Confucian Free Energy: The Predictive Mind in Ancient China

Roger Ames presents an interpretation of the classic Confucian philosophy where the world is seen as an always ongoing, radically interrelational, holistic process best described in terms of focus and field. Without any permanent ground truth, its inhabitants must be action-oriented way-makers: irreducibly social optimizers, and contextual co-creators, of their shared cosmos. Meanwhile, a prag- matic turn is happening in the cognitive sciences, instantiated in a new and ambitious theoretical framework: Karl Friston’s free energy principle, which aims to be a unifying paradigm for the sci- ences of brain, life and mind. Based on first principles from statistical physics, it describes humans - and self-organizing systems in general - as continually modelling and predicting the world. The full spectrum of human cognition and behavior is then generated by a single mechanism: the mini- mization of the difference between predicted and actual sensory inputs. Although still controversial, the free energy principle is gaining traction within robotics, biology, neuroscience, psychology, so- cial sciences and philosophy of mind. I here compare these two worldviews from so vastly different backgrounds, and find, perhaps surprisingly, that they in many respects are immediately compati- ble. Social co-creativity across spatio-temporal scales, contextualization, action-orientation and the Confucian virtues naturally translate to or integrate with free energy principle terms. Even when in seeming disagreement, for example on the question of the appearance/reality dichotomy, or that of reductive materialism which often separates the sciences and humanities in general, the two frame- works seem able to positively inform or nuance each other. This multidisciplinary comparison is interesting because it can potentially inform or guide the two theories, and address recent critiques of Ames, and as a proof of concept that bridges can be built across times, cultures and academic traditions.