Michael Levin and Karl Friston: How Free Energy Shapes Everything
episodePreviously titled “How Free Energy Constructs Our Reality | Michael Levin and Karl Friston” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
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What is the Free Energy Principle and how does it explain self‑organization?
We've all conversed extensively about information previously, but what is the meaning of this information? What precisely is the distinction between information and meaning?
Uh for me, what I'm really interested in, I'm not I'm not gonna try to give a mathematical definition or anything, but uh what I'm really interested in is uh this this polycomputing perspective where you focus on the observer. So there are some there's some uh given uh set of physical events and there are one or more observers that are choosing how to parse what they're what they're observing in different ways. So that might be time scale, that may be granularity. And then uh there the the ways in which they fill in things that aren't actually in the data at all relative to their um expectations. And most importantly, the way in which uh they will uh use that uh you use the patterns in that data to uh do something when we're moving on to into the future, right?
So so adaptive utility of of whatever's there. That's that that to me is the most interesting thing about information. It's on the receiving end and how much. uh processing and creativity is used by agents to uh do something interesting with it.
Carl, do you have any disagreements as to how as to how information becomes meaningful to a cell or an organism or to a society? And what's precisely this difference between information and meaning?
Yeah. So I just recapitulate what Mike has just said, but uh using the language of the physicist. So I think you'd have to start just by um acknowledging that most of the physics that's brought to the table to explain this kind of self-organization that has some meaning for the things that are self-organizing rests upon information theory. So you have very elemental concepts such as self-information, which is just the implausibility of an event as uh enumerated by the negative block probability. the average of self-information would be entropy, and that's an important measure. And then you can work up to sort of things like free energy as um a w uh an information theoretic measure of the quality of any self-organization.
But I think to sort of speak to Mike's point um and to your question about the distinction between information in an information theoretic sense, possibly in a challonesque sense and meaning, I think you really do have to take a relational or or or observer position. So from my point of view, under the free energy principle, the whole point is that if you've got a separation between the observer and the observed, you now can understand the dynamics and self organization of the observer. as holding probabilistic beliefs or mathematical or Bayesian beliefs about the observed. And I think that's where the meaning arises. So it's not the information theory of the observer, for example, neuronal activation when I see a particular visual scene.
It's what that what that p uh pattern of activity means for encoding and representing the meaning of the sensory input. the visual input that caused that activity. So it's belie y you know, if you allow me to use beliefs in a mathematical sense as Bayes in beliefs, um, then it's not it's the the meaning is um inherent in what those beliefs are about. And because you've now got the separation between the observed and the observer, they are are the beliefs of the observer about the observed, which could be the rest of the universe. It could be you, another person that constitutes my niche, you know, what I am observing. So I I think there's a really important uh you know also distinction between meaning and information which really takes you beyond Shannon information and information theory and really forces you to make a distinction between uh the observer and and the observed.
Could could I c could I could I try try something out here? I wanna I wanna see what what what Carl thinks about this or and and just to just to see if if you like the whole uh uh premise or or and if so what what you think. Uh I I I've been thinking about um information on a sort of behavioral timescale, a developmental timescale, and an evolutionary timescale from the perspective of this bowtie architecture idea.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the Free Energy Principle and how does it explain self‑organization?
0:00–6:01
2
How does information become meaningful for cells and organisms?
6:01–16:57
3
What role does creativity play in the adaptive use of information?
16:57–27:42
4
How do in‑painting and out‑painting illustrate biological information processing?
27:42–39:10
5
Why is biology considered an unreliable medium for information?
39:10–49:50
6
Is aging driven by noise, error accumulation, or psychological factors?
49:50–59:36
7
What is the nature of selfhood according to the Free Energy framework?
59:36–1:09:58
8
How can the Free Energy Principle inform approaches to disease and aging interventions?
1:09:58–1:12:58
Speakers
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