AUTHOR=Friston Karl , Thornton Christopher , Clark Andy 

TITLE=Free-Energy Minimization and the Dark-Room Problem

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=3

YEAR=2012

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00130

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00130

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<p>Recent years have seen the emergence of an important new fundamental theory of brain function. This theory brings information-theoretic, Bayesian, neuroscientific, and machine learning approaches into a single framework whose overarching principle is the minimization of surprise (or, equivalently, the maximization of expectation). The most comprehensive such treatment is the “free-energy minimization” formulation due to Karl Friston (see e.g., Friston and Stephan, <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B9">2007</xref>; Friston, <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B7">2010a</xref>,<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B8">b</xref> – see also Fiorillo, <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B6">2010</xref>; Thornton, <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B19">2010</xref>). A recurrent puzzle raised by critics of these models is that biological systems do not seem to avoid surprises. We do not simply seek a dark, unchanging chamber, and stay there. This is the “Dark-Room Problem.” Here, we describe the problem and further unpack the issues to which it speaks. Using the same format as the prolog of Eddington’s <italic>Space, Time, and Gravitation</italic> (Eddington, <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B5">1920</xref>) we present our discussion as a conversation between: an information theorist (Thornton), a physicist (Friston), and a philosopher (Clark).</p>