Can the Free Energy Principle be made ecological? (Bruineberg et al, 2018)

Everyone loves Friston's free energy principle (FEP), and everyone wants it for their own. Not everyone can have it, though (well, at least not if it's going to mean anything) and so there's a spirited fight about who's theory it best fits in the literature. 

Bruineberg, Kiverstein & Rietveld (2018) argue two points in an effort to win the fight for the good guys. First, they want to show that inferential, representational takes on the FEP end up in an unworkable place. Second, they want to show that an ecological/enactivist analysis works much better. Overall I think they take a solid swing at both, so it will be interesting to see the responses this sparks. Here I want to review their arguments.

To unbury the lede, I like this paper a lot. It's really long and repetitive, but in here is an excellent ecological analysis of the free-energy principle that also works to explicitly rule out the competition. I am obviously biased, but their work pointing out the flaws of Hohwy's account all make good sense to me, not least because these flaws show up in all kinds of places in the representational ontology. Hohwy fails for the reason interface theory does, in my view, and it's nice to see separate analyses end up in the same place as me. 

For what it's worth, I am not yet convinced that the FEP is the way we need to go. However, if it ends up being a good idea, Bruineberg et al have done sterling work in showing how we should go about it. 

General Ecological Information Does Not Support the Perception of Anything

One common critique of the ecological approach is how can we use perception to explain behaviour that is organised with respect to things in the world that aren't currently in our area? How do we plan for future activities, or how do we know that the closed fridge has beer? 

A recent attempt to get ecological about this comes from Reitveld & Kiverstein (2014) who propose a relational account of affordances that enables them to talk about opportunities for more complex behaviours. This account has developed into the Skilled Intentionality Framework (e.g. Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014), where skill is an 'optimal grip' on a field of task-relevant, relational affordances. 

I have always had one primary problem with this programme of work - I don't believe that they can show how these affordances create information and thus can be perceived. I discuss this here and here, and there's comments and replies for Rietveld and Kiverstein there too. You can indeed carve the world up into their kind of entities, but if they don't create information then they cannot be perceived and they are irrelevant to behaviour. 

I was therefore excited to see a new paper from the group called 'General ecological information supports engagement with affordances for ‘higher’ cognition' (Bruineberg, Chemero & Rietveld, 2018; hence BC&R). There is a lot of excellent work in here; but their proposal for a general ecological information is, in fact, neither ecological nor information. It is a good way of talking ecologically about conventional constraints on behaviour, but it doesn't make those perceivable and so the main thesis of the paper fails. 

The Field is Full, Just Not of Affordances - A Reply to Rietveld & Kiverstein

I recently posted about relational accounts of affordances and how one way to summarise my objections to them is that they cannot support mechanistic models of cognition. I came to this after reading Rietveld & Kiverstein's 'Landscape of Affordances' paper and chatting to them both at EWEP14. Eric and Julian have been kind enough to send through some detailed comments (beginning here and split over three comments due to character limits). This post is me replying to these comments as a way to get them somewhere a little more visible. I haven't gone point by point, I've just pulled out the key stuff I wanted to address; read their comments for the whole thing. I appreciate their willingness to get into this with me; their account is becoming wildly influential and their papers and feedback are helping me immensely as I work to articulate my concerns. 

To preview: my fundamental objection remains the same and as yet unanswered - while it is indeed possible to identify relations between 'forms of life' and 'socio-cultural environments' there is, as yet, no evidence that these relations create perceptual information. If they do not create information, they are not ecologically perceived, and they cannot figure in the online coordination and control of behaviour. And if they can't do that, then they sure as hell aren't affordances.

So my challenge to Reitveld & Kiverstein (R&K) is this - work up an example of an affordance that fits their definition and not mine and that creates information. Then we can test to see whether people act as if they perceive that affordance and can try perturbing the information to confirm how they are perceiving it. Then, and only then, do we have a ball game.

Relational Theories of Affordances are Functional, Not Mechanistic (A Purple Peril)

Everyone and their dog has a theory about how to interpret Gibson's famously vague definition of affordances;

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill....an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer.

There are two basic flavours of theories: affordances as dispositional properties of the environment (Turvey, Shaw, Reed & Mace, 1981; Turvey, 1992) and affordances as relational features of the animal-environment system. (A recent paper has just claimed they should be best understood as events, but to be honest I don't really know what's motivating this). The two most recent and popular relational accounts are Chemero's book (Chemero, 2009; see these posts on the relevant chapter) and Rietveld & Kiverstein (2014) in a paper entitled 'A Rich Landscape of Affordances'. Their goal, like most of the relational accounts, is to handle higher-order cognition by scaling up affordances to support it (our move, in contrast, has been to expand the uses of perceptual information; Golonka, 2015; Golonka & Wilson, 2016 preprint).

I am firmly in the 'affordances as dispositional properties' camp (see, for example, the discussion section of my recent throwing paper for an extended analysis). Specifically, they are dynamically defined dispositional properties of objects and events in the context of tasks. The reason is that this is the only way affordances can be the kind of thing that can create information and therefore be perceivable. They have to be 'out there' and made of things that light can bounce off, for example, and relations between organism and environments are not typically such things. In addition, if they do not exist until perceived, we need a story to explain how we come to learn to perceive them, and there is no viable ecological framework that will make this happen (Wilson et al, 2016).

Reading this material with my new mechanism glasses on has given me a new, concise way to identify the problems with these relational accounts:

Affordances-as-relations theories are all functional explanations, and not mechanistic explanations