Related papers: Psychophysical identity and free energy
This monograph attempts a theory of every 'thing' that can be distinguished from other things in a statistical sense. The ensuing statistical independencies, mediated by Markov blankets, speak to a recursive composition of ensembles (of…
Time irreversibility in neuronal dynamics has recently been demonstrated to correlate with various indicators of cognitive effort in living systems. Using Landauer's principle, which posits that time-irreversible information processing…
Enquiries concerning the underlying mechanisms and the emergent properties of a biological brain have a long history of theoretical postulates and experimental findings. Today, the scientific community tends to converge to a single…
The Free-Energy Principle (FEP) [1-3] has been adopted in a variety of ambitious proposals that aim to characterize all adaptive, sentient, and cognitive systems within a unifying framework. Judging by the amount of attention it has…
The free energy principle, and its corollary active inference, constitute a bio-inspired theory that assumes biological agents act to remain in a restricted set of preferred states of the world, i.e., they minimize their free energy. Under…
This paper presents a model of consciousness that follows directly from the free-energy principle (FEP). We first rehearse the classical and quantum formulations of the FEP. In particular, we consider the inner screen hypothesis that…
We address the problem of building theoretical models that help elucidate the function of the visual brain at computational/algorithmic and structural/mechanistic levels. We seek to understand how the receptive fields and topographic maps…
There is increasing interest in learning how human brain networks vary as a function of a continuous trait, but flexible and efficient procedures to accomplish this goal are limited. We develop a Bayesian semiparametric model, which…
The Mind-Body Problem, which constitutes the starting point for a large part of the speculations about consciousness and conscious experience, can be re-stated in an equivalent way, using the `brain duplication' argument described in this…
We present a categorical formulation of the cognitive frameworks of Predictive Processing and Active Inference, expressed in terms of string diagrams interpreted in a monoidal category with copying and discarding. This includes diagrammatic…
Stochastic chains represent a wide and key variety of phenomena in many branches of science within the context of Information Theory and Thermodynamics. They are typically approached by a sequence of independent events or by a memoryless…
Recent advances in nonequilibrium statistical physics have provided unprecedented insight into the thermodynamics of dynamic processes. The author recently used these advances to extend Landauer's semi-formal reasoning concerning the…
The deep connection between thermodynamics, computation, and information is now well established both theoretically and experimentally. Here, we extend these ideas to show that thermodynamics also places fundamental constraints on…
The physical interpretation of the functioning of the adaptive immune system, which has been thoroughly characterized on genetic and molecular levels, provides a unique opportunity to define an adaptive self-organizing biological system in…
Does the energy requirements for the human brain give energy constraints that give reason to doubt the feasibility of artificial intelligence? This report will review some relevant estimates of brain bioenergetics and analyze some of the…
The paper moves a step towards the full integration of statistical mechanics and information theory. Starting from the assumption that the thermodynamical system is composed by particles whose quantized energies can be modelled as…
Data is scaling exponentially in fields ranging from genomics to neuroscience to economics. A central question is: can modern machine learning methods be applied to construct predictive models of natural systems like cells and brains based…
This explanation of what a brain is and does rests on informational first principles, because information theory, like its parent theory thermodynamics, is mathematically sacrosanct, itself resting on real-valued probability.Just as…
Physics and economics are two disciplines that share the common challenge of linking microscopic and macroscopic behaviors. However, while physics is based on collective dynamics, economics is based on individual choices. This conceptual…
Adaptation in a fluctuating environment is a process of fueling environmental information to gain fitness. Living systems have gradually developed strategies for adaptation from random and passive diversification of the phenotype to more…