Integrating Cybernetic Big Five Theory with the free energy principle: A new strategy for modeling personalities as complex systems

Cybernetics is the study of goal-directed systems that self-regulate via feedback, a category that includes human beings. Cybernetic Big Five Theory (CB5T) attempts to explain personality in cybernetic terms, conceptualizing personality traits as manifestations of variation in parameters of the neural mechanisms that evolved to facilitate cybernetic control. The Free Energy Principle and Active Inference framework (FEP-AI) is an overarching approach for understanding how it is that complex systems manage to persist in a world governed by the second law of thermodynamics-the inevitable tendency toward entropy. Although these two cybernetic theories were developed independently, they overlap in their theoretical foundations and implications and are complementary in