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Autopoiesis, free energy, and the life–mind continuity thesis

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Abstract

The life–mind continuity thesis is difficult to study, especially because the relation between life and mind is not yet fully understood, and given that there is still no consensus view neither on what qualifies as life nor on what defines mind. Rather than taking up the much more difficult task of addressing the many different ways of explaining how life relates to mind, and vice versa, this paper considers two influential accounts addressing how best to understand the life–mind continuity thesis: first, the theory of autopoiesis (AT) developed in biology and in enactivist theories of mind; and second, the recently formulated free energy principle in theoretical neurobiology, with roots in thermodynamics and statistical physics. This paper advances two claims. The first is that the free energy principle (FEP) should be preferred to the theory of AT, as classically formulated. The second is that the FEP and the recently formulated framework of autopoietic enactivism can be shown to be genuinely continuous on a number of central issues, thus raising the possibility of a joint venture when it comes to answering the life–mind continuity thesis.

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Notes

  1. See Kirchhoff (2015a, b) for arguments that show how the FEP and enactivism can work together in complementary ways against cognitivist theories of mind.

  2. Given that the FEP and aspects of the AT can be shown to be complementary, would it not be better to unite these two frameworks and use them to jointly criticize view that object to a deep continuity between life and mind? This is certainly possible. But it is a task that will have to wait for another occasion.

  3. The distinction between internalist and externalist forms of the causal-explanatory relation between organism and environment is due to Godfrey-Smith (1996).

  4. My account of the FEP is not comprehensive. See Friston (2005, 2009, 2013) and Friston and Stephan (2007), for detailed (mathematical) treatments.

  5. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this point.

  6. As Varela specifies: “An autopoietic system—the minimal living organization—is one that continuously produces the components that specify it, while at the same time realizing it (the system) as a concrete unity in space and time, which makes the network of production of components possible” (1997, p. 75).

  7. Some readers will no doubt make the objection that if A cannot directly access B, but must instead model B by sampling across probability distributions, then this commits the FEP to internalism. But this conclusion need not follow. Consider, if A stands in a relation to B, whatever that relation might be, then A and B are not one and the same but separated (in some fashion). In the literature on dynamical systems, it is common to treat two separate pendulums as coupled, and therefore as constituting a nonlinearly coupled dynamical systems—as a system comprising both A and B. However, even if A and B are coupled in this precise mathematical sense, there is still a schism between A and B. After all, A and B are not identical. But it is far from clear that such a separation entails commitment to any kind of internalism. In fact, it can be shown that any dynamical system A—e.g. an organism—coupled with a second dynamical system B—e.g. an environment—“can be said to ‘infer’ the ‘hidden causes’ of its ‘input’ (the dynamics of B) when it reliably covaries with the dynamics of B and it is robust to the noise inherent in the coupling” (Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014, p. 7).

  8. One might claim that the FEP overplays its capacity to explain the interdependence between sensation and movement. After all, this is not special to the FEP but a baseline condition of any dynamical system that is coupled to its environment. This is observation is correct. But it is not a problem for the FEP given that it based in dynamical systems theory and statistical physics.

  9. The FEP is not committed to the idea that all phase transitions must be avoided. Indeed, there is no need to think that the FEP is incompatible with phase transitions such as those involved in the transitions from egg-caterpillar-cocoon-butterfly. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for mentioning this example.

  10. One might press the claim that the FEP is premised on adaptivity. But this seems difficult to do given that a key assumption of the FEP is that without active inference (embodied activity) organisms would not be able to minimize free energy (Hohwy 2012). The reason for this is that active inference—on the FEP formulation—is a precondition for minimizing free energy under hierarchical generative models and Markov blankets.

  11. I consider Di Paolo’s (2009) alternative to mere autopoiesis in Sect. 6.

  12. As Friston and Stephan put it: “This principle ... is sufficient to account for adaptive exchange with the environment by ensuring a bound on adaptive value is optimized” (2007, p. 427).

  13. Although developing an answer to this issue is of significance, it is a task that will have to wait for another occasion.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Julian Kiverstein, Eric Rietveld and Jelle Bruineberg for helpful comments on this paper. I am also grateful to all the participants at the Predictive Brain and Embodied, Enactive Cognition workshop at the University of Wollongong. Finally I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for highly constructive comments.

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Kirchhoff, M.D. Autopoiesis, free energy, and the life–mind continuity thesis. Synthese 195, 2519–2540 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1100-6

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