it doesn’t talk about the “how” of the machinery that enables such a cut to actually be made in nature.

There are four levels of such code I would identify. Genes, neurons, words and numbers. Each produce their “worlds” or Umwelt. Only humans have verbal and mathematically constructed Umwelts or world-models.

So yes, there is one general story to be had - a semiotic theory of everything. That is implied in Friston’s approach, but not mathematically expressed in direct fashion. The fact that there needs to be a machinery of semiosis - some system of encoding - is implied by the Markov blanket formalism, but not to be found in that formalism.

And as you protest, humans are more complex. We have words and numbers that lift us beyond the semiotics of neurons and genes. We have social semiosis and techno semiosis. Friston’s free energy principle was directed primarily at the problem of neurosemiosis, and has been expanded to - sort of - include biosemiosis.

So I have plenty of “criticisms” of Bayesian mechanics. But I think it helps to have actually understood what Bayesian mechanics might claim.

Again the point is made that an explanation for everything is an explanation for nothing. — Banno

Yes. Darwin’s theory of evolution really hammered home that point. Nothing useful can ever result from talk about absolutely general constraints.

I mean what’s with physics and its obsession with the least action principle? Do these guys understand anything about how explanations work?

The dual framing of things means indeed there are two kinds of things — Cartuna

So there are two kinds of descriptions, not two kinds of “things”? There is epistemic duality but not ontological duality?

I want to be clear what you are committing to.

The one who looks and sees the sides of the medal lies in between. — Cartuna

You lost me there.

I get that there is a third person description and a first person description. There is what we tell each other about the “world” as understood from an imagined “God’s eye” view. And then there is what we tell each other about “our selves” as also understood as … well here it gets fuzzy.

Somehow we introspect and report qualia. There is the redness of red. There is experience that is separate from the world that is being experienced. And a self that is itself seperate from those experiences. We are now in some homuncular regress of worlds, experiences and experiencer.

Yet for you, there is this analogy of a medal with two sides. You can see it from both its sides, and yet not both sides at once. And yet - wonderfully - they are really the one thing, the one medal, bound, fused, unseparated.

It is just that there is the inside and the outside view of this two faced medal. This also is how we should understand an ontology motivated by the analogy of a medal with different inscriptions to tell us we in fact are seeing two sides of one thing. Or something like that.

I don’t feel this is going that well for you. Perhaps you can clarify further.

I didn't read the article thoroughly but I'm struggling to see the utility of the "dark room" model being discussed. — the affirmation of strife

It is a sign of a strength of the free energy principle that the bogus “dark room problem” is the best opposition that might be mustered.

If the only line of attack on an idea relies on a fundamental misrepresentation of the idea, then it’s critics are doing a mighty poor job.

The free energy principle describes the minimisation of surprise in the context of being active. That the organism is busy and striving in a challenging environment is what is taken for granted as the situation being optimised by the cognitive process.

Take away the challenging environment and you don’t even have some gap between the certainty of your actions, and the uncertainty of the world, to be minimised.

The justification is that there are two different things. — Cartuna

In what sense is consciousness a “thing”. Do you want to say it has substantial being? Explain to me how that works.

Nope. I’m just asking you to attempt to justify your dualist framing of things.

We haven’t got on to how things might be better framed under a triadic and semiotic systems perspective.

If I hear a piece of music, there are structured processes going on in my brain (looking at it from the outside). But why should they be conscious experiences? Because of the very fact there is structure? I can imagine the same processes going on without a conscious experience. — Cartuna

What do you think conscious experience is then - such that you could positively motivate this claim?

Do you not think that the structure of the ear drums, the structure of the auditory processsing hierarchy, all the rest of the brain’s structure, probably has a lot to do with the structure of our auditory experiences given the way the two always seem to be found in each other’s company?

Can you imagine a body without ears, a brain without auditory cortex, and yet there would still be auditory experience?

So I hear you expressing your doubt. I don’t see what substantiates that doubt as yet.

Can you imagine a conscious experience going on without those neurological processes? How does that work?

I never hear an answer to the question "Why can't that function happen in the dark?" which does not involve a redefinition: — bert1

Apo weirdly has tried to just reverse the burden of proof and to ask "why shouldn't it feel like something" without having first said why it must. — bert1

So does the function ever in fact happen “in the dark”? Is there any reason to believe that?

You might say you can imagine it happening in the dark. But then you would have to give positive reasons for how it could happen in the dark. Which of course you can’t.

