A critical analysis of Markovian monism

Abstract

Free Energy Principle underlies a unifying framework that integrates theories of origins of life, cognition, and action. Recently, FEP has been developed into a Markovian monist perspective (Friston et al. in BC 102: 227–260, 2020). The paper expresses scepticism about the validity of arguments for Markovian monism. The critique is based on the assumption that Markovian models are scientific models, and while we may defend ontological theories about the nature of scientific models, we could not read off metaphysical theses about the nature of target systems (self-organising conscious systems, in the present context) from our theories of nature of scientific models (Markov blankets). The paper draws attention to different ways of understanding Markovian models, as material entities, fictional entities, and mathematical structures. I argue that none of these interpretations contributes to the defence of a metaphysical stance (either in terms of neutral monism or reductive physicalism). This is because scientific representation is a sophisticated process, and properties of Markovian models—such as the property of being neither physical nor mental—could not be projected onto their targets to determine the ontological properties of targets easily.

Brain Entropy During Aging Through a Free Energy Principle Approach

“…From a biological perspective, for instance the plasmalemma is the natural Markov blanket of the neuron, able to make possible both the differentiation and the communication between the internal and external states (Cieri and Esposito, 2019;Ramstead et al, 2019). Currently there is an active and important discussion about whether this construct should be interpreted in a realistic way, applied to biological systems (Bruineberg et al, 2020;van Es and Hipólito, 2020;Beni, 2021). 3 For example, with reentrant interactions among widely distributed brain regions (Edelman, 1993).…”

Free energy: a user’s guide

“…Similarly, it is difficult to evaluate the corresponding general claim because there is not enough understanding of the mathematical theorem and how it maps onto real systems. Recently, however, Beni (2021) and Bruineberg et al (2021) have critiqued the framework on grounds of its applicability to real systems. We are starting to see critical analysis of active inference from outside the tradition.…”

Redressing the emperor in causal clothing

“…These considerations point, in our opinion, to a strongly instrumentalist understanding of Bayesian networks, and hence of Markov blankets, which would not justify the kinds of strong philosophical conclusions drawn by some from the idea of a Friston blanket (see e.g., cf. Andrews, 2020;Beni, 2021;Wiese & Friston, 2021 for some recent critical discussion).…”