The Free Energy Principle is a formal description of how life resist entropy across scales by minimising surprise. Surprise here being an information-theoretic view of how unlikely a particular sensory state of an organism is, not the psychological phenomenon of surprise — though they are definitely linked. The free energy principle describes how organisms attempt to reduce the difference between their model of the world and their perception of it.
Joining me to shed light on this topic is Maxwell Ramstead. Maxwell is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal and at the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University. He has coauthored several papers in leading journals, which exploring the applications of the free energy principle to the dynamics of cognition and the mind, phenomenology, ecology, and socio-cultural systems.
In our conversation, we cover:
- What is the Free Energy Principle
- What is active inference
- The 4 E A approach to cognition (embedded, embodied, enactive, extended and affective)
- Entropy
- Potential societal implications of the Free Energy Principle
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