And so we arrive at those who actually have theories that model the function in question. And they can rightfully say why it would feel like something to be modelling the world in the way the nervous system models the world.

There are good reasons for thinking that all that brain activity couldn’t do anything else but generate experience.

So yes, the burden falls back on the naysayer who can offer nothing but their disbelief.

Do you see any metaphysical errors in the dark room problem? — TheMadFool

I’ve said that it is only a “problem” premised on a fundamental misunderstanding of Friston’s Bayesian approach.

Banno is trying to do his usual thing of causing mischief and standing innocently on the sidelines.

H&N neurotransmitters have more to do with focus. Dopamine literally makes you think about what you don't have. It takes your focus away from, well, H&N.

No, it doesn't wipe anything in clean. — frank

Lieberman again? His dichotomy of desire dopamine and control dopamine is one way of talking about the contrasting actions of dopamine in the striatum and prefrontal, I guess.

The lost keys form the driving desire - the long-range working memory intention. The found keys become the happy resolution - stop, see, here is what you were looking for.

It breaks habits as much as it cements new ones. — frank

A little dopamine keeps a state of focused attention/intention locked in. A sudden flush of dopamine wipes the slate clean. That explains the apparently contradictory effects.

Did you mean arse? — Banno

Was the spelling ambiguous or just the semantic intent? :wink:

That the free energy principle is the constraint that drives adaptive learning is what is in contention. — Banno

For it to be in contention, folk would first need to demonstrate they understood it.

There's nothing sweeter than an observation that doesn't fit the model. — Kenosha Kid

How many sigma before you accept such exceptions as signal rather than noise?

Let’s get real about the scientific method.

The dark room is a red herring. — Banno

For sure. It appears to be one of those fake philosophical posers intended to stoke the careers for those on both sides of the debate. Andy Clark has form here. :wink:

Both. I can minimise surprises by picking the garlic that will rot if left much longer. But in stead I came back to this surprisingly entertaining thread. Both of my actions are apparently explained by thermodynamics, and so thermodynamics explains nothing. — Banno

Aren’t you just playing Buridan’s ass here?

Why continue to pretend you don’t understand that the free energy principle is the constraint that drives adaptive learning? Is it to substantiate the impression that you have as little new to learn about the world whether you are picking your garlic or “engaged” in biological theories of everything?

What a pose.

I don't think so. — Cartuna

Everyone has their opinions but not the receipts it seems.

The free energy minimizes, to sustain the basic needs for life. But the urge for surprises will drive your brain to get in form. Free energy will increase. — Cartuna

You are taking this free energy thing too literally.

The clever thing Friston does is exploit the bridge that exists between the mathematical formalisms of physical entropy and information entropy.

Others do that too. Stan Salthe has his infodynamical general theory of life and evolution. Fundamental physics makes the connection in terms of blackholes and event horizons.

So there is a dual description to be had. Life and mind can be viewed physically as Brownian ratchets, and informationally as Bayesian ratchets - both sides of the coin being able to swim against the general entropic tide.

But you can’t save physical energy for other kinds of metabolic work by going into a dark room or even sitting in an armchair and thinking less. The separation of the two forms of “work” is also a key part of the story.

That is where Pattee’s epistemic cut, or Friston’s Markov blanket, come in. It is also why the brain can seem somewhat like a computer - a device for which the cost of switching the state of its physical gates is a constant, and so drops out of the picture as a drag on the act of computing anything.

A computer can generate nonsense or do something useful. The energy cost in terms of electricity coming out the wall, heat radiated into the environment, is the same. Human brains seem to operate in a similar fashion at times.

Point being, despite some protestations to the contrary, it is still not clear how this fits in with thermodynamics and information theory. — Banno

Not clear to you or not clear to the neuroscientists that drive Friston’s stellar h-index ranking. Shome difference shurely?

Don't be clingy. — Kenosha Kid

Don’t be evasive.

I got no counter. — Kenosha Kid

You certainly failed to offer any counter.

You quoted Friston saying one thing, then you went off on some riff about your everyday definition of surprise as "novelty". I pointed out that your use of novelty is ambiguous. It covers surprises that are both good and bad. Yet you wanted to stick with the idea that all novelty has positive valence ... because dopamine.

Fair summary?

