The science underneath
Markov blankets
In shortA way of describing where a person ends and the world begins, and how the two affect each other.
The idea
A ‘Markov blanket’ is the mathematical way of saying where one thing ends and the world begins: a cell’s membrane, a person’s senses and muscles. What is inside only knows what is outside through the blanket (what it senses) and only changes the outside through it (what it does). An interesting consequence: blankets can be nested inside one another. A family, a class or a team also have blankets, and a child belongs to several.
What to try
- Ask what the child can know about a situation, from what they see and hear, and what they can do in it.
- When a pattern appears in only one place, think of that place (the class, the family) as a system with its own rules.
- Giving the child ways to act on the situation changes what they can learn.
The common mistake
Using ‘porous Markov blanket’ as an explanation. It is a formal and much-debated concept; in practice it is useful for asking what the person can sense and do.
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Short, plain pieces by the researchers and good writers.
The science behind itHow strong the evidence is, the model, videos and references.
How strong the evidence is
A way of thinking A lens for interpreting what a child does, not a rule from trials.
In a causal graph, a node’s Markov blanket is the set of its parents, children and children’s parents, which makes the node conditionally independent of the rest. Friston and colleagues partition states into internal, external, sensory and active, and propose nested blankets at several scales (Kirchhoff et al., 2018). Bruineberg et al. (2022) distinguish the instrumental use (‘Pearl blankets’) from the metaphysical use (‘Friston blankets’) and criticise the jump between them. Recommended use: as a heuristic for mapping sensory and action channels and nested systems (person, family, class), not as a measure.
More technical books
The technical textbook on active inference, for those who want the formal model.
See on Amazon ›Amazon links are affiliate links: if you buy, Bounded Uncertainty receives a small commission at no cost to you.
Videos
External videos, chosen because they agree with these ideas. Bounded Uncertainty has no link to the channels.
References
- Kirchhoff, M., Parr, T., Palacios, E., Friston, K., & Kiverstein, J. (2018). The Markov blankets of life: autonomy, active inference and the free energy principle. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 15, 20170792.
- Bruineberg, J., Dołęga, K., Dewhurst, J., & Baltieri, M. (2022). The emperor’s new Markov blankets. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 45, e183.
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