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Kathryn Nave, "A Drive to Survive: The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life" (MIT Press, 2025)
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Kate Nave
I was groomed to become one of his wives this week on Disorder, the
- [01:19]
New Books Network Announcer
podcast that orders the disorder, an Epstein survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her.
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Carrie Figdor
I want to see action, and I am demanding action.
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Kate Nave
Do not just talk the talk.
- [01:32]
Carrie Figdor
You need to start walking the walk now.
- [01:34]
New Books Network Announcer
It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now.
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Carrie Figdor
Welcome to the New Books Network hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co host of the channel along with Sarah Tyson and Blaine Neufeld. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books and a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Kate Nave or Catherine Nave, a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her new book, A Drive to the Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life, is just out from the MIT Press. The cybernetic tradition in cognitive science analyzes the purpose of behavior of many complex systems, from sensory guided missiles to sensory guided animals in terms of feedback control that maintains stability in the face of external perturbation. A more recent extension and elaboration of this framework brings in predictive processing and the minimization of free energy, essentially minimizing getting inputs that conflict with what the system expects in a drive to survive. Nave argues that this framework is inadequate for explaining living organisms, which are not merely complex, but inherently unstable and continually producing themselves through metabolism. Nave defends a bioanactivist view of living organisms in which the chemical and energetic constraints involved in having a metabolism are essential for understanding their actions, in contrast to the sensor guided movementism of the free energy principle framework. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Kate Nave, welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
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Kate Nave
Hi. Thank you for having me.
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Carrie Figdor
Okay, so this will be a very interesting conversation because it's one of the best or strongest, I suppose, takedowns of the free energy framework, as you put it, which has sort of taken cognitive science, or at least parts of it, by storm in recent years. So sorry. I think a lot of people will appreciate your discussion of the free energy principle and your defense actually of a different way of thinking about the distinction roughly between life and non life. Before we get into the book itself, maybe you can say a bit about yourself, how you became a philosopher and how this book came about.
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Kate Nave
Sure. So I guess I'm one of those people who did want to be a philosopher, since it was a thing that I knew you could be. So I did philosophy as my undergraduate. I actually was very lucky in that I got to do some philosophy in school, which isn't very common in the uk at least I was in a class of one. And then, yeah, I did my undergrad in philosophy and that was in London. And being in London, there was also a lot of. A lot of media around. So I left philosophy for a while and went into journalism. I did science and technology journalism. And I found I was interviewing a lot of really interesting people who got to sort of dedicate their lives to working on particular topics. And I got a bit fed up of constantly moving between things and never getting to be an expert on anything. So I increasingly thought I wanted to go back to philosophy. And around that time as well, working kind of artificial intelligence was sort of picking up. And I'd remembered a philosophy course that I did that was in philosophy of competitive science that was very, very different from the kind of other stuff you do in philosophy that was mixed a and it was just so much more interesting than other areas of philosophy to me. So I decided I wanted to go back into that. And Edinburgh has this master's program called nine Language and Embodied Cognition, which is really quite Unique, or certainly was at the time, and I think still is quite unique in that it allowed you to take a philosophy master's, but go into doing courses in informatics or in language science. And that gave me, like, a really interesting, I think, sort of brief overview of the kind of questions that come up in philosophy of cognitive science from particularly the perspective that's very popular at Edinburgh in terms of embodied. Embodied cognitive science. And then I just got very lucky and was able to continue that into a PhD and now a postdoc. Yeah.
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Carrie Figdor
Good. And so this book is a continuation of work you did in the PhD or a new direction or what?
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Kate Nave
Yeah, it's a continuation. I guess the new direction sort of happened during the PhD because I began by working on visual phenomenology and predictive processing. I got very into Husserl's visual phenomenology, and I think it was very interesting to me how much the kind of stuff Hussein was saying from quite a long time ago lined up so nicely with this new account of what was supposed to be a new account of how the brain worked. So I found predictive processing very compelling, and it tied in nice, the kind of threaded principle. And it will not seem to provide a late. Between predictive processing and questions about biological purposes, which was another interest of mine. So the idea was to just build up a story base, not to criticize, I guess, predictive processing, the frenzy principle, but to use it in a positive way to build up a particular account. And it's one of those things. And I think a lot of people who worked on this have a similar experience where the more you go into it, the more you discover these kind of flaws and problems that bother you until you end up thinking it's more interesting to criticize these kind of accounts. And, I mean, that's sort of happened halfway through my PhD, and the work that I did in the second half of the PhD is what became the book.