That baseline is achieved indeed by maintaining a certain free energy that's needed to live a life. — Cartuna

You mean a certain entropy throughput that sustains its "far from equilibrium" structure. Work must be invested in keeping the structure in a continuous state of repair.

In a darkened room, the brain will still be expending just as much energy in its metabolism.

The status quo can be maintained. If unexpected things happen, the free energy has to increase. Excitement occurs. Information increases, depending on the new situation. — Cartuna

The science says that the energy budget of the brain is surprisingly constant.

That is because focused attention is about shutting stuff down as much as turning stuff up. If faced with a duck-rabbit stimulus, or the ambiguity of a Necker cube, neurons favouring one interpretation get cranked up, and those favouring the alternative are actively suppressed.

One can arrange life to meet as little surprises as possible, like seek sanctuary in a dark room, but surprises are needed in life. — Cartuna

Again, you just absolutely miss the whole point of the Bayesian argument. Life is the ability to surf nature's entropic gradients.

As an energy mechanism it is a Brownian ratchet. And as an information mechanism, it is a Bayesian ratchet.

And there you have it. A unified theory of ratchets. :lol:

Why do you think that dopamine response evolved? Why do you think children are naturally drawn to novelty? Just for the luls? It's there to maximise information for building models about our environments. — Kenosha Kid

Do you read what I say? Of course once you can prevent the environment from increasing your belief uncertainty, you then lock in the possibility of ratcheting belief in the direction of ever-broader uncertainty.

It is monotonic to claim "children are naturally drawn to novelty". They have a natural need to learn and construct a stable neural model of the world. They have a natural need to take the random, over-connected, mess of synaptic connection which they are born with and prune the thickets back to give them useful shape. They have a natural need to act on the world and so discover the good and bad consequences that might follow.

Your framing of the issues is too one note.

I'm dismissing it in terms of its fidelity to actual biology. — Kenosha Kid

And you are simply wrong on that score. You don't appear to understand the theory, so no surprise you don't understand what could count as legitimate criticisms of it (and I believe there are criticisms, such as that Friston is so physicalist that he doesn't give sufficient place to the role that semiotic code principles play in actually being the ratcheting mechanism at the heart of the Markov Blanket).

Those who see it as true in some a priori fashion (Apokrisis?) will always be able to explain any given observation in terms of the theory, but at the cost of introducing ad hoc hypotheses to make it fit. — Banno

This might be above your pay grade, but listen to Friston and he tells you he understands that he offers only a generalised theory of everything. To then use that as the basis of models of particular functions or systems is another matter. Of course that becomes a more ad hoc exercise - even if just for the reason that the beautiful theory must be spoilt by random historical accidents. :razz:

Australia got the kangaroos, Europe got the cows, New Zealand got the moa. The general logic of ecology demands large vegetation munchers to balance the entropic equation, recycle the material negentropy and keep it within the system. And while kangaroos, cows and moa are all equally good solutions at that level of explanation, the reasons why they are all such different solutions becomes a matter of historical accident as far as we can tell.

Again, what matters is that Friston offers a mathematics - Bayesian mechanics - which captures the essence of the semiotic modelling relation in a way that the mathematics of Turing computation doesn't.

It is counterfactually an improvement on the kind of logicist paradise that has pervaded the study of life and mind up until now.

Neuroscientists and biologists always knew that organisms aren't simply machines. Friston provides a general mathematics that supports that.

I would not be at all surprised to see in a few years a crusading pedagogue explaining how the only way to teach kids is to minimise the surprises to which they are exposed. And there will be schools that follow that advice, with mixed success. — Banno

If folk are too dumb to understand what is actually being said, then sure.

The explanatory power of surprise avoidance will take years, and much subtle empirical evidence, to evaluate. — Banno

There is a vast amount of empirical evidence already. Helmholtz put psychology on a scientific footing in the 1800s by showing that prediction was the basis of cognition and sensation.

But then along came computer science and its logical atomism. The machine model of reality. Psychology lost its way for a good while, especially in the Anglo world.

No, although the theory here seems to imply that (that life, once there, is a drive towards minimal free Gibbs). — Cartuna

But the theory actually states that life expresses the drive to avoid becoming randomised by its environment.

It gets confusing because life and mind must also be able to do work. The free energy principle is being treated here as a statement that the goal of life and mind is to do no work - retreat into a dark room and do nothing. But what it actually is saying is that the goal of minimising free energy is how a baseline for personal being gets established. The first requirement is to be able to have a structure of belief about the world - a reality model - that is not immediately being entropified away into uncertainty. That baseline is then what sets the scene for the second thing of actually getting to work on the world.

