Meaning making through the lenses of the Free Energy Principle
The Free Energy Principle (FEP) proposes a unifying theory of how living systems persist. Life exists in direct opposition to entropy. While the universe trends toward disorder, living things resist it. A plant keeps its leaves green, a bird maintains its body temperature, a cell preserves its boundary.
The FEP explains how this is possible: living systems must minimize the difference between their expectations and their sensory experiences. This difference represents uncertainty about the world. It's called "free energy" in analogy to "thermodynamic free energy" which measures potential for change. Too much uncertainty threatens survival, so living systems evolved two strategies to minimize it:
The FEP is fundamentally a mathematical framework. This is my attempt to present it through the phenomenological lenses of meaning. Free energy minimization is in essence the process of finding coherence.
While in previous articles I focused on the general ideas of seeking meaning and understanding, what I explain here is the specific mechanism.