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Carrie Figdor
Okay. Okay. Yeah. Because both phenomenology and in activism, you know, and. And the whole predictive processing and the free energy and all that, you know, that's. Those are kind of the two big. There's lots of moving parts, but those are the sort of two big parts here. So it's interesting that you're sort of stuck with the one, and the other one is just kind of dissipated or it's. Yeah. So to start with the. Let's start with the embodied part. As you note in the beginning of the book, Enactivism or four Ecognition, embodied emotional, you know, embedded the whole, the whole bit, it's kind of all over the place. I mean, I've looked it up myself and I've tried to like, you know, what is it that makes them all, you know, binds them together? And often it's just like, you know, we don't like representations and it doesn't go beyond that. You don't go that route, you know. So let me make that that clear. You. You think there is. Well, you acknowledge some of the problems that an activism as a school, if you want to put it that way, has had, but you also defend your own sort of. This is what I'm going to be by an activism and particularly bioanactivism. So I think maybe you can give us a summary of what your version of an activism is, what you know, and why you think that's the relevant one to be defending here.
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Kate Nave
Sure, yeah. I think it's one of those things where labels are. There's no such thing as like a label without its problems. But hidden activism is in many ways has become a lot more problematic than I would like as a label, as you say, it's often just used to mean an anti representationalism which would encompass tons of stuff that definitely doesn't fit in the same cant as a lot of inactive work. I mean, eliminativism is anti representationalist, but it would be weird to describe particular schools of in activism as being eliminativist. I think the other thing that is a slightly sort of narrower characterization that's a bit more productive is to say it's a view that either privileges, that kind of tends to privilege, privilege action and privilege ongoing interaction in your explanation of cognition. And that's not. That's a little bit more focused, but it's still something that encompasses Tonies and Tummies of different ideas that wouldn't necessarily consider all the work of tons of people who wouldn't consider themselves inactive. And I think, but I think that is the kind of way inactivism is understood in its kind of initial introductions, which is in the embodied mind in 1991 by Varela, punction and Roche, that that's not really what I would think of as a bioenacter kind of piece of work. It is just a piece that focuses on this idea that we need to explain things in terms of the guidance of action. I think what that gets you though, what you have in their work that's not quite developed in that book is this idea that action is necessarily intentional. So we're not just trying to describe the dynamics of motions. We're trying to describe the way in which a system is directed towards bringing things about and that that's what connects in activism with phenomenology, because in both of those and in many ways you can kind of see this particular trajectory of an activism as being a continuation of phenomenology because they're searching for this notion of attentionality, of directedness and the possibility of like failing to achieve your target. That's not a, that isn't a representational one, but they want a positive account of what that kind of directedness to a target is, which isn't really there in the embodied mind in my mind. But where for me that comes from is precisely the biological elements that you can put together. This view of cognition about being grounded in action with a view as cognition being grounded in the kind of, the particular sort of situation of biological systems where their movements aren't just movements in the same way that like a pendulum or a machine use, they're movements that are directed towards ultimately in a sense, directed towards rebuilding the system that is engaged in the movement. So that's just the idea most generally of Outer Greases, which also comes from Varela. But isn't that central in the introduction of the inactive approach? So basically the idea of bioanactivism is that these two parts of the picture have to go together. You have to have this view of the kind of basic intentionality as being something that's realized through action, rather than something that's kind of real, that's kind of instantiated in an internal state that's supposed to be directed at something external. It's a property of a system in its interaction with the world. But to make sense of what that kind of property is and how it can be, how it can have the normative characteristics of intentionality, you need to appeal to the sort of biological components of Varela's work, which is his work on alpha Voesis and this idea that biological systems are self producing systems. And that's not a neat. That's like the synthesis that defines the work of someone like Evan Thompson. But it. So it's not like it's far from a new thing. But I think people don't always recognize when people look at what an activism could mean from a general sense, the way in which those two pieces are essential to a particular characterization. And that you can't have one without the other is sometimes missed, if that makes sense.
