As a corollary to the systems view of Evolution, on the level of the system of nature, selection of lower-level systems can be seen as Bayesian search – as an algorithm that metaphorically fills niches and builds bridges of complexity into the void by “looking for” Attractors of nature as a System.
[D]iverse phenotypes amount to multiple hypotheses about what might ‘work’; each individual is a hypothesis or model of what should occupy this ecological niche, and must compete for selection under pressure from the environment.Friston (2017)
References
- Beinhocker (2011): “Evolution as computation: integrating self-organization with generalized Darwinism”
- Campbell (2016): “Universal Darwinism As a Process of Bayesian Inference”
- Friston (2017): “The mathematics of mind-time”