Agency and Intentionality in Living Systems

You've probably come across the "free energy principle." It's become one of the most influential ideas in the broader cognitive sciences. Since the neuroscientist Karl Friston first introduced it in 2005, the theory has been fleshed out, extended, generalized, criticized, and cited thousands and thousands of times. But what is this idea, exactly? What does it say about the nature of brains and minds? What does it say about the phenomenon of life itself? And is anything that it says really that new?

My guest today is Dr. Kate Nave. Kate is a philosopher at the University of Edinburgh and the author of the new book, A Drive to Survive: The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life. In the book, Kate offers an extended critical analysis of the free energy principle and situates it in a broader landscape of ideas about the nature of life and mind.

In this conversation, Kate and I talk about how the free energy principle has changed over time, from its beginnings as a theory of cortical responses in the brain to its eventual status as a theory of... well, a lot. We discuss why this theory has had such an enormous influence, and we talk about how many of the key ideas behind it actually have a long history. We consider some kindred spirits of the free energy framework— approaches like cybernetics, enactivism, predictive processing, and autopoiesis. We walk through a series of questions that all these approaches have long grappled with. Questions like: What does it mean to be alive? What is the relationship between being alive and being cognitive? What are the roles of prediction and representation in cognition? And we ask how—if it all—the free energy principle gives us new answers to these old questions. Along the way, Kate and I touch on: surprisal, visual phenomenology, vitalism, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Maturana and Varela, pendulums and bacteria, computation and models, primordial purposiveness, pancakes, and whether we'll ever be able to create artificial life.

As you might be able to tell from the description I just gave, this conversation goes pretty deep—and it does get a bit technical. It dives down into the history and philosophy around some of the most foundational questions we can ask about minds. If that sounds like your cup of tea, enjoy.

Alright friends, on to my conversation with Dr. Kate Nave!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

5:00 – The 2005 paper in which Karl Friston proposed the principle of free energy minimization. Friston later generalized the ideas here and here.

14:00 – For influential philosophical work on action in perception, see Alva Nöe’s book, Action in Perception.

17:00 – One of the classic works in the “enactivist” tradition is Evan Thompson’s book, Mind in Life.

18:00 – The actual quip, credited to Carl Sagan, is about “apple pie” not pancakes: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

20:00 – The notion of “autopoiesis” (or “self-creation”) was introduced by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in their book, Autopoiesis and Cognition.

24:00 – A classic paper of cybernetics from 1943, ‘Behavior, purpose, and teleology.’

37:00 – For more on the idea of “predictive processing,” see our earlier episode with Dr. Mark Miller.

43:00 – For a discussion of the idea of “representation” in the philosophy of cognitive science, see here. For a discussion of “anti-representationalism,” see here.

Recommendations

‘Organisms, Machines, and Thunderstorms: A History of Self-Organization,’ (part 1) (part 2), Evelyn Fox Keller

The Mechanization of the Mind, Jean-Pierre Dupuy

‘The Reflex Machine and the Cybernetic Brain,’ M. Chirimuuta

Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.

Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here!

We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: manymindspodcast@gmail.com. 

For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).