iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/10/2026

#TheTroubleWithAgency Talking about Rosen's anticipatory systems, which predate active inference by several decades and (unlike the latter field) get the role of anticipation in living systems exactly right.

"Biologists still argue today whether canalization is a selectable phenotype or not. In contrast, it is easy to see how it may arise from biological organization: organisms (even simple ones like bacteria) differ from purely reactive mechanisms in that they can proactively allocate work to compensate for detrimental changes in their environment, but also in their internal structure. They are anticipatory systems (Rosen, 1985; Louie, 2012) because they continuously work towards goal states that are not yet realized. All this requires is what Rosen calls “internal predictive models” of an organism’s surroundings. What he means here are not formal models (see the last section) or literal representations of an environment (mental or otherwise). Rosen’s “predictive models,” instead, consist of a subset of the organism’s functional components — such as the bacterium’s chemotactic and flagellar apparatus — which alter the present state of the system in response to predictions about its own future state and its surroundings. The bacterium does not have to explicitly represent the idea of a food source within itself. It only has to be able to modulate its movements in a way that is likely to bring it closer to this source in most situations. It expects to be fed, and acts according to this expectation."

Shows Rosen's diagram of an anticipatory system from his 1985 book and the following quote: "In this diagram, adapted from Rosen (1985), I’ve highlighted the two functional subcomponents that make a living organism an anticipatory system. The first consists of specialized components involved in “modeling” the future. Think of the chemotactic apparatus again: it receives direct input from the environment and conveys it to the flagellar complex, the effector component of the system. This modulates the behavior of the bacterium directly, in a way that is congruent with its expectations. Alternatively, effectors can also alter the sensory input that is received from the environment. This is what happens in sensory adaptation: if you switch the light off at night, it will take your sense of vision some time to adapt its sensitivity to the darkness. In either case, the result of what the effectors achieved is then fed back into the model component. The bacterium either senses a higher or lower concentration of sugar in the new position it has reached since the last measurement, and its sensorimotor process (the “model”) gets updated accordingly. This kind of anticipation is how organisms “pull the future into the present” without breaking any laws of physics or causality, and without requiring explicit representation of expectations (Rosen, 1985). With his account, Rosen presages what is known today as active inference by several decades (see (Friston, 2013; Parr et al., 2022; Nave, 2025). I will have much more to say about it, and the role it plays in keeping an organism alive in the next chapter."

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026

Fog on the #Danube (Greifenstein reservoir) this morning.

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026

It"s so warm here that I still took a dip in the lake yesterday. #Altarm #Donau #Herbst

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2026

Fascist bootlickers gonna lick boots.

Exchange on that other platform, the fascist one, where Musk announces he will rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI.

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

Sunday hike on the #HoheVeitsch in #Styria. Beautiful fall light, clear views, rocky trails, a herd of chamois, and an asp that crossed our path. This is my kind of meditation and embodiment ritual. Feeling at ease and aware of every muscle in my legs today 😋 ...

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

Checking in with the ducks and herons at the #Danube in #Greifenstein this morning. Water levels have been low for so long that the riverbed is overgrown with grasses...

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

"Our job is to call it as we see it, and right now for me, this is it." spore.social/@yoginho/1172510276418… The framing for this bullshit is interesting, and *very* similar to every right-wing nutcase politician right now: [in dramatic whispering […] [Original post on spore.social]

Post from X by Michael Levin: "Here it is - the official, revised, peer-reviewed version of my Platonic Space paper. Of all the many unpopular positions I’ve taken over the decades - bitter controversies around the origin of left-right asymmetry in embryogenesis, bioelectricity and genetics, diverse intelligence, etc., this one has by far generated the most pushback: serious (grateful for those!) and energetic attempts to move me to other views, pleas to just drop it and not talk about it (for several different reasons), nasty emails and accusations, impacts on reviews of papers that have nothing to do with this, etc. Kind of amazing to me how incendiary this is. What can I say... Our job is to call it as we see it, and right now for me, this is it. Apologies to collaborators and colleagues for any shrapnel! Time will tell if this pans out or not; I've placed my bets. And btw, if you think this stuff is weird and uncomfortable, just wait… There’s much more on the way. The knob turns slowly but as long as the data keep coming, I'm going to say what I think it all means and follow it to the next steps it enables. Buckle up!"

