Karl Friston's free energy principle

Overview

Karl Friston's free energy principle suggests that organisms, including humans, act to minimise the difference between their internal model of the world and incoming sensory data, a quantity called "free energy". In simple terms, the brain constantly predicts sensory input and updates its models to reduce surprise or prediction error. Friston set the principle out in a series of papers from 2005 onwards; it is the theoretical umbrella over predictive processing and active inference accounts of the brain.

Notes

• This aligns with my view of knowledge as a model built to predict sense data and reduce surprise. On that account a model is revised only when one of its predictions visibly fails, which is also why Street Epistemology works where argument does not.
• The principle is a framework rather than a single testable hypothesis, and critics have said that it is unfalsifiable in its most general form (Popper's Razor). The specific models built within it are testable, and some have been.

Also see

• Knowledge
• Justified True Belief
• Consciousness
• Street Epistemology
• Karl Friston

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle