The Free Energy Principle

The Free Energy Principle, as developed by Karl Friston, has been a cornerstone of Mark Solms’s recent work in neuropsychoanalysis. All self-organizing systems aim to minimize free energy, but how do they do this? In this chapter, I outline the basic conceptual arguments of the Free Energy Principle as applied to biological self-organizing systems and the brain. This includes concepts like free energy, Markov blankets, predictions, prediction error, and precision. The Free Energy Principle offers crucial conceptual resources in the shift to informatic uncertainty which open bridges with Lacanian psychoanalysis.