https://www.wired.com/story/karl-friston-free-energy-principle-artificial-intelligence/

An amazingly important and relatively impenetrable idea… about the nature of organisms and minds… as viewed by a very peculiar and brilliant neuroscientist.

There’s something utterly fundamental (pun unintended) here about the nature of ‘barriers’ that create layered complexity in organisms… and relationships. Even thought. As if there is a sentinel of a sort, that determines what shall pass and what shall not… between layers. Cell membranes are unimaginably sophisticated (and, in a sense, intelligent), and the differentiations of our own bodies and their organs all demonstrate this property.

But I suspect this is not merely a property of physical organisms, but also of minds…

I have experienced this directly, and it’s long been an unarticulated aspect of my own thinking and experience… particularly of nonordinary situations. In some of these, one aspect of my mind is commonly found to respond with almost absolute negation: “This is impossible, it cannot be happening… it must not happen!” A rather surprising result from the workings of my own mind under the influence of sudden insight.

There is an aspect of my mind that is nearly absolute in its determination to reject certain forms of insight… or even direct experience. And I suspect something like this is functioning at the interpersonal, cultural, societal and even species level of our human experience. Sometimes… catastrophically, since it is primarily formed up to filter out ‘surprises’, novelty… events that are unexpected.

If he is correct that much of our cognition is predictive (this was an insight I had over 20 years ago), there is a deeply disturbing subtext here: nothing is more predictable than dead terrain or machines… and so we may be in a situation where this aspect of our cognition is actually trying to invent a world where novelty is more and more rarely encountered. As it succeeds at this, more of our environment and minds die. And as this proceeds, ‘the results indicate that our predictive powers are both true and growing’, since, as I said: dead terrain and machines are the most predictable situations.

“In Friston’s mind, the universe is made up of Markov blankets inside of Markov blankets. Each of us has a Markov blanket that keeps us apart from what is not us. And within us are blankets separating organs, which contain blankets separating cells, which contain blankets separating their organelles. The blankets define how biological things exist over time and behave distinctly from one another. Without them, we’re just hot gas dissipating into the ether.”