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/09/2026

#TheTroubleWithAgency Writing again this week! 19,667 words. That's about 1/3 of the book done. Gonna be tight for the deadline at the end of the year. Who would've thought ... 🤓

On the one hand, the high degree of abstraction of a relational model is necessary if we want clear and general insights — such as Rosen’s conjecture that organisms are not machines. On the other hand, abstraction makes the application and validation of the model difficult. In contrast to conventional network graphs, which suggest a specific underlying regulatory structure, arrow diagrams depict a more dispositional relational scheme that can be realized by a whole variety of physical processes and interactions. For example, the metabolic fluxes of different species of bacteria living under different environmental conditions generally conform to the (F,A)-model, yet consist of varying sets of activated biochemical pathways at any given time. This highlights another drawback: the static appearance of an arrow diagram may lead to the wrong kind of intuition about the dynamic nature of biological organization. What we need is a formal account that faithfully connects a relational diagram to the teleodynamic behavior that characterizes such a system. Only such a concrete dynamic realization of the abstract relational model can be applied to specific biological observations, and validated against experimental measurements.

But here we bump into a seemingly insurmountable obstacle: the gist of Rosen’s conjecture is precisely that we cannot formalize the complete behavioral repertoire of a self-manufacturing system. An organism may act or change in ways that are not captured or predicted by our current dynamic model. Still, mathematicians didn’t stop deriving theorems after Gödel, and neither should biologists stop making models of organismic behavior after Rosen. We may never achieve perfection, but we can continue to probe and push the boundaries of what can be modeled, and to gain insights into life that way. However, the idea is not to mindlessly accumulate more and more models of mechanisms. We need new kinds of models that lead to a deeper understanding of self-manufacturing dynamics. We must push the boundaries harder. We must pay more attention to the limitations of our efforts. This is very much in the spirit of Rosen’s view of science as the art of modeling. And it is also robustly supported by other perspectivist approaches to the philosophy of biology (see (Wimsatt, 2007; Jaeger & Neustetter, 2026b). We learn from false models when they fail in interesting ways.

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/08/2026

Tragöß - Kamplsteg - Klamm - Grüner See #Styria

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2026

#Seckau Abbey. And rain in the evening, finally!

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2026

In beautiful #Murau, Styria. Although for a sad reason.

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026

The world is not formalizable, because life is not formalizable. The world is not a computer. And neither are you. 18,515 words on "The Trouble with Agency."

"What’s more: contrary to widespread dismissals, we are now in a position to connect Rosen’s conceptual approach with empirical science. It may be true that (just like Church-Turing) Rosen’s conjecture remains an unproven theoretical postulate. But (just like Church-Turing), Rosen’s conjecture is extremely robust. Over the decades of its existence, it has withstood many serious attempts to find logical flaws and disprove it. They all failed, because its core result is rock solid: living systems and mechanisms do belong to different categories. What is needed at this point is not further proof, but a clear-cut realization of the (F,A)-model that renders it useful. Rosen’s conjecture applies if we can convincingly show that living organisms can be properly modeled using (F,A)-systems. And if his conjecture applies, then the CTDW principle is invalid: not all physical systems are of an algorithmic nature. In my opinion, Hofmeyr (2017, 2021) achieves the required realization: he shows how the (F,A)-model fits what we know about the biochemistry and genetic regulation of the cell, and how it accounts for their collective co-construction. No other contemporary (whole-cell) model even comes close — a central failure of our mechanistic modeling efforts. Judging by the standard criteria for model validation in the life sciences, this is a very well-supported model! Why, then, are not more people investigating it?"

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026

@brembs This may help with the distinction between nonlinear (self-organizing) & living (self-manufacturing) system. Plus: I spend quite some time explaining the difference between nonlinear feedback & autopoietic co-construction. It's essential to understand […] [Original post on spore.social]

"We often compare living systems to hurricanes, whirlpools, and flames. And, in a way, these are not bad metaphors — surely not as awful as considering the organism a machine! Organisms, too, are stable yet dynamic patterns that only occur far from equilibrium. They, too, are organized in a dynamic manner. But this is where the similarities end. The major difference between non-living self-organization and living self-manufacture is that the waste energy generated from the entropy gradient is not dissipated but recycled in a living system: organisms reinvest this energy into the generation of the very interactions and constraints that constitute their own organization. This leads to the self-referential dynamics (Kauffman, 2000) calls a work-constraint cycle. Living systems are the kinds of systems that must perform work to persist. A rock doesn’t need to do that. But neither does a hurricane, which just burns through its entropy gradient and then dissipates itself once that gradient is exhausted. You, in comparison, can survive some time after your last meal. Isn't this the essence of what it means to be alive?"

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/08/2026

Life, as you probably don't know it. (Esp. if you are a biologist or computational modeler in biology today.) 17,276 words written of "The Trouble with Agency" so far.

