- The Functional/Biological Link: The Free Energy Principle (FEP)
The Free Energy Principle (FEP) provides a theoretical foundation for innate knowledge by suggesting that the fundamental biological imperative for self-organizing systems, including biological ones, is to minimize “surprise” or prediction error.
• Minimizing Surprise as Innate Knowing: This framework suggests that “sentient behavior” or active inference is based on a first principles account of biotic self-organization. The FEP dictates that an agent (or a neural network) operates to minimize variational free energy, which is a measure of the fit between its internal model and sensory observations. To minimize surprise, the biological network attempts to learn how to predict the world better and how to make the world more predictable. This inherent drive to seek predictability and avoid noise could explain an instinctual understanding, such as the child recognizing they were cheated before they can articulate the reason using formal language.
• Evidence in Isolated Systems: This concept is applied to systems that lack a complete human brain or social context, such as the “DishBrain” research involving in vitro neurons embodied in a simulated game-world. In this type of research, the cultured cortical neurons demonstrate learning when they seek predictable input (positive “reward”) and try to avoid unpredictable noise (negative “reward”). The capacity of these isolated neural networks to self-organize activity to display behavior like this suggests a form of learning or “knowing” that is based on computational and organizational principles within the neural tissue itself.
- The Foundational/Philosophical Link: Panpsychism
If you need a theory that entirely removes the origin of “who we are” from the complexity of the brain or social structures, Panpsychism offers a framework where consciousness or mind-like attributes are considered fundamental to reality itself.
• Mind as a Fundamental Feature: Panpsychism is the view that the mind or consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality, existing throughout the universe. Under this view, mentality is present in some primitive form in entities even at the fundamental level of physics, rather than emerging later in complex organisms.
• Irreducible Experience: This perspective avoids the necessity of having complex structures (like the mature brain or social class) to generate experience, because experience itself is irreducible. Panpsychism is generally understood to be incompatible with emergentism, which holds that consciousness arises only higher up in the hierarchy of complexity.
• Intrinsic Properties of Matter: Philosophers supporting this view, such as Bertrand Russell, argued that physics describes the extrinsic properties of matter, but consciousness could be related to the matter’s intrinsic properties (sometimes called quiddities). The conscious mind, in this sense, is seen as a structure created by these intrinsic properties, meaning consciousness “just is” matter. This directly supports the notion that a basic state of knowing is inherent and not dependent on complex structures like a functional brain or society.
Therefore, the state of “knowing” you describe can be linked to the FEP (as an innate drive for predictability) and Panpsychism (as the philosophical assertion that mind or experience is fundamental to existence, not emergent from complex biology or social structures).
Canonical Hub: CANONICAL_INDEX