Part of the issue with FEP frameworks is its choice of ontological setting. By situating the theoretical observer within the organism, looking out, it adopts a Kantian perspective. This opens it to critiques like the dark room problem. Can we construct more natural settings? https://twitter.com/NoahGuzman14/status/1246727194623102976

The Free Energy Principle casts the brain, or organism more broadly, as an anticipatory machine, acting so as to minimize surprise - free energy - within its sensor-actuator circuitry. With this framework, we can recover Bayesian mechanics as a maximum entropy sensory flow.

The dark room problem: locking yourself in a dark room minimizes surprise! You expect blackness, and this is what you receive. We can avoid this critique by encoding hyperpriors to make the agent dislike this, but it's a hack.

The emergence of dark room problems in FEP suggests our ontology setting is unnatural. Likewise, FEP fails to characterize a key feature of agency: auto-sophistication. Agency accumulates internal complexity, which is power over its environment.

The solution to these issues is to adopt a fully embedded ontology, which doesn't assume the same inside/outside Kantian disposition. Here, there is no information-theoretic boundary between our agent and its environment - they're built from the same material.

Under this setting, we can translate the information-theoretic free energy surprisal minimization of FEP into a more natural & general framework: an agent is a thing that consume free energy from its environment and stores it within itself, increasing its consumptive capacity.

Here, the epistemic surprisal becomes just another source of free energy, used by the agent to further disequilibriate from its environment. But we're not limited to the epistemic here - food & other resources are, of course, forms of free energy used to auto-sophisticate.

This ontological setting naturally combines the entropic dynamics of epistemology characterized by FEP with the normative concerns of growth, survival, sustinence. This suggests a way out of Hume's guillotine: the value of a fact is the work I can get out of the state of affiars.