The Dialectics of Free Energy Minimization.
Frontiers in systems neuroscience January 1, 2019 Evert A. Boonstra, Heleen A. Slagter 19 citations
The article argues that Karl Friston's free energy minimization framework, which claims to unify brain theory and apply to all living systems, aligns with Georg Hegel's dialectics. Drawing on Catherine Malabou's work, the authors demonstrate that Friston's approach reinvigorates Hegelian dialectics from a neuroscience perspective, requiring a reading through Hegel's speculative philosophy. This reading moves beyond the cognitivism-enactivism debate about whether organisms are secluded from or open to their surroundings. Instead, the tension between these positions is itself operative at the organismic level as a contradiction the organism sustains throughout life: secluded existence depends on perpetual relation with surroundings, and the condition for that relation is a secluded entity. This internalized contradiction grounds the perpetual process of free energy minimization.