In constructing some state of certainty, some meaningful or autopoietic distinction is made between the self and the world. And that epistemic cut between the world and the self is what allows us to deal with entropy or information uncertainty to the degree it has some practical interest for us.

So the model is of course a structure with high negentropy - and island of wisdom afloat in a world of dissipation or entropy increase. There is a historical investment in some structure of learnt habit. And now the free energy principle is about maintaining that investment by minimising the need to make any changes to it.

But that just then limits the need to make change and promotes enduring stability. The environment is of course going to continue to demand adaptive change to the neural model. However, that change is now focused just like a Brownian ratchet. Encountering uncertainty leads to adaptation or learning by the model, rather than randomising it - eroding our historically constructed structures of belief.

The free energy principle imposes a thermodynamic direction on the modelling relation the organism has with its world. By pre-filtering noise, what comes through is by definition salience - a meaningful signal. So what should ordinarily act to scramble a structure of certainty - increase a model's entropy - instead only is allowed to increase its negentropy.

If you can wedge the forwards steps, you can milk a randomising environment for its energy in Brownian ratchet fashion.

Coincidentally, this same principle is also the biggest paradigm shift to hit theoretical biology in the last decade. It is how life operates down at the quasi-classical nanoscale, as with kinesins and other molecular machines.

That has absolutely nothing to do with it. — Kenosha Kid

:yawn:

Again, the definition is quoted above. I know your initial MO was to claim that, by disagreeing, I must be employing a different definition, — Kenosha Kid

And yet where you correctly quote surprise as it is defined by Friston as....

mathematically, surprise is also the negative log-evidence for the model entailed by the agent. This means minimizing surprise maximizes the evidence for the agent (model).

You then go on to discuss it in terms of some pop-neuropsychology bullshit...

When it finds something surprising, i.e. that the model could not predict, it rewards itself with a hit of dopamine. — Kenosha Kid

A "hit" of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens triggers a switch from acting on habit to responding with focused attention. The prefrontal cortex is also "hit" with dopamine so as to underwrite the fixing of the moment in working memory.

It is not about subserving a feeling - even if it might feel like something to be alerted, focused, engaged. It is about a certain kind of surprise or prediction error that leads to a positive orientation response. A global decision to approach closer and explore, gather more information.

Then surprise or prediction error can trigger the opposite form of orientation response if that is judged more appropriate. We can flinch, pull away, prepare for fight or flight (or even simply freeze). The brain's hierarchy gets "hit" by other neuromodulators like noradrenaline - a transmitter with information processing consequences like jacking up the signal/noise ratio of our neuronal responses. When facing radical uncertainty - like a lurking tiger - the brain tilts towards a willingness to jump to rapid conclusion based on limited data and prior experience.

So going off on some riff that surprise = dopamine = reward is just telling me you haven't studied the role that neuromodulators play in the complex information economy of the brain.

There is a hell of a lot more to it all. Which is why it is so valuable that Friston might boil all the complexity down to its simplest possible mathematical expression.

Are relations between stuffs or between nothings? — litewave

You have to look at it the other way around. Chaos is so much “somethingness” that it is effectively a nothingness. Just an unstructured torrent of possibilities. The task of global structure - the evolution of laws and regularities - is to suppress that wildness to the degree that you are left with stuff that is definite and individuated.

The Atomists imagined this state as atoms in a void. That tells the story of the day after creation, but not the story of creation itself.

Someone mentioned children - fresh minds, tabula rasa. To younglings, the world is full of surprises because they haven't had time or are in the process of constructing a faithful model of the world, one which would help them to anticipate events, prepare for them, etc. and then they mature into adults. As adults, growing older is just another name for accumulation of empirical data to refine said model which is an asymptote for actual/true reality. My guesstimate is the model any person develops should be a good map of the territory by the 25th year of life if it's to be of any use at all. — TheMadFool

Agreed. But what is also key is that the map of the territory is one that is a map of the territory with oneself in it as well. So it isn’t a map with the whole world represented, it is a map of the route you want to take to complete your self-defining life mission. It is a map of yourself as much as a map of the world you must inhabit.

This is the difference between a Cartesian representational model of what the brain does - the computer science model - and an enactive or embodied view of cognition. Our neural models of the world are maps which embody a personal point of view.

