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by uoaei
2202 days ago
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Your challenges to the core intuition are predicated on a simplistic and uncharitable interpretation. Gambling, watching sports, and speed dating all have secondary motivations (earning money, tribal success, potential to spread your genes, respectively), but what's more is that these are all arenas of controlled and quite specific surprise. You know exactly the type of surprise that you are going to get, and the satisfaction you get from being right or the post-rationalization you perform for being wrong are both useful to the human. Contrast this to the "surprise" of a global pandemic, or massive social unrest. No one knows what's going to happen next and so you have a large contingent of people who are desperately trying to enact conservatism of the "move things back to normal" flavor. This is a stress response, and the stress is induced by not knowing what kind of surprises lay ahead. The latter is the kind of surprise that is being minimized in the free-energy framework. |
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I am neither seeing that Friston has (A) produced anything even remotely resembling a testable framework this "kind of surprise that is being minimized in the free-energy framework" and (B) pointed to any plausible mechanisms in the brain that should that this is in fact "the kind of surprise that is being minimized". He just handwaves.
What clearcut evidence can you give me that humans minimise this "kind of surprise"? What evidence would you accept as falsifying this? Where does Friston make clear that "secondary motivations" don't count? Also making a super vague, unquantified statement like "large contingent of people who are desperately trying to enact conservatism ..." in defense of Friston / free-energy doesn't give me a lot of confidence in the social milieu that this theory comes from. All the more so, since my OPs explicitly criticised Friston for vagueness.