Entropy 2017, 19, 169; doi:10.3390/e19040169 www.mdpi.com/journal/entropy Article Where There is Life There is Mind: In Support of a Strong Life-Mind Continuity Thesis Michael D. Kirchhoff 1, * and Tom Froese 2 1 Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong, Wollongong 2500, Australia 2 Department of Computer Science, Research Institute for Applied Mathematics and Systems, National Autonomous University of Mexico, 04510 Mexico City, Mexico; t.froese@gmail.com * Correspondence: kirchhof@uow.edu.au; Tel.: +61-4221-5742 Academic Editors: Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic and Robert Lowe Received: 22 February 2017; Accepted: 11 April 2017; Published: 14 April 2017 Abstract: This paper considers questions about continuity and discontinuity between life and mind. It begins by examining such questions from the perspective of the free energy principle (FEP). The FEP is becoming increasingly influential in neuroscience and cognitive science. It says that organisms act to maintain themselves in their expected biological and cognitive states, and that they can do so only by minimizing their free energy given that the long-term average of free energy is entropy. The paper then argues that there is no singular interpretation of the FEP for thinking about the relation between life and mind. Some FEP formulations express what we call an independence view of life and mind. One independence view is a cognitivist view of the FEP. It turns on information processing with semantic content, thus restricting the range of systems capable of exhibiting mentality. Other independence views exemplify what we call an overly generous non- cognitivist view of the FEP, and these appear to go in the opposite direction. That is, they imply that mentality is nearly everywhere. The paper proceeds to argue that non-cognitivist FEP, and its implications for thinking about the relation between life and mind, can be usefully constrained by key ideas in recent enactive approaches to cognitive science. We conclude that the most compelling account of the relationship between life and mind treats them as strongly continuous, and that this continuity is based on particular concepts of life (autopoiesis and adaptivity) and mind (basic and non-semantic). Keywords: life-mind continuity; free energy principle; radical enactivism; autopoietic enactivism 1. Introduction How are life and mind, respectively, characterized, and how are their relations to one another best conceived? In this paper, we start by examining this question from the perspective of the free energy principle (FEP). The FEP is argued to deliver an overarching rationale for brain functioning; to give a unified theory of perception, cognition, and action (and all other psychological capacities); and to suggest a framework by which to understand the relation between life and mind [1–3]. It states that organisms act to maintain themselves in their expected biological and cognitive states, and that they can do so only by minimizing their free energy given that the long-term average of free energy is entropy [4,5] (By “state” we mean a state in a system’s state space. One of the states that a system expects to find itself in is “to be alive”. Thus, a system will seek to reduce the probability of finding itself in a non-anticipated state relative to its generative model. In other words, by minimizing free energy, on average and over time, the system will self-organize the parameters of its internal states