Any kind of science needs to be driven by evidence, not a desire for totalising unity. We do not accept theory on the grounds that it's neat, but on its accord with observation. — Kenosha Kid

So Kuhn was wrong about paradigms? Whatever.

(Do you see how you just employed the data processing paradigm that Bayesian mechanics replaces to try to argue against Bayesian mechanics? Oh the irony.j

Yes, a human is only one example of a biological system, but you only need one counterexample to falsify a law. — Kenosha Kid

You are creating your own confusion by talking about surprise as if it were just a “feeling” here and not an information theoretic metric.

Check out Friston’s recent Markov Blanket and Unified Theory of Unified Theories presentations if you want to get beyond the verbiage and kick the tyres of the actual maths.

Friston's particular contribution is in bringing the Helmholtz free-energy approach to bear on the problem, and then trying to extend it beyond cognitive science to living systems in general. — SophistiCat

:up: Well said.

As a model of neurophysiology, it goes back to the first efforts at mind science in the 1800s. What is new is to cash out the story as actual maths and physics.

Psychology went down the wrong path of trying to found itself on computer science in the 1950s. Now it can join biology in rooting itself in the maths and physics of dissipative structure theory.

The Hard Problem gets sorted at root if mind, like life, is shown to be a physical principle from the getgo.

Friston positions Bayesian mechanics as the new fourth branch of physics - following on from classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics.

paraphrasing, "destroying the village to save the village". — TheMadFool

The theory here is sort of like that. You need to destroy surprise in order to be surprised. You have to create a baseline where the world is made as predictable and unsurprising as possible. That then allows you to experience the counterfactuality of events which are actually surprising - events that have personalised meaning or information because they must force you to revise your beliefs about the world.

Surprise can’t exist in the usual sense if everything that happens counts as something out of the blue. That becomes just randomness.

The brain desires salience. It has to discover the signal by first eliminating the noise.

The problem is in trying to model all human behaviour according to one general rule when in fact it is an interplay between many physical processes evolved at different times in different environments, some overriding. Our fear of lurking tigers _is_ quite different from our innate curiosity for the novel, and should be treated as such. — Kenosha Kid

But Friston is creating a mathematically general theory of the modelling relation that distinguishes all bios from all a-bios. He is giving neuroscience its own proper physicalist foundation - Bayesian mechanics - to wean it off the Universal Turing Machine formalisms that want to treat the brain as a representing and simulating computer.

When he talks of surprise, it is as a technical term within a new mathematical structure. He brings together many existing information theoretic concepts - surprisal, mutual information, free energy - under the one general set of equations. So the theory is broad enough to cover the mind of a bacterium as much as a human.

First you find the common base principles of what a biotic modelling relation with the world is all about. Then you can start to worry about the complexities of the specific implementations.

When it finds something surprising, i.e. that the model could not predict, it rewards itself with a hit of dopamine. — Kenosha Kid

Not really. Finding your lost keys might be a pleasing surprise. A sudden increase in your world certainty. Spotting the lurking tiger is something different, a sudden increase in your world uncertainty.

A dopamine hit locks in a goal state. You get tunnel focus on the natural next action of grabbing your keys. Dopamine fixes a habit of action - hence is associated with addiction.

But an increase in uncertainty leads to a drop in serotonin, and increase in noradrenaline. You get hit by neuromodulators that cause you to cast around anxiously for some better predictive model of the world.

So surprise is information uncertainty. But if you are looking for lost keys, you at least know they are somewhere and what you want them for. The unpredictable bit is where they will show up as an environmental sensation. The dopamine happiness is about being immediately back on track in a surprise minimised world.

A lurking tiger is a much greater source of uncertainty. You didn’t predict it and you are not sure what is the best thing to do about it. The sensory surprise of seeing it doesn’t spell the end of your state of uncertainty but the start of it.

Banno I think apokrisis did a good job of answering this. — I like sushi

Nice of you to say so, but it was a hurried reply to a confused OP. I can do better. :smile:

First, it is obvious that to be able to predict the world with minimal error is going to be a way to live longer. Or even more importantly - from a true Darwinian perspective - maximise your reproductive success. So that “mystery” is easily dealt with.

Then the actual Darkened Room issue.

Perhaps it is clearer in Friston’s more recent Markov Blanket reformulation of his arguments, but an enactive/semiotic approach to cognition is all about the coupling of the organism to its world by a cybernetic feedback loop of action and sensation.

