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Is our intelligence rooted in how living organisms are organized?

Kathryn Nave explains how a concept called constraint closure may be fundamental to understanding brains, minds and cognition.

By Paul Middlebrooks
15 July 2026 | 105 min watch

Kathryn Nave is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and author of the bookA Drive to Survive: The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life.” Nave argues that the free energy principle falls short as a unifying framework for living systems and cognition, and instead finds promise in recent concepts in philosophy and theoretical biology—how living systems must be organized in order to survive.

Read the transcript.

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