Manuscript quote: "This is the core of Rosen’s conjecture (1991): while not breaking any laws of physics, or the sequence of cause-and-effect, a living self-manufacturing system is still not a mechanism — and hence also not a machine — as I have defined these concepts above. Because there are no predefined states and rules, we cannot formalize, and thus compute, all the potential behaviors of such a system (see also Louie, 2009). Like the Church-Turing conjecture, Rosen’s is also widely misunderstood: it does not imply that we cannot simulate observed properties and activities of an organism in a computer. We can — at least up to some point. Instead, Rosen’s conjecture is an incompleteness argument, and it is asymmetric in time: no matter how well our model fits the past and the present, it will be unable to predict — or even formally prestate — all the possible activities and functions of a living system and its components in the future."

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2026

Query for the hivemind: A colleague asked on that other platform if we know any communities of scientists that are committed to writing without LLMs / genAI. Do you know any such organizations? I am committed to this individually, but I don't know of any […] [Original post on spore.social]

Carl T. Bergstrom's post on BlueSky: "Does anyone know about communities or groups of scientists who are committed to writing without the use of LLMs / genAI?"

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/07/2026

I had a great time facilitating my workshop "Into the Unknown," a philosophical exploration of what it means to be a grad student these days, at the Max Planck Cognition Summer School at Schloss Eckberg in Dresden. A feisty group of students, who didn't buy any […] [Original post on spore.social]

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/07/2026

A clear sign that we got somewhere with our workshop this week! 😂 #ThePerspectiveStudio #TheZoNE

A piece of cardboard with "Fuck Plato!" written on it.

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 29/06/2026

Things are obvsly not well at Verses AI... 1y between active inference as "the next AI breakthrough" youtu.be/YMX7kzvzfSE and Friston resigning, Verses firing its R&D team (no proper recompensation), and pivoting away from AI research […] [Original post on spore.social]

LinkedIn exchange between Philip Wilson and Ines Hipolito:

Philip: "Last year I was let go from VERSES without a days notice. I am still owed three months salary plus some conference expenses. When I inquired as to why I wasnt getting paid, I was told that the company is under financial stress, that it was "just business" and that It was partially my fault for continuing to work even when the payments were not coming through.

I am now myself under "financial stress" and am not employing freelancers who would unwillingly loan me money so I am writing this to at least try and improve my psychological stress.

I hope that others wont make the same mistakes I and VERSES have done and that this systemic issue will be addressed."

Ines: "Philip is not alone. Most of the R&D team was let go without notice and remains unpaid."

A graph of Verses' stock inexorably crashing to zero.

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 27/06/2026

"This American power grab, dubbed as Energy Dominance, is a sign of sheer desperation & shortsightedness—motivated by selfish interests & pushed by an administration which has completely severed its ties with reality—than a coherent plan. It’s madness…" […] [Original post on spore.social]

"The bad news is: this decline cannot be stopped—only hastened—as it is driven by not political or individual decisions, but the logic of a complex system with all its economic and cultural incentives built on the fastest possible draw-down of non-renewable resources. This civilization is rapidly passing its sell-by date, and faces a long tumultuous decline—and neither trying to build an electrified surveillance utopia, nor reinstating oneself as the petro-king of the world can change that. The good news is, on the other hand, that there is a way to restore what has been broken; if not fully, then at least to a degree where subsequent generations—of not just humans but all living beings—can live a materially poorer but certainly more fulfilling life. In order for us to live, the Megamachine must die."

Helping nature to regenerate is the only way through our predicament, using whatever resources we may still have to repair the damage we have done to Nature and to wean agriculture off of fossil fuels, chemicals and of their many other disastrous practices. This doesn’t meant that we have to rush back to the caves, nor that we must hide in a bunker. Mineral resources will not run out from one year to the next plunging the world into chaos. It means seeking ways to live a more fulfilling way of life, one not centered around chasing profits and limitless growth, but one which is aimed at finding the balance between what’s still possible and what needs to be done to ensure a peaceful transition into a future of less consumption and more connection. Actively trying to hurt others for our way of life to continue just a little longer will certainly not get us there.

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/06/2026

This is what the Strait of Hormuz really looks like right now. Nowhere near back to normal. Not going to be back to normal for a long time.

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/06/2026

An amazing night of insect-watching at the neighboring regeneration-ag farm. They've identified >800 local species already. Caddisflies were swarming. Lots of moths, beetles, midges, grasshoppers, and cicadas showed up. I felt teleported back into my […] [Original post on spore.social]

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 18/05/2026

When you not only loose the war, but you have also lost your mind... And: sorry not sorry but I'm not ALT-texting this for once.