An organism’s actions on the world are a source of certainty. It is like a hypothesis that you intend to test, You can at least be certain of what you plan to do in terms of acting on the world.

The world itself is then the source of surprise. While you act with the certainty of an intention that is going to make some change to the world, the world is coming back at you the other way as the cause of any sensory uncertainty.

The trick is then to act in ways that only increase your certainty about the sensations you will experience. If the certainty of your actions effectively reduces the uncertainty of your sensations, then the two sides of the equation are tightly coupled in a way that optimises your ability to exist in the world.

It is all you have to do. Minimise the surprises that would otherwise stop you smoothly meeting your needs as a living organism. Zero surprise means every wish is being effortlessly met. Sensory prediction error is used to calibrate habits of action. You are winning to the degree your plans for your future don’t encounter the unexpected.

But an organism lives in the world. It exists because it can tame environmental uncertainty through its actions. It can feed itself, protect itself, reproduce itself, etc. It can act in ways that reduce the world’s uncertainty.

So it doesn’t need to retreat to the refuge of a darkened room to escape the environment’s capacity to surprise. That move might seem to remove the source of sensory uncertainty, but it would also remove the certainty represented by the organism’s store of habits of action. The whole system of cognition would collapse. As it does in sensory deprivation conditions.

For example, in the strong interaction SU(3) was chosen and not U(3). — Cartuna

Chosen by who? Are you saying the particles - as the matter - got to choose their SU(3) interaction as their structure of relations, rather than the particles being characterised by the restriction of having to arrive at a gauge invariance that could give them their stable material identity?

As I understand it, U(3) reduces to SU(3) because one of the 9 interactions would effectively self cancel and hence be unphysical. A distinction that failed to make a difference.

And note, I don’t eliminate materiality from my argument. I would agree that structural realism, in its enthusiasm, can throw out the baby with the bath water there.

My argument is that materiality reduces to “material possibility”. The bare unformed potential for some action with some direction.

So it is a structuralism in the tradition of metaphysicians like Anaximander, Aristotle and Peirce. And in the spirit of quantum field theory, condensed matter physics and loop quantum gravity.

Order out of chaos. The emergence of structure to limit the uncertainty of bare spontaneity.

So in a broad sense, there must be some material cause for the formal cause to act upon. But then also, the game is to reduce this materiality to its least concrete state of being. That then gives formal cause a real job to do.

If matter is fundamentally defined in terms of a complete absence of form - naked fluctuation, a quantum foam, an Apeiron, whatever - then existence naturally evolves as whatever structuring set of relations can impose a cohesive and generalised order on such a chaotic state.

Thus it might seem that matter comes first in the creation of a complexly structured Cosmos. But that it just equivalent to saying the maximally unformed and unstructured was the ground from which the formed and the structured arose… due to mathematical inevitability.

To exist is to gain the important quality of stable persistence. And that means to arrive at an equilibrium state, or generalised invariance. Differences might freely still happen, but now they no longer make any general difference.

Ah! There you make a naive, but understandable mistake.Structures don't flow independently somewhere to create the material it needs. The structure lies in the matter itself. — Cartuna

So when it comes to the Standard Model of particle physics, the group symmetry doesn’t limit the material possibilities?

Sounds legit.

But why is minimising surprise the very same as living longest? — Banno

Friston states where the flaw in this lies...

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.”

The whole "darkened room" angle only has legs for the naive realist.

Bayesian mechanics is about the pragmatic problem of taming the "blooming, buzzing confusion of reality" - the sensorium of the newborn - and turning it into a useful model of "the world as it would be with us in it". That is, a semiotic unwelt, or system of interpretance.

So whether we are talking of semiosis at the level of genes, neurons, words or numbers, the game is the same. Biology is negentropy in command of entropy production. It is a state of far from equilibrium thermodynamics (ie: dissipative structure) where some autonomous/emboddied self is in charge.

That is what Friston's Bayesian mechanics captures. Selfhood emerges to the degree the natural uncertainty of any dissipative environment can be made predictable and thus controllable.

It is not the world that must be made stable and boring. That is always going to be chokka with uncertainties. It is the ability to then forge a constant sense of intentional self within that blooming, buzzing confusion that is the task. It is selfhood that must be made stable and boring ... which is something most of us successfully achieve as we become creatures frozen into familiar routines and familiar concerns as the "way of life that defines us as being us, and not someone else". :razz: