New Books in Philosophy 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 and author, challenges predictive processing and the Free Energy Principle. She contrasts sensor-guided control with bio-enactivism, arguing metabolism and self-production shape intentional action. Short, sharp takes on autopoiesis, constraint-closure, and why living systems resist mere stability models.
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From Journalism Back To Philosophy
- Kate Knave began in philosophy, left for science journalism, then returned via an embodied cognition master's at Edinburgh.
- Her PhD shifted from visual phenomenology toward critiquing predictive processing and the Free Energy Principle.
Free Energy Links Inference And Action
- The Free Energy framework unifies offline inference and ongoing action by treating both as parameter variations that reduce sensory surprise.
- Variational inference approximates intractable Bayesian updates, and action changes the world to make sensory evidence more probable under the agent's model.
Stability Alone Doesn't Explain Life
- Stability-as-homeostasis is insufficient to distinguish living from nonliving systems because many physical systems passively return to equilibrium.
- Ashby's cybernetic view treats survival as stability, but that doesn't capture the self-producing, precarious chemistry of living organisms.