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/04/2026

What Lercher describes below is exactly the same as the process of #RelevanceRealization (originally proposed by John Vervaeke in a human cognitive context) that we describe and naturalize in this paper: www.frontiersin.org/journals/psycho…

Text extract from Lercher 2026:

"Forming an abstraction is not free. It is an active, metabolically expensive physical process of extracting invariants. Before a cognitive agent can form a concept 𝐴 (like “Red”), it has to encounter the territory: multiple experiential instances of redness. From there, the agent actively filters out high-dimensional noise to isolate a stable core. In the vocabulary of manifold learning, the agent projects the high-dimensional manifold of raw experience down onto a lower-dimensional invariant subspace. This subspace physically constitutes the concept 𝐴.

It is tempting to argue that unsupervised clustering algorithms already generate abstractions without needing any prior experience. But this confuses statistical compression with phenomenal constitution. Certainly, an unsupervised algorithm can cluster data points to locate a statistical centroid. That mathematical invariant, however, is merely a compressed address within a latent space.

For that statistical centroid to count as a genuine concept—a semantically grounded category like “Redness”—the agent needs the intrinsic phenomenal state to serve as the common denominator for the grouped instances. If there is no constitutive experience of Red anchoring the reference, the cluster is just a high-density region in a vector space. It does not qualify as a concept held by a subject."

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 05/03/2026

Up to >3,500 words in the last two days! 💪 That's more than 5% of the book already.Only ~95% to go. spore.social/@yoginho/1161271645250…

Excerpt from the book: "I’ll explain all these unfamiliar concepts and models in the next chapter. For now, I just want to point out that notions such as self-determination and autonomy not only can be made logically coherent, but also mathematically precise. Based on this, and the classification of organisms and mechanisms as distinct categories of systems, agency can be defined in a way that is completely naturalistic (expressed in terms of organized causes and effects), yet not mechanistic, because of the self-referential and hierarchically entangled interactions of the physico-chemical flows involved. In technical terms, this blurs the distinction between the rules of change and the state of a system. This distinction can always be made in a model of a mechanism, but fails in living systems. There is a fundamental difference between animate and inanimate dynamics. Obviously, organisms are completely natural (i.e., physical) systems. But they are not machines."

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/02/2026

#TheTroubleWithAgency Started writing on the book. >1,000 words down, only ~59,000 to go...

This is where the trouble with agency starts: when the concept is deployed to explain organismic behavior, development, or evolution, but there is no agreed definition or understanding of the term. This kind of situation, regrettably, is extremely widespread in the emerging literature on the topic.

In some extreme cases, “agency” is used without any serious attempt at defining the term at all. More often, definitions are provided, but they turn out to be problematic, ambiguous, or so malleable that meaning may be arbitrarily reassigned depending on context and the purposes of an author. We could call this latter tactic “Groucho-Marxism.” To paraphrase a famous quote attributed to the comedian: “these are our concepts; but if you don’t like them, we have others.”

This may happen through carelessness or neglect. The habit of using ill-defined terms in equivocal and often confusing ways is certainly not unheard of in biological research. Moreover, the field is rife with dubious metaphors — especially computational ones — that no longer seem to serve any productive purpose. But, sometimes, I wonder if the obfuscation isn’t deliberate. It allows authors to make grandiose claims based on one definition of “agency,” and then fall back on less exciting (but better supported) uses to justify an argumentative retreat when the initial arguments come under scrutiny. This approach is called the “motte-and-bailey.” I will present numerous concrete examples in the chapters that follow.

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/02/2026

So, how's that "I don't mix soccer with politics, that's why I won't boykott the world cup" mantra of yours going? #boycott the #FIFA2026 #WorldCup!

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/02/2026

With the #Snowflake browser extension, you allow people from horrible authoritarian countries to surf the internet freely through the #TorBrowswer. There is no risk or impact on your use of the internet. Have you installed it yet? snowflake.torproject.org

Snowflake browser extension panel saying that "Your Snowflake is ready to help users circumvent censorship." And: "Number of users your Snowflake has helped circumvent censorship in the last 24 hours: 7.

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/02/2026

Winter wonderland outside my office window... let's see how long until it slushifies.

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/02/2026

Bonus surprise: I did not even know in advance that #Dvne were opening for them ... 🤘

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/02/2026

After five weeks of travel: glad to be back home in #Austria (with lots of yummy loot from #Switzerland).

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Yogi Jaeger @yoginho.spore.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/02/2026

I have not had the time yet to write and reflect about my visit in the zone à defendre (#ZAD) in Notre-Dame-des-Landes near Nantes three weeks ago. Will do so soon. The last thing I expected, and the first thing I bumped into, in that autonomous zone is […] [Original post on spore.social]

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