Active Inference

​Active inference provides an integrated perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior that is increasingly used across multiple disciplines including neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. Active inference is a “first principles” approach to understanding behaviour and the brain, framed in terms of a single imperative to minimize free energy.

The Free Energy Principle (FEP) is a formal statement that explains how living and non-living systems resist the second law of thermodynamics stipulating that all open systems tend to dissipation or chaos by restricting their behaviour to a set of states. The FEP describes the behaviour of a given system by modeling it through a Markov blanket.

​Through the crucial assumption of a living system (internal states) is coupled with its environment (external states) it is possible to learn about the behaviour of system (i.e. action & perception) and predict future states. It allows to understand how and why living systems actively change their local world into expected states.

In recent years, the FEP and its corollary active inference have become increasingly influential in neuroscience, psychology, philosophy and artificial intelligence.