Optimal grip, affective tension and skilled intentionality

Sousa and colleagues (2013, Early bioenergetic evolution) used the word in a chemical sense. They argued that the chemical disequilibrium at off-ridge hydrothermal vents on the early Earth was probably much greater than today, because the atmosphere held far more CO2, perhaps up to 1000 times more.¹ When H2 from serpentinizing systems met marine CO2, there was disequilibrium and potential for organic synthesis.¹ They added that the free energy a reaction actually provides depends on the level of disequilibrium between rates of formation and breakdown.² Wallace (2013) used a different term, linkage disequilibrium, for chromosomal regions linked with loci that alter the risk of metabolic disease.³

Bruineberg, Kiverstein and Rietveld (2018) wrote that in many kinds of animals, disequilibria might be experienced as an affective tension or something-to-be-improved.⁴ The animal is drawn to act on the affordances of its situation to reduce this tension, and so improves its grip on its environment.⁵ They call this the tendency towards an optimal grip and take it to be a basic concern of every living animal.⁵ They state that this concern structures the animal's lived perspective, so that certain affordances stand out as relevant.⁵ They also read the minimizing of surprisal as an animal reducing its disattunement with the environment.⁵

Bruineberg and colleagues said that the tendency towards an optimal grip puts the Bayesian notions of precision and uncertainty in a different perspective.⁶ In the traditional account, uncertainty modulates how far sensory prediction-errors shift the internal hypothesis.⁶ Allen and Friston (2018) discussed the Markov blanket and argued that it supports neither a radically sceptical nor a radically realist position. A living system can only infer the causes of sensory impressions.⁷ They added that the blanket does not rule out direct perception in the sense of an optimal grip on affordances, citing Bruineberg and Rietveld (2014).⁷

Ramstead, Constant, Badcock and Friston (2019) invoked the skilled intentionality framework (SIF). They described it as an account of the origin of intentionality, or directed purposiveness, in cognitive systems.⁸ In their reading, the SIF recasts cognition as the engagement by organisms of the affordances that make up their local niche.⁸ It gives a real-time dynamics for engaging the resources the niche affords and enables the stabilisation of that niche.⁸ They used it to propose how higher-order Markov blankets can be drawn, by way of affordances.⁸