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Carrie Figdor
Yeah, so. So you mentioned, I mean, you know, the, I mean the term intentionality here, as you put it, Was directedness towards some sort of a goal of action which, you know, I mean you do mention the, you know, standard philosophy of mind, intentionality in terms of Brentano and representation.
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Kate Nave
Right.
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Carrie Figdor
That's not ruled out on view. It's just on your view. It's just not the focus of it is that. That's how I understood it.
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Kate Nave
Right, yeah, exactly. I like the idea here that that that's sort of like a second order kind of thing that you get once you have social systems who can coordinate with each other. It's the idea that that's not the primary notion of intentionality.
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Carrie Figdor
Okay, okay. So and then you know, again, guidance of action. I mean again there's another tradition here which you also, which is worth distinguishing which is of course the cybernetic tradition. And you. It basically begin this, you know, the Ashby and other people who, you know, see systems, including living systems, organisms as, you know, systems for control. Right. Control of behavior and that kind of thing. And so. What's, what are. Why do you find the cyber magnetic view? I mean it's maybe going well. Yeah. Why do I find the cybernetic view like insufficient as a view of life? Because it's so pervasive, particularly in cognitive science that adding more to that. In a sense needs defense.
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Kate Nave
Yeah. So I think it's a problem I often run up against is the way somebody from cybernetics would talk about cognition and the way ferrous and activists would talk about cognition are indeed very, very similar in the sense that the cyberneticists were also very interested in this idea that cognitive operations should be grounded in biological processes. It's interesting also I think that we often talk about like good old fashioned AI and like classical AI as being this kind of computationalist symbol manipulation view. But cybernetics is actually older. It is sort of the original AI and it was not that at all. It was very much about ongoing interaction. The thing for the cyberneticists that they, they still think of mind as machine, just a different sort of machine. So for them rather than the Turing machine, it's the feedback controller. It's a system that maintains a particular trajectory and responds to perturbations or disruptions in a way that returns to that trajectory. And I think it's not sort of surprising that one of the inspirations for this, given both the time at which the cyber nitisgens were kind of developing their approach, particularly Norbert Wiener, was around Blighty's first and second World War. And so an integration that we know was missile track the Problem of missile tracking, which is a really nice case, you would think of something where you're trying to guide a system to follow a particular trajectory and respond to perturbations to maintain that trajectory for the side annotations. This was such a powerful model because we were quite a skilled mathematician. And if you're a skilled mathematician, you can kind of make anything look how you want it to look. And so you can kind of make all sorts of behaviors look like they are control type behaviors where you have some particular stationary thing that needs to be maintained and that needn't be, say, a particular stable point that could be a particular sort of linear velocity and describe everything that happens in terms of being the preservation of that. And there's a famous paper that Weiner wrote with Arturo Ruthenluis, who is, I think, a psychiatrist, and the engineer Julian Figelow, where they argue that this can kind of supply this general analysis of purposive behavior, where they say it's basically synonymous with behavior controlled by feedback. And where that becomes most tied to a biological view of cognition is in the British cybernetician Rosh Ashby, who really takes that and runs with it and says that this is the, this is the way to explain all living systems. And I guess for me, the way it's sort of set up in this book is Ashby is kind of the proto Friston, where he's taking this idea, saying it's a general principle of life. And he has claims such as survival and stability are essentially equivalent, that you can define what it is to survive over time in terms of stability. And that when it comes to more complicated and you know, the natural response to that is, well, clearly you and I are far more complicated than that. We do a lot more than just maintain our body temperature. But for Ashby, you can describe all of that stuff as being built up out of this kind of foundation of maintaining stability. We are more complicated systems that maintain a more complicated stability landscape. We can move between different stable patterns, but ultimately guided by this kind of underlying preservation of an invariant kind of identity, which is really, really similar to the way that the free energy principle thinks about this. So I think it's kind of productive to look at what the critiques of Ashby were to kind of form. At least for me, it was helpful in informing how I thought about the free energy principle.
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Carrie Figdor
You so good, so good, so good.
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Kate Nave
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- [20:00]
Carrie Figdor
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- [20:03]
Kate Nave
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Carrie Figdor
So. So maybe we should, Maybe you should get into that. I mean, there's a number of chapters that go into significant and important detail. And actually, you know, just to,
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Kate Nave
you
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Carrie Figdor
know, a lot of that, that you, you've done a, a great job in explaining, you know, the ins and outs and the mathematics and everything of the Free Energy principle and what you call the free energy framework that makes that accessible to people who aren't deeply involved with it. So that's a real service that I think that the book provides, whether or not you agree with Carl Friston or not. So maybe we should say a bit about how, how the free energy. Well, what the free energy framework, as you call it is, and how that kind of picks up on or extends feedback control, cybernetic type picture, which again, you're disagreeing with.
