From Existence to Free Energy and Self-Evidencing

The story that puts self-evidencing at the core of our understanding of the mind and existence can perplexingly seem both trivial and far from trivial.It would be trivial because the reasoning is largely analytical, in the same ballpark as "a triangle has three sides"; and it would be nontrivial because this simple analytical meditation aspires to deliver a method for understanding the mind and the way that we experience ourselves, each other, and the world.I hope to avoid perplexity by moving stepwise from conceptual analy sis of the notion of existence to the notion of self-evidencing organisms.Along the way, I introduce several key notions, such as models, self-supervision, free energy, approximate variational inference, and model evidence.The aim is to connect the notion of self-evidencing to Karl Friston's free energy princi ple, focusing on its philosophically salient ele ments.The stepwise order of explanation is impor tant to show how self-evidencing emerges a priori, as a first-principles system.I begin this chapter by describing initial, heuristic concepts of the two key notions of things and self-evidencing, which will help anchor the more technical arguments and discussions.I then offer an analy sis in statistical terms of the concept of existence and describe the bound aries of an existing thing and the states that characterize its existence.The notion of states is connected to notions of sensory input and internal models, and then to the idea of maintaining the model through action.This in turn leads to the challenge of describing a system as genuinely self-supervised and able to function on its own, without external supervision-this is what brings in the free energy princi ple.Then self-evidencing is shown to capture all these notions under one concept.Next, chapter 3 will extract some of the philosophically distinctive aspects of the self-evidencing agent, expanding on how action comes into the picture.