Kathryn Nave.
A Drive to Survive: the free energy principle and the meaning of life.
MIT Press. 2025
Since 2005, Karl Friston’s proposal that the principle of free energy minimization
underpins the purposive behavior of living agents
has evolved through thousands of publications.
This principle’s central move is to formalize the drive for self-preservation
in terms of a single probabilistic imperative:
to survive, a living system must consistently exhibit
the same “most likely” pattern of activity over time.
Despite the simplicity of this central claim,
the free energy principle’s complexity and rate of development
have previously made it difficult to identify and evaluate.
In A Drive to Survive, Kathryn Nave offers an extended critical analysis
of the strengths and limitations of Friston’s proposal.