ArticleEntropy (Basel, Switzerland)2024
Principled Limitations on Self-Representation for Generic Physical Systems.
Article in Entropy (Basel, Switzerland), 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 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.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Beyond representations: from active inference to active interference.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- Five Fristonian Formulae.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Cortical development in the structural model and free energy minimization.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2024Article
- Making the Thermodynamic Cost of Active Inference Explicit.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Forgetting ourselves in flow: an active inference account of flow states and how we experience ourselves within them.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The ideas of self-observation and self-representation, and the concomitant idea of self-control, pervade both the cognitive and life sciences, arising in domains as diverse as immunology and robotics. Here, we ask in a very general way whether, and to what extent, these ideas make sense. Using a generic model of physical interactions, we prove a theorem and several corollaries that severely restrict applicable notions of self-observation, self-representation, and self-control. We show, in particular, that adding observational, representational, or control capabilities to a meta-level component of a system cannot, even in principle, lead to a complete meta-level representation of the system as a whole. We conclude that self-representation can at best be heuristic, and that self models cannot, in general, be empirically tested by the systems that implement them.
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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.