I should have reassured you earlier that I have not taken offense.
Why did I reference the free energy principle in answer to Cogito’s question concerning what we can deduce about human nature? The short answer is that I came across it my reading, which is dedicated to exploring conceptual frameworks to understand human nature, and all that comes with it: human consciousness, human social institutions, human culture. I wade through neuroscience (for the layman), philosophy of biology, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, genomics, genetics, epistemology to find explanations of how we (humanity, the West, Americans) are as we are, think as we think, do what we do - in order to find a way to make a coherent atheist conservative political argument that is free from moral determinism: no God, no Marx.
FEP is a conceptual framework that may, perhaps, further this ambition. It is one of a number of principles applying the concept of “autopoiesis” - the process of self-producing and self-maintaining in a living system. Autopoietic process does not require God to create it, or set it going, or guide it along an evolutionary path. I fully expect, though, that when applied to the process of socialization, social science can abuse it, by extending the concept of a “self-producing and maintaining living system” to humanity as a whole (species) and affiliated groups of people (tribes, nations, empires). Consciousness being the experience of a living body would be understood as group-consciousness - constituted by the experience of existing in a group-body: i.e. as a hive mind. Individual autonomy is not a permissible consciousness. And we’re back to the USSR.
I am not proselytizing FEP - as you do Joe Henrich’s “co-evolution principle”. I certainly do not claim that every intelligent and educated person should know it, as you do the co-evolution principle. I do not pretend to be able to do the maths underlying free energy minimization, anymore than I can do the maths that explains the Bayesian inference in perception. I understand the gist of what the principle describes: the process by which a self-organizing system keeps itself from disintegrating into disorder. I get the gist that a self-organizing organism can be defined as as free-energy minimizing system.
Is FEP a science? No more than evolution itself is a science, or Joe Henrich’s “Co-evolution Principle”, is a science. I am not altogether persuaded that anthropology - Henrich’s field - is a science. Establishing the epistemic status of an argument is quite irrelevant to conducting a conceptual analysis of it. I would argue that evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology, being social sciences, import a “progressive” historicist assumption into the idea of social development, which imports moral determinism into the “evolutionary” concepts underlying their work. I might argue that Joe Henrich’s Co-Evolution Principle, aligns evolutionary theory with Marxist history and has the whiff of Marxist/Hegelian “synthesis” about it. I am with Pinker in not being persuaded that the [experiments and investigations] undertaken by group selectionists (to find correlations between genetic variation between and among groups with the nature of the society constituted by them) do add any more informative value to our understanding of human society than would a competent history. History itself is becoming more and more aligned with the social science agenda for progress - e.g. 1691 Project. I would argue that a lot of evolutionary social science is conceptually dubious by virtue of its progressive moral determinism. I would also argue that much of the empirical methodology tends to become a cargo-cult - e.g. counting and identifying genetic variations is a scientific ritual that will provide the data that evidences social “selective pressures” for diversity-preferring and altruistic traits to dominate populations. Collectivist utopia, here we come.
How are we to get away from “science” telling us that human nature - our very DNA -demands that we vote Democrat, defund police, celebrate homosexual marriage while denigrating heterosexual marriage, let doctors mutilate children and teachers humiliate and gaslight them, destroy the institution of property, censor our speech, prevent climate change, stop breeding…?
I will have to suppose that my free energy limits have been reached and surpassed, as most of what I have read on the topic sped a good deal above and over my brain.