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Kate Nave
Sure, yeah. I think one of the things that's made this kind of framework so difficult to get one's head around is that even though there is this focus on stability as an underlying principle, it's a very changeable framework. What the free energy framework was in 2005 is very different from what it is now. So I think it is. I think one way that's helpful for me in understanding it is kind of thinking through how it developed, because it initially developed as essentially a Bayesian brain theory, which. So the idea that the brain is fundamentally doing Bayesian influence, that's what it's in the business of. And it's, I think, usually traced to a 2005 paper where it's a theory of cortical responses and it quickly becomes a unified brain theory. And initially there's actually no action in that story. It's just the story of how we learn about the world, how we learn about the hidden causes of our inputs. But what made it different from other Bayesian brain theories is that it drew on various bits of kind of formal machinery that are useful for explaining how the process of Bayesian inference can be simplified. Because if you think about the kind of world that our actual brain is trying to learn about, it's so complicated and multidimensional that doing a full Bayesian update would be intractable. So the initial kind of key part of the framing principle is just basically a set of approximation framework for Bayesian inference. And that involves a few key parts that are useful in thinking about where free energy comes from. The main one is variational inference, which is not like super complicated in its basic idea. It's just the idea that rather than doing the full Bayesian calculation, you begin with a simpler probabilistic model that is easier to gradually adjust. So you have something like a Gaussian distribution with a couple of parameters and you vary those to minimize some quantity where that quantity is an approximation for the unlikeliness of the data given your model. It's not the same given the true model of exact baiting inference. So unlikeliness relative to your approximate model is essentially what foreignity is capturing. And unlikeliness relative to the true model of exact Bayesian inference is what it's approximating. The reason I think that's interesting is once you get in this idea that inference isn't just something that you solve analytically in one go, but something that you can use through sort of trial and error variations to minimize the unlikeliness of your input, is that that also translates nicely to the idea of what you do in control. So in inference, you're varying the parameters of your model to make input more probable. In action, you're varying the, I guess the parameters of the world through acting on the hidden causes to make the sensory evidence more regular and more less variable. So, so that it is less surprising. And the key thing that makes the connect. So that's kind of the key thing that connects this primary framework with these cybernetic control style Vs is it gives you a story in which both inference, offline inference and ongoing action can be subsumed under the same sort of formalism.
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Carrie Figdor
Okay. And so I mean, we might as well cut to the chase.
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Kate Nave
Then
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Carrie Figdor
this fails for you as an account of it might be, I mean, to use your terms, it might be okay for what you nicely call sensor guided movementism, which I thought was a great phrase. But it's not going to suffice to explain organism behavior, or organisms for that matter. So maybe you can get us into that part of the book. I mean, now we're talking about why this very popular, at least in certain circles, view fails for living systems.
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Kate Nave
Yeah, so I think it's an important point, as you said, that it's not that it can't describe some aspects of behavior. Where I kind of get off the train is there are these claims that you can use this to define the existence of an organism over time, that this kind of maintenance of some sort of stability is a first principle of life. And in some Ways the free energy principle needs that claim. It needs that idea of stability and homeostasis because it can only describe what you do within a model. So you need a model in order to describe things in terms of foreignergy and to get the whole system up and running. And that raises the question, where does that model come from? And one way of solving it is to say that the organism embodies some sort of stable model, that its identity is sort of. Its identity is identical to the fixity of this particular model. And then all inference proceeds sort of downstream from that. And you can have all sorts of changes in like lower level models, but they're all relative to that high level kind of probability distribution. So the reason I don't think that works is that I think that is quite a good description of the sort of physical objects we identify around us. They are things that kind of vary a bit but maintain stable properties. And that's how we identify them over time. And that in a sense is also the first issue with this description is that all autom systems respond to disruptions to return to stable states. That's just the property of physical matter that it tends to return to rest. And if a disruption is below a certain threshold, so if you heat something up and raise its temperature, it will tend to dissipate that heat. It's a very generic feature of physical objects. And this is where Ashby is more consistent than Frisbee. Frisbee. Ashby is more consistent than Friston in the sense that that was the speech. Oh dear. That was the point for him.
