Kathryn Nave, "A Drive to Survive: The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life" (MIT Press, 2025)
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What is the free‑energy principle and why does it matter for cognitive science?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello, and welcome to New Books and 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 in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Kate Knave, or Catherine Knave, a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her new book, A Drive to Survive, The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life, is just out from the MIT Press. The cybernetic tradition in cognitive science is 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, Knave 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 bio-inactivist 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 and Philosophy. Hi, thank you for having me. 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, you know, how you became a philosopher and how this book came about.
Sure. So I guess I'm one of those people who didn't want to be a philosopher since it was a thing that I knew you could be. So philosophy is my undergrad. 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 I did my undergrad in philosophy and then And that was in London. And being in London, there was also 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 set 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 cognitive 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 Mind, Language and Body 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 mathematics or in language science.
And that gave me a really interesting thing. 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.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the free‑energy principle and why does it matter for cognitive science?
0:01–6:37
2
How does Kathryn Nave critique the sensor‑guided “movementism” of the free‑energy framework?
6:37–13:24
3
Why does Nave argue that living organisms are fundamentally unstable and self‑producing?
13:24–20:30
4
What is bio‑enactivism and how does it differ from traditional cybernetic accounts?
20:30–27:29
5
How does metabolism provide a better basis for intentionality than control‑theoretic models?
27:29–34:10
6
Can consciousness or cognition be realized without a biological metabolism?
34:10–41:06
7
What are the implications of Nave’s ideas for ecosystems and artificial environments like the internet?
41:06–47:15
8
What future research directions does Kathryn Nave plan to pursue after this book?
47:15–53:07
Speakers
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