ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2013
Life as we know it.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 225 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
225 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Free Energy Principle and Free Markets.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Review
- Conative inference as a mechanism of allostatic resilience: wanting to be and being to want.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Review
- ICU Delirium as a Failure of Predictive Synchronization: A Two-Agent Active Inference Model.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Active inference as a model of collision avoidance behavior in human drivers.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Non-ergodicity in ecology and evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Agentic Finance: An Adaptive Inference Framework for Bounded-Rational Investing Agents.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The Awareness-First Theory: A Coherence Principle Underlying Active Inference and Physical Law.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- A deformable attractor manifold organizes human resting-state brain dynamics.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Mind Everywhere: A Framework for Conceptualizing Goal-Directedness in Biology and Other Domains-Part One.Biological theory · 2026Article
- A matter of psychic life and death: reappraising the death drive and its link to psychosis through the prism of the free energy principle.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Beyond representations: from active inference to active interference.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Direct input variables: rethinking the limits of the extended mind hypothesis within predictive processing.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Conscious simultaneity with continuous motion: a measure-theoretic resolution of the hard problem.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- From evolutionary individuality to cognitive integration: a cross-modular perspective on human-AI coevolution.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Genealogies of organizational closure: from logical paradox to mind in life.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2026Review
- How light reshapes the mind. An active inference framework for the cognitive and emotional effects of indoor lighting.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2026Article
- Oscillatory dynamics as the coordination layer of the organism: waves, Markov blankets, and the virtual space of cognition.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
- De-anthropomorphizing the mind: life as a cognitive spectrum in a unified framework for biological minds.Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2026Article
- When prediction fails: a computational complexity view of stress.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2026Article
165 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
This paper presents a heuristic proof (and simulations of a primordial soup) suggesting that life-or biological self-organization-is an inevitable and emergent property of any (ergodic) random dynamical system that possesses a Markov blanket. This conclusion is based on the following arguments: if the coupling among an ensemble of dynamical systems is mediated by short-range forces, then the states of remote systems must be conditionally independent. These independencies induce a Markov blanket that separates internal and external states in a statistical sense. The existence of a Markov blanket means that internal states will appear to minimize a free energy functional of the states of their Markov blanket. Crucially, this is the same quantity that is optimized in Bayesian inference. Therefore, the internal states (and their blanket) will appear to engage in active Bayesian inference. In other words, they will appear to model-and act on-their world to preserve their functional and structural integrity, leading to homoeostasis and a simple form of autopoiesis.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.