Following the FEP, we can now say that organisms maintain themselves in the low-entropy states that ensure their continued existence by actively minimizing this measurable quantity called “free energy.” But what is free energy from the perspective of the organism? It turns out, after some mathematical juggling, that free energy is basically the same thing as sensory prediction error. When an organism is minimizing sensory prediction error, as in schemes like predictive processing and active inference, it is also minimizing this theoretically more profound quantity of free energy.