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Carrie Figdor
That's okay.
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Kate Nave
Yeah. The whole point for him is that this isn't special. This isn't anything intentional or distinctively biological. It's a way of showing that the biological is just the same as all other sorts of physical systems.
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Carrie Figdor
Yeah, well, one of. Let me, let me just, you know. Yeah, that's good because I do want to get into, you know, why that's not sufficient. But what are the things that you, you mentioned the pendulum case before of, you know, I think it's Michael Kirchhoff who uses that pendulum example as engaging in active inference. And you say something to the effect that, you know, stability in the face of perturbation is, or let me, let me put it that you need to. The legitimate use of agential. We haven't used the word agent, but I think that would be appropriate. The legitimate use of agent or, you know, inferentialist language is more than just, you know, maintaining stability in the face of perturbation.
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Kate Nave
And
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Carrie Figdor
one of the Questions that I had at that point was, you know, more of a kind of a pushback that somebody within that tradition might say well, you would say well why? I mean, and what the, the question that I, it made me think of Dennett's intentional stamp. Yeah, yeah. And, and, or you know, that you know, all there is to belief is just, you know, being, you know, predictable by, by certain, you know, in terms of that you can use language of belief and desire. And a lot of people say well that's not enough, you know, that kind of thing. But, but of course Dennett and Friston or Kershaw or Michael Levin or any of these people who are more into that program would just say well why not? I mean, who are you to say that we can't use the language this way?
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Kate Nave
Yeah, I think I would be happier and I am now happier if that the interpretation of the Fray principle was given because the literature have indeed moved in that direction. It's no longer presented as a kind of right fruity minimization is no longer presented as this kind of clear distinction between purposive living systems and non living matter. It did used to be, as I say, it changes. And I think that is better. That is a more consistent presentation of what this account gives you. The reason I would push back on that is to say that there are distinctions between the kind of things that we ordinarily think of as purposes and the kind of things that we don't that aren't just matters of complexity. And it's more work to argue that those differences get you the kind of those differences amount to a theory of what makes those systems intentional and purposes. But I'll say a bit about what those differences are mostly. So one difference that this kind of description abstracts away from is it's solely at the level of the dynamics of the system. And one thing that is very different from living systems is that they don't only respond to disruptions to maintain stability. They also kind of introduce disruptions of their own that they have to continually canker. So it's the fact that the stuff that makes living systems up is continually. It's actually defined by its instability. All sorts of biological components have very, very rapid turnover patterns, whether that's membranes or enzymes or the level of the brain synapses. There's a continual material and cycling of their parts that you don't get in other systems that respond to disruptions to maintain stability. So for that reason, one of the things that living systems have that a pendulum doesn't, that's not just a matter of complexity, is that kind of intrinsic instability that drives them to act, to rebuild themselves, even if they're not being perturbed, even if nothing's coming in and knocking them away from stability. And that's one of the things that this story abstracts away from that I think is in Borgage, the other is that living systems, we can recognize the same living system or simply getting a continuation of the same living system over time in a way that doesn't depend on any sort of stability at all, or any, to be precise, any particular stability that defines that system. So any invariant trait that makes that system what it is. The kind of examples I use for that are things like lateral gene transfer among bacteria, which can happen across species, it can even happen between plants and bacteria, where an individual can take on entirely new genetic material that's never been a property of that type before. So it's not just that it's new for the individual, it's also new for that type of individual. And that can give it new capacities, such as the ability to metabolize new compounds or survive in new ecological niches that would previously have been poisonous for it. And that's a kind of transformation that doesn't seem captured by underlying stability that is distinctive to that bacteria. There's a stability of the general processes of a metabolism, but not one that allows you to pick out that individual versus any others. But if you kind of observe that process and follow that individual, you don't think of that transformation as amounting to that individual dying and becoming something new. There's some way in which we recognize the continuity through this sort of change. And that ties me to this view where the way in which we individuate living systems is much more of a processual kind of individuation than for all other things in the world. And there's a nice notion from the psychologist Kurt Lewin of gen identity where it's continuity between time steps rather than invariance of features. And those two things are what distinguishes living from non living systems. To me now it takes more work to explain why that's enough to amount for an account of intentionality. But I think that pushes back on the idea that the only difference that we have to work with is just the complexification of these sort of stabilizing processes.
