Markov blanket
Chapter 1 - Worldview
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Welcome to the Markov blanket page
This is the second item of the third building block.
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This page may well be the most important of this online book.
We do not walk around the world unbiased but relate to the context from within, giving us a particular responsibility for our actions and creating vulnerability.
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Key take-aways
- You are distinct from the rest of the world
- Life does everything necessary to maintain this distinction (survival)
- You are all looking for evidence of our existence
- You need freedom in context
- You use others as source of information
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Core idea's
Your autonomy
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We live and act in our world as autonomous agents.
How is this possible? The principle of the 'Markov blanket' can explain this.
- Even before birth, our agency, our Markov blanket, is built up piece by piece from our genetic background and the experiences we gain moment by moment
- Studies on individuals' SES (Socio-Economic Situation) provide overwhelming evidence of how personal agency shapes the outcome of one's own situation later in life
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We constantly seek evidence of our identity in our surrounding world, starting from our individuality, driving us towards actions that confirm our current situation
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Distinction
Let us start with a simple example: when you are talking about something, you are not talking about anything else. This distinction is important because if this distinction didn't exist, nothing would exist. After all, everything would be part of 'the same'.
The distinction exists on every scale, between the world and land, land and business, business and employee, employee and its brain…
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Everything inside a 'distinction' is called a Markov blanket: a coherent system that can be separated from 'the rest' of the world
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Deep dive
Markov blanket
As a starter, think about a drop of ink falling into a glass of water. If the ink dispersed, you would not consider it a living thing. But on the contrary, what would you think if the ink were to open up a little bit, shrink again into a drop, and do that over and over again? For the entropy principle, the second description is remarkable.
Living systems don't disperse as entropy would predict, but they follow the rules of their proper Markov blanket model.
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This means that living systems tend to – opposite to entropy – move inwards
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How can we think about our brain as a Markov blanket?
- First, with every action, you create movement in the world. Your brain tries to maximise the evidence for your model of that world with every move. The first direction is inside-out.
- Secondly, by the senses and the internal sensory states, the brain is busy maximising its own model's validity. So the second direction is outside-in followed by inside-in.
Think about a fresh born animal jumping around on the lawn or a baby with stomping feet. These first actions are necessary to experience in what sense the world changes when they do the first thing they can do.
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Two clear-cut actions
This ‘distinct system’ has only two simple states
- First, the active states are NOT influenced directly by external conditions. They depend upon the internal states. But they do affect the external situation.
- Their direction is from inside to outside.
- Secondly, the sensory states do NOT influence the externality. They do affect the internal condition.
- Their direction is from outside to inside or from inside to inside.
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Agency
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The evidence of existence
In summary, you are always maximising the gathering of evidence of your existence.
The free energy principle is the opposite of entropy. Where entropy is about opening up, minimising free energy is about creating relationships and coherence between at least two elements, maximising the experience of (the own) existence.
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Necessity of freedom
Daniel Dennett argued in his work that the bodies (we) that genes create for themselves benefit most from freedom in context because this is how they have the opportunity to avoid dangers.
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The other: source of information
Evolution has quickly ensured that genes that use other agents for survival have an advantage. The question is, what do we do when another individual is also watching the scene, who has a different perspective than we do and might even have a different belief about what we see?
- We might implicitly track the perspectives and beliefs of other individuals around us.
- We might be getting exciting interference from other people's beliefs and other people's content, even though we know them to be different from our own.
This does not contradict the first point, 'evidence of existence'. Evolution has discovered that other agents are a significant source of information with a special status in the context: they show paths away from danger towards replication success.
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