ArticleEntropy (Basel, Switzerland)2024
Making the Thermodynamic Cost of Active Inference Explicit.
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.
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
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Agentic Finance: An Adaptive Inference Framework for Bounded-Rational Investing Agents.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Five Fristonian Formulae.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Intrinsic Motivation as Constrained Entropy Maximization.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Life, its origin, and its distribution: a perspective from the Conway-Kochen Theorem and the Free Energy Principle.Communicative & integrative biology · 2025Review
- How do inner screens enable imaginative experience? Applying the free-energy principle directly to the study of conscious experience.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
When describing Active Inference Agents (AIAs), the term "energy" can have two distinct meanings. One is the energy that is utilized by the AIA (e.g., electrical energy or chemical energy). The second meaning is so-called Variational Free Energy (VFE), a statistical quantity which provides an upper bound on surprisal. In this paper, we develop an account of the former quantity-the Thermodynamic Free Energy (TFE)-and its relationship with the latter. We highlight the necessary tradeoffs between these two in a generic, quantum information-theoretic formulation, and the macroscopic consequences of those tradeoffs for the ways that organisms approach their environments. By making this tradeoff explicit, we provide a theoretical basis for the different metabolic strategies that organisms from plants to predators use to survive.
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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.