I think the claim here is supposed to be that if the principle works for bacteria, it can’t tell you that much.[1] That’s true for your laws of physics example as well; nothing is gained from taking the laws of physics as a starting point.
That said, this doesn’t seem obviously true; I don’t see why you can’t have a principle that holds for every system yet tells you something very important. Maybe it’s not likely, but doesn’t seem impossible.
I know more about the brain than I do about physics, but I would hope that quite a lot is gained from taking the laws of physics as a starting point.
The fact that the FEP applies to both humans and bacteria (and non-living things like rocks, as Roman Leventov pointed out elsewhere), is valuable because, empirically, we observe common structure across those things. What is gained by the FEP is, accordingly, an abstract and general understanding of that structure. (Whether that is useful as a “starting point” depends on how one solves problems, I suppose.)
I think one important aspect for the usefulness of general principles is by how much they constrain the possible behaviour.
Knowing general physics for example, I can rule out a lot of behaviour like energy-from-nothing, teleportation, perfect knowledge and many such otherwise potentially plausible behaviours. These do apply both to bacteria and humans, and they actually are useful for understanding bacteria and humans.
The OP, I think, argues that FEP is not helpful in this sense because without further assumptions it is equally compatible with any behaviour of a living being.
I think the claim here is supposed to be that if the principle works for bacteria, it can’t tell you that much.[1] That’s true for your laws of physics example as well; nothing is gained from taking the laws of physics as a starting point.
That said, this doesn’t seem obviously true; I don’t see why you can’t have a principle that holds for every system yet tells you something very important. Maybe it’s not likely, but doesn’t seem impossible.
I know more about the brain than I do about physics, but I would hope that quite a lot is gained from taking the laws of physics as a starting point.
The fact that the FEP applies to both humans and bacteria (and non-living things like rocks, as Roman Leventov pointed out elsewhere), is valuable because, empirically, we observe common structure across those things. What is gained by the FEP is, accordingly, an abstract and general understanding of that structure. (Whether that is useful as a “starting point” depends on how one solves problems, I suppose.)
I think one important aspect for the usefulness of general principles is by how much they constrain the possible behaviour. Knowing general physics for example, I can rule out a lot of behaviour like energy-from-nothing, teleportation, perfect knowledge and many such otherwise potentially plausible behaviours. These do apply both to bacteria and humans, and they actually are useful for understanding bacteria and humans.
The OP, I think, argues that FEP is not helpful in this sense because without further assumptions it is equally compatible with any behaviour of a living being.