Active Inference: Courtship vs Survival
Courting to survive, and to learn: an active-inference reading of the courtship–survival trade-off A classic life-history problem asks how an organism with a finite life should divide effort between surviving and reproducing. My earlier mathematical model of courtship versus survival [1] solved a two-year version by maximizing lifetime fitness over mating effort m , giving the optimal effort. So the key idea is invest hard now when survival is poor or mates are abundant now; conserve when the future is bright. Natural selection shapes organisms whose internal models encode adaptive prior preferences. Expected free energy minimization therefore provides a mechanistic process theory for achieving fitness rather than replacing evolutionary theory. Hence, I recast the same problem as active inference i.e. action selection by minimization of expected free energy (EFE) and show two things. First, the classic optimum is recovered almost exactly as the pragmatic (preference-satisfying) l...