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Although this arrangement is theoretically elegant, some difficulties arise when applying it to real-world systems like brains and computers, as they have limited memory and limited time to process information. Even with an estimated processing power of trillions of calculations per second, the human brain faces constraints on its capacities that only allow it to process a fraction of what is actually happening in an environment. Additionally, Friston’s Free Energy Principle would imply that the brain is making vastly complex comparisons between its memory and the world at every second. While this is technically true, this principle faces similar mathematical constraints in real-world scenarios, as there are only so many calories that can be burned at one time.
The brilliance of the Free Energy Principle, and the reason it has proven to be so exciting for neuroscience and psychology, is because several pre-existing constructs in mathematics and physics exist that simplify these computations to such a degree that the proposed computations could be plausibly handled by a human brain. Put simply, instead of having to make calculations across all possible environmental states, including extremely unlikely ones like unexpected meteor strikes or ghost apparitions, the human brain instead makes a series of guesses or hypotheses, and then calculates the amount of surprise generated by its sensory inputs.
Once a level of surprise is ascertained, the mental model can then be progressively revised to fit the incoming sensory data, or action can be taken to change the world to match the model. This can be represented visually by two converging graphs, which represent probability distributions, which in turn correspond to expected and actual states as expressed by the brain’s electrical signals.
With its emphasis on an iterative progression towards a sophisticated and expansive perspective on the world, the general trajectory of development implied by the Free Energy Principle would imply that the human brain begins at a low level of sophistication and grows in response to the sensory information it acquires. The Free Energy Principle would also imply that the more data someone has access to, the more sophisticated and expansive their hypotheses about the world should be – and the less often they will be surprised. (Ticket to Heaven by Zachary R.J. Strong, PDF version, p 108-109)
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