A critical analysis of Markovian monism


BENI M.

Synthese, cilt.199, sa.3-4, ss.6407-6427, 2021 (SCI-Expanded) identifier identifier identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 199 Sayı: 3-4
  • Basım Tarihi: 2021
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1007/s11229-021-03075-x
  • Dergi Adı: Synthese
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, IBZ Online, Periodicals Index Online, Index Islamicus, Linguistic Bibliography, Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts, MLA - Modern Language Association Database, Philosopher's Index, zbMATH, DIALNET
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.6407-6427
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: Free energy principle, Markovian monism, Fictional models, Mathematical models
  • Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. part of Springer Nature.Free Energy Principle underlies a unifying framework that integrates theories of origins of life, cognition, and action. Recently, FEP has been developed into a Markovian monist perspective (Friston et al. in BC 102: 227–260, 2020). The paper expresses scepticism about the validity of arguments for Markovian monism. The critique is based on the assumption that Markovian models are scientific models, and while we may defend ontological theories about the nature of scientific models, we could not read off metaphysical theses about the nature of target systems (self-organising conscious systems, in the present context) from our theories of nature of scientific models (Markov blankets). The paper draws attention to different ways of understanding Markovian models, as material entities, fictional entities, and mathematical structures. I argue that none of these interpretations contributes to the defence of a metaphysical stance (either in terms of neutral monism or reductive physicalism). This is because scientific representation is a sophisticated process, and properties of Markovian models—such as the property of being neither physical nor mental—could not be projected onto their targets to determine the ontological properties of targets easily.