- [34:47]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, but you also, you also say that they, the at least the formalisms or the free energy framework or some aspect of it can't capture this intrinsic instability. Did I understand that correctly? And if so, why can't they?
- [35:18]
Kate Nave
Yeah, I think it's a slightly. Whether it can or not depends on what claims they make. And they make different claims at different points in terms of how they understand this kind of. In terms of how the free energy is derived. So if it's one way in which you get the view that there's a stable model that you can work your kind of free energy picture down from is this idea that living systems are sort of cyclical systems. So at some level they're systems that return to the same states. And that might be at the level of, say, a species. So you might have the case that, sure, an individual butterfly doesn't cycle around the same set of states over and over again, but there is a life cycle of the butterfly that that individual is an instantiation of. So the model is from the stable life cycle of the butterfly. And if you derive your model from. From these kind of cyclical dynamics or this idea of there being at some level, sort of steady state of the system with a closed space, then that genuinely can't describe these sorts of changes because they are expanding into new kinds of, new areas of possibility space that just weren't there before. And I talk a bit about Kaufman's work on the idea of the adjacent possible there. The idea that as you move through your space of possibilities, you create genuinely new possibilities, that it doesn't make sense to say what kind of your possibility is based on thought. Now, there's another thing that you can do with this kind of formalism, because it is a formalism, it's very flexible. Instead of requiring that stable dynamics, you can say that we define free energy over, say, trajectories where you're minimizing something over a path rather than over particular states. And that would then allow you to retroactively redescribe pretty much, well, literally anything, pretty much any kind of pattern of behavior in terms of minimizing for energy over something that you have specifically constructed to retroactively redescribe that. But that would be a different claim. It wouldn't be a falsifiable or empirical one. And so those are two quite different ways in which this kind of framework has been motivated. The first one makes specific claims about what a system has to do to be free energy minimizing. So it could be falsifiable. It's something you can go out and test, but it wouldn't apply to living systems. The second one is a kind of retroactive redescription that could apply to anything, but doesn't kind of make any positive claims about it. And it's the first one that seems more powerful. But could you describe these sorts of phenomena? Does that make sense?
- [38:00]
Carrie Figdor
I see. Yeah, I think so. So we haven't mentioned, you know, metabolism directly. Right. But it's sort of implicit in, in some of what you've said. So maybe we should just make that explicit. What does a metabolism do that and, and one of the reasons, you know, that it's worth thinking about as well, besides living is, you know, synthetic metabolisms or you know, you know, sort of non biological metabolisms that we might create or, you know, so there's there, there are new sorts of entities around that or at least potentially through like synthetic biology or, you know, some other ways of constructing new, you know, new entities. So maybe you can say, say a bit about the why, you know, what metabolism does, you know, and why having a metabolism is so, you know, important, you know, in your, in your view of life and then, and then how you handle these sort of new kind of weird cases or at least claims, I should say, of, you know, creating synthetic metabolisms or, you know, efforts to synthesize cells, things like that.
- [39:38]
Kate Nave
Yeah. The reason metabolism is so important for me is it comes back to. So I mentioned how alkaloesis is this really important part of a diarem active picture for me and alto voices being lost as self production gets kind of interpreted in different ways because initially alpopoisis was intended to describe a single cell. And if you want to describe, intended to describe basically the way a cell has an internal metabolic network that regenerates membrane that surrounds it, but where that membrane is necessary for the reactants inside the cell to be able to occur at all. And because it controls the flow of reactants into the cell so that they're at concentrations where they can react and those other things. But there's an interdependence between those physical components. And that's not very useful if you're trying to think about the intentionality of the human cognizer, which is why aldebuysis gets generalized to something like autonomy, which often gets reduced to something like what the spring energy principle is describing. It's just preserving something in response to disruption. And obviously, as we've said, I don't like that. So the question for me is whether we could have a notion of that kind of chemical process that retains a level of specificity that something like control lacks, but is able to describe this kind of metabolic process at levels beyond the single cell. And I suppose one thing I should say about the reason I think that's important is because metabolism does have these properties that control doesn't. It has this sort of inherent outwardness where the system, even if it's left alone, is driven to go out and do things in the world because its kind of inherent tendency to decay forces it to, you know, go out and seek resources that can regenerate itself. And that was very important in an early critique of cybernetics that influences the whole book, which is Hans Jonas Jonas work, where he makes metabolism central to an account of what life is, because that does have these properties of what he calls needful freedom, where we're sort of free of any particular configuration of matter, but we have a need for continual supply of matter and energy to rebuild ourselves. And it's all. It's largely at this sort of phenomenological level. But I think he does a very nice job of capturing why this kind of single celled property that seems so removed from human cognition potentially contains the roots of a lot of things that we think of as distinctively cognitive. Yeah.
