Related papers: The empire strikes back: Some responses to Bruineb…

Bruineberg and colleagues helpfully distinguish between instrumental and ontological interpretations of Markov blankets, exposing the dangers of using the former to make claims about the latter. However, proposing a sharp distinction…

Biehl et al (2020) present some interesting observations on an early formulation of the free energy principle in (Friston, 2013). We use these observations to scaffold a discussion of the technical arguments that underwrite the free energy…

We summarize the original formulation of the free energy principle, and highlight some technical issues. We discuss how these issues affect related results involving generalised coordinates and, where appropriate, mention consequences for…

In this comment on "The Markov blanket trick: On the scope of the free energy principle and active inference" by Raja and colleagues (2021) in Physics of Life Reviews, I argue that the argument presented by the authors is valid; however, I…

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…

What can we hope to learn about brains from the free energy principle? In adopting the "primordial soup" physical model, Bruineberg et al. perpetuate the unsupported notion that the free energy principle has a meaningful physical--and…

In recent works, Knuth and Bahreyni have demonstrated that the concepts of space and time are emergent in a coarse-grained model of direct particle-particle influence. In addition, Knuth demonstrated that observer-made inferences regarding…

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 aim of "A glance beyond the quantum model" [arXiv:0907.0372] to modernize the Correspondence Principle is compromised by an assumption that a classical model must start with the idea of particles, whereas in empirical terms particles…

In this commentary, we respond to a technical analysis of the Free Energy Principle (hereafter: FEP) presented in "How particular is the physics of the Free Energy Principle" by Aguilera et al. In the target article, the authors analyzed…

Einstein's distinction between principle theories and constructive theories is methodological rather than metaphysical. Principle theories such as thermodynamics and relativity articulate empirically distilled constraints that delimit…

The concept of free energy has its origins in 19th century thermodynamics, but has recently found its way into the behavioral and neural sciences, where it has been promoted for its wide applicability and has even been suggested as a…

The free energy principle has been proposed as a unifying account of brain function. It is closely related, and in some cases subsumes, earlier unifying ideas such as Bayesian inference, predictive coding, and active learning. This article…

This paper presents a continuous, information-theoretic extension of the Free Energy Principle through the concept of Markov blanket density, i.e., a scalar field that quantifies the degree of conditional independence between internal and…

We seek to clarify the concept of active inference by disentangling it from the Free Energy Principle. We show how the optimizations that need to be carried out in order to implement active inference in discrete state spaces can be…

The 'free energy principle' (FEP) has been suggested to provide a unified theory of the brain, integrating data and theory relating to action, perception, and learning. The theory and implementation of the FEP combines insights from…

In this thesis we explore the physics of renormalons in integrable models under the framework of resurgence. In the first part, we review some background on resurgence, integrability and renormalons, including a discussion of large N…

A discussion is presented of the principle of black hole com- plementarity. It is argued that this principle could be viewed as a breakdown of general relativity, or alternatively, as the introduction of a time variable with multiple…

In a recent technical critique of the free energy principle (FEP) due to Aguilera-Millidge-Tschantz-Buckley, it is argued that there are a number of instances where the FEP$\unicode{x2014}$as conventionally written, in terms of densities…

This technical note considers the sampling of outcomes that provide the greatest amount of information about the structure of underlying world models. This generalisation furnishes a principled approach to structure learning under a…