if the free energy principle were right, would it disprove the orthogonality thesis?
As far as I can tell, it would not—unless you think that the determinism of physics also disproves the orthogonality thesis (because if the world is deterministic, then you can’t get every possible motivation, right? Just the ones that actually happen in the world).
Free energy explains behaviours and their opposites—it explains why someone punches someone or refrains from doing it, eats sushi or hamburger or soylent for lunch or skips it entirely, does/doesn’t, wants/doesn’t want, stays/leaves… builds paperclips/doesn’t build paperclips...
This doesn’t mean that free energy is vacuous, any more than sometimes predicting sunshine and sometimes predicting snow makes weather prediction vacuous. It means that weather prediction/free energy need some other set of inputs to predict an action. In the case of weather prediction, this is things like pressure, wind speed, satellite imagery, etc… In the case of free energy, it’s less clear what the other inputs are, but motivation and preferences seem perfectly valid inputs.
(for the Bayesian version of Free Energy, the evidence and the priors can serve as the—variable—inputs)
As far as I can tell, it would not—unless you think that the determinism of physics also disproves the orthogonality thesis (because if the world is deterministic, then you can’t get every possible motivation, right? Just the ones that actually happen in the world).
Free energy explains behaviours and their opposites—it explains why someone punches someone or refrains from doing it, eats sushi or hamburger or soylent for lunch or skips it entirely, does/doesn’t, wants/doesn’t want, stays/leaves… builds paperclips/doesn’t build paperclips...
This doesn’t mean that free energy is vacuous, any more than sometimes predicting sunshine and sometimes predicting snow makes weather prediction vacuous. It means that weather prediction/free energy need some other set of inputs to predict an action. In the case of weather prediction, this is things like pressure, wind speed, satellite imagery, etc… In the case of free energy, it’s less clear what the other inputs are, but motivation and preferences seem perfectly valid inputs.
(for the Bayesian version of Free Energy, the evidence and the priors can serve as the—variable—inputs)