- [42:21]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, so that kind of gets to my next
- [42:27]
Kate Nave
kind of.
- [42:27]
Carrie Figdor
My next question in a way is, you know, introducing the cognitive or even, or even consciousness. You know, as you're aware, there's a, you know, big, big debate now about whether, you know, artificial devices or items of any sort can realize consciousness or any sort of cognitive. More, more consciousness, but still, you know, mental properties. And the old debate about multiple realizability, you know, very various media, you know, that you can have that are. That constitute conscious systems or not. And it would. Where do you. Let me just put it generally, where do you stand on the issue of multiple realizability? Are you saying you need a metabolism for cognition or consciousness, which would tie it directly to the biology, or are you really just focused on an account for. I want to distinguish what makes living systems different from any kind of feedback control system. But there's no. I'm not making any claims about consciousness or cognition. Where, where do you stand on that?
- [43:59]
Kate Nave
Yeah, I think I'd be making the claim that to me, I suppose, firstly, all the kind of theories of higher order aspects that go beyond what I'm talking about, things like consciousness and cognition. I think they all have this problem at the core of them that they are subject to various forms of indeterminacy and triviality insofar as they are supposed to be largely like formal medium independent theories, because you could. There's every time anyone proposes their sort of theory of consciousness or theory of cognition, the kind of Old triviality issues of which came up with computation in the 80s come up again that you can gerry them under certain decompositions of systems so they map on to the particular functional process that you think is relevant. And you can take any one physical system and divide it up in different ways, such that on one division it looks like it's performing irrelevant. It's computational theory, say computational function. And on a particular decomposition it doesn't. And that's something that sort of generates, I think, a lot of back and forth where you can have that dialectic over and over again. But to me, the reason that keeps reoccurring and occurs as much as computational theories of cognition as dynamical theories is because they are focused on this formal level. They don't. They create space for those kinds of issues to happen. So what I like about something like metabolism is it's much more tied to material and energetic properties of the system. So things like kind of spontaneous decay times and then the amount of energy released by that decay. So the thermodynamics and energetics of the stuff that the system is made up of, which are genuinely more constraining. They also involve questions of like relative timescales in a way that other formal theories abstract away from. But I think that that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a purely like, I don't want to be a carbon chauvinist. But yes, it's not saying that the biochemistry of life as we know it is the only way in which you can get a genuine metabolism going. It's saying that metabolism depends very tightly on biochemical properties, such that the kind of degrees of freedom there are for different instantiations are really tightly constrained. So it means that if we want to ask questions about could we realize this in other forms, you end up talking to people who work on things like origins of life and astrobiology about what are the particular chemical, chemical properties necessary to get a synthetic light living system going. And they are often very, very narrow in terms of what can realize them. So it's. I like, I like that about this kind of story. I don't want a story in which, you know, we have to be made up of these particular amino acids, but a story in which the standards for realizing a particular process that's going to count as having this metabolic purpose to it are going to be pretty tight and it's going to be something of an empirical question as to figuring out what might be able to realize that.
- [47:12]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, okay, so I wouldn't, I wouldn't then classify you As a, like a bionaturalist sort of person, I think I'm
- [47:23]
Kate Nave
somewhat not sure how to categorize myself. Yeah, I'm thinking about writing something on this in terms of like a biochemical functionalist maybe, but. Or term it an unexpensionalist because it's not. I don't want to be tied to the contingencies of the way this happens to have been realized. That doesn't seem to matter to me. But I do think the property that is realized is much more. It's a much more fine grained functionalism at least than is standardly found in conflict. Right.
- [47:54]
Carrie Figdor
Okay. Okay, good. I think, you know, we're getting close to the end here. So was there some aspect of the book that we didn't get to that you want to bring out?
- [48:10]
Kate Nave
I think it covered most of it. I mean, the only thing is that there is an account of this that I quite like. An account of how we generalize metabolism beyond the single cell without trivializing it to being something like control, omit control, omit disruption that I do like, which is this kind of story of constraint closure. I don't. It's probably too much to go into any detail, but it's tied to the idea of autocatalysis. The key idea is just that constraints make things happen. They are just limit what is possible. They make new things possible. And that's standardly the case in non living systems as well. So if you constrain water flowing down a hill into a thin channel, it can turn a water wheel. If that flow is unconstrained, that water wheel is not going to turn because there's not going to be enough pressure. So this idea that constraints make new things possible I think is so important for understanding living systems. It's an idea that I got from Alicia Boreri's work that's been. That has been elaborated by various other people since. The constraint closure story particularly comes from Alvaro Moreno, Atea Mossio and Nael Montiville. And the key thing there is essentially a lot of these accounts get at this idea that life involves some sort of circular causality that's fair in the cybernetic view, that's fair in the free energy principle. And what just has always bothered me is there's lots of different types of circular causality. The one that is involved in living systems specifically. It's not just that it's circular causality, it's this particular kind of causality that involves constraining things that make new things possible. Where the new things that are made possible involve the regeneration of those constraints that made that thing possible at all. I think that's very important because that is a more restrictive notion than something that you get like what you get in the free agent principle difficult that is still generalizable beyond the level of actual capitalists. So it captures what kind of this sort of single cell metabolism involves. By going from the notion of, say, an enzyme to a constraint, you get something that has a bit more generality.
- [50:21]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, right. Okay. So I don't want to open any sort of new fronts here because we're running out of time. But as a final question, what are you working on now? I mean, you sort of just hinted at some of the things, but are you continuing in the same vein or have you turned to something else? I mean, what's on your medium, short, medium term horizons?
- [50:53]
Kate Nave
The most recent thing that I'm excited about is taking this kind of work I've done on thinking about what it means for an individual organism due persist over time and what, what is it for it to have goals that it works towards and kind of extending that from individual organisms to ecosystems. Because this cybernetic view also influenced how people thought about ecology. And so if I think it has problems for individual organisms, I think it also has problems for how we think about ecologies or ecosystems of organisms. So I'm looking a bit at that, looking at how there was a similar debate in ecology over whether ecosystems are could be understood as stable systems or something more like resilient systems, where a resilient system isn't one that necessarily responds to a disruption by returning to its prior state, but a system that is capable of a kind of transformation that counts as a continuation. And that's like fun in an ecosystem way. But it's also interesting because these ideas are also being applied to how we think about the Internet as an ecosystem in a way that's very continuous with what the cyberneticians were doing, because the cyberneticians inspired a lot of the development of the Internet, particularly a guy called Gregory Bateson. So we kind of. The idea of this little project that I've sort of been working on with Dave Ward is looking at how cybernetic ideas of ecosystems influenced the development of kind of artificial ecosystems like the Internet, and whether a more sophisticated view of ecosystems might lead to different conclusions about how we should think about the design of these artificial environments. Oh, cool.
- [52:35]
Carrie Figdor
Very good. You know, and you. For some reason that made me think we didn't discuss Markov blankets.
- [52:42]
Kate Nave
Oh, that's good. I hate this because you are blankets of the one thing I've been willing to.
- [52:46]
Carrie Figdor
Which, you know, was kind of, you know, central because they, they, they were a core part of the whole kind of mission creep of the free energy principle. But yeah, so we'll just have to leave that as something that the reader can enjoy.
- [53:04]
Kate Nave
They can read the book if they can.
- [53:07]
Carrie Figdor
Yeah. But I think we're. We're about out of time now, and so I just want to say thank you for great book and good luck on the ecosystem work that's following up. That sounds very interesting and relevant as well.
- [53:26]
Kate Nave
Yeah, thank you, story. I'm talking about it.
- [53:28]
Carrie Figdor
Okay, great. Thanks. Goodbye. Hi, you've been listening to an interview with Kate Nave. We've been talking about her new book from MIT Press, A Drive to Survive the Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life. I'm Carrie Figdor. This is New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I hope you enjoyed the podcast and thank you for listening.