New Books Network Kathryn Nave, "A Drive to Survive: The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life" (MIT Press, 2025)
Apr 10, 2026
Kate Knave, a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellow at Edinburgh and author of A Drive to Survive, challenges the Free Energy framework from a bioenactivist perspective. She contrasts metabolism-driven autopoiesis with sensor-guided movementism. Topics include cybernetics, predictive processing, individuation, constraint closure, and applying organismal ideas to ecosystems and designed environments.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Free Energy Unifies Inference And Control
- The free energy framework generalizes cybernetic feedback control into a unified account of brain inference and action.
- It treats inference and action as minimizing variational free energy, linking Bayesian approximation with control strategies for sensorimotor regularity.
From Journalism Back To Philosophy
- Kate Knave transitioned from science journalism back into philosophy because interviewing specialists left her wanting sustained expertise.
- She pursued Edinburgh's embodied cognition program, then a PhD combining phenomenology, predictive processing, and bio-enactivism that became the book.
Cybernetics Frames Life As Stability Maintenance
- Cybernetics models organisms as feedback controllers that preserve stability by returning to preferred trajectories.
- Kathryn Nave links Ashby's view to Friston: both reduce life to maintaining invariants across perturbations, making them formally similar.
