Me and My Markov Blanket - Biological Self-Organization and Free Energy

Explore a compelling presentation by Karl John Friston from University College London on the concept of biological self-organization and its connection to Markov blankets. Delve into a heuristic proof and simulations of a primordial soup that suggest life is an inevitable and emergent property of any weakly mixing random dynamical system possessing a Markov blanket. Examine the arguments supporting this conclusion, including the conditional independence of internal and external states, the role of free energy minimization, and the emergence of an information geometry related to probabilistic beliefs. Discover how this perspective leads to a Bayesian mechanics summarized as self-evidencing, providing insights into how internal states model and act on their environment to preserve functional and structural integrity.