- Full Text
- Scholarly Journal
Encultured minds, not error reduction minds
Full text preview
We believe the free-energy principle (FEP) lacks theoretical resources to account for the complex phenomenon of culture. The current article's attempt at doing so results in a trivialization of the problem, and a reductionist view on what culture and its participants are. Below we focus on the problems the proposal faces with accounting for the diverse normativities that characterize encultured persons. After that, we argue that this is a symptom of more fundamental theoretical problems with the FEP.
The FEP claims that the overarching goal of every individual is to reduce free energy or uncertainty. Accordingly, all normativities that the system instantiates are claimed to come from the preselected set of “expectations”; for instance, living organisms are argued to move away from dangerous temperatures because these temperatures generate inputs incompatible with “expectations” about them (this is the example given in the current article). These adaptive “expectations” are argued to reside in the highest level “expectations,” sometimes called hyperpriors (Clark 2013a), which have been formed during phylogeny; only those individuals with adaptive hyperprior “expectations” managed to survive and procreate (Friston et al. 2012; Kiebel et al. 2008).
Although a rather ingenious idea, the above claim runs into clear problems in the context of enculturation. People certainly have phylogenetically old normativities such as the ones satisfying our basic survival needs, but they also house a whole plethora of normativities emergent over the course of development, ones that cannot be argued to have formed in phylogeny. It hardly needs demonstration that genetically identical and raised in the same socio-cultural milieu twins can develop radically opposing sets of values and goals. What is more, these goals and values can sometimes override the phylogenetically old, adaptive normativities: history knows many cases of people deciding to die or suffer for some highly abstract cause. This fact seems...