Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

Agency and Perception in Whitehead and the Free Energy Principle (dialogue with Tim Jackson)

Tim and I continue to explore how Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism might intersect with contemporary scientific theories, especially the Free Energy Principle (FEP). The FEP suggests that organisms strive to minimize the surprise of sensory inputs by adjusting their internal models of the world, which resonates in some ways with Whitehead’s account of perception as the flip side of causation (he coins the term “prehension” to capture this novel view). This led us to ponder the dynamic interplay between internalist and externalist views of perception, proposing that an organism is inseparable from its environment. We discuss Whitehead’s statement that, for each conscious occasion of our experience, our body is just a particularly intimate part of the environment. 

Whitehead lays out his theory of perception in the book Symbolism (1927). In short, Whitehead argues that our basal mode of perception is of causal efficacy, with sense perception (or what he calls “presentational immediacy”) being a derivative mode only available to complex organisms with developed sensory organs. Our normal perception occurs in the mixed mode he calls “symbolic reference,” which connects the vague but emotionally meaningful “time perception” of causal efficacy with the clear but barren “spatialized perception” of presentational immediacy. 

We also delved into the challenges of differentiating between the living and non-living within a framework that views all entities as organic processes. Our conversation underscored the potential of Whitehead’s process-oriented, organicist perspective to harmonize subjective experiences with objective scientific investigations.

We mention a paper critical of FEP by the philosopher Kate Nave, which you can read here: https://www.dialecticalsystems.eu/contributions/life-beyond-the-free-energy-principle-how-to-survive-without-invariance/

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Matthew David Segall

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2 responses to “Agency and Perception in Whitehead and the Free Energy Principle (dialogue with Tim Jackson)”

  1. rehabdoc Avatar
    rehabdoc

    One thing to take into consideration is the importance of utilizing internal models for anticipation in action selection based on context. This is the idea that is central to the theoretical and relational biology of Robert Rosen, whose final two books, ‘Life Itself’ and ‘Essays on Life Itself’, both published by Columbia University Press, go through the process of making a categorical distinction between the ‘complexity’ of organismic functionality based on closure to efficient causation and closed causal loops and the ‘simplicity’ of mechanistic capabilities restricted by compliance with the mechanistic formalism and the ‘ontology of states’. As a result, mechanisms are computable, algorithmic, and strictly deterministic. Their function is ‘context-independent’. But their entailment capacity is severely limited and weak! Mechanisms are OPEN to efficient causation and do not contain closed causal loops operating on a continuum. Organisms have none of these limiting characteristics of mechanisms. Their function is necessarily ‘context-dependent’ and they are capable of anticipation based on context and predictive internal models. What this allows for is the potential for ‘scaling up’ the functionality of organisms with biological evolution in accordance with the ‘Principle of Increasing Semiotic Freedom’. While mechanisms comply with the mechanistic formalism, organisms are non-formalizable. While predicative mathematics using real numbers is fully capable of capturing the dynamics of mechanisms, impredicative mathematics and the incorporation of imaginary/complex numbers is required in the description of organisms. These differences run very very deep. As Maturana and Varela pointed out, organisms are dissipative systems that are ‘autopoietic’–ie. they are self-sustaining and self-reproducing. Mechanisms are not. Organisms manifest context-dependent ‘intelligence’. Mechanisms do not. 

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  2. rehabdoc Avatar
    rehabdoc

    Just checked briefly on Kate Nave’s forthcoming book (thank you for that reference!) and she is correct in her critique of the ‘free energy principle’ and the idea that a living being is exclusively in the business of lowering the free energy of its sensory states. This is another ‘simple’ mechanistic model that would work pretty well for an automaton, operating in the context of the mechanistic formalism and a predicative, context-independent, Turing-machine frame. Organisms are not statistical, deterministic machines that fully comply with the mechanistic formalism and the ‘ontology of states.’ Sorry. That is a fundamental misrepresentation of what a living organism is. That would make them amenable to predicative mathematics and ‘non-Gödelian’ (ie. ‘computable’ given that Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems imply NON-computability), formalizable systems masquerading as ‘complete’ and totally autonomous. But that is not the reality of organicity. It is important to read the work of Robert Rosen and to fully absorb it and its implications. The ‘Church-Pythagoras Theorem’ that maintains that ‘effectiveness is computable’ and that the adaptive behavior of organisms can be fully simulated by Turing machines, and that predicative mathematics is all that is needed to ‘totalize’ (to use a term borrowed from Emmanuel Lévinas–who is someone else whose work on phenomenological ethics needs to be fully recognized and appreciated in this context!) a living organism, is entirely wrong-headed and a slap in the face of all living organic systems (see Chapter 4 of ‘Essays on Life Itself’ by Robert Rosen). This is the nominalistic human left-hemispheric worldview trying to ‘pull a fast one’–ie. an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the right hemisphere–and pretend that the totalization of organismic functionality is within the range of rationality, when, in fact, it cannot be. It is entirely a product of human hubris, the results of which have been and will continue to be horrendous, if we refuse to ‘smarten up’ and recognize the reality of our finitude and its associated inescapable limitations. Ultimately, this is what quantum physics, in its ‘correction’ of Newtonian Mechanics, is trying to tell us. There is no absolute separation, no ‘G-d’s-eye’ throned perspective, and no way for the finite being to totalize context-dependent organismic alterity. And to pretend that there is, is not only misleading–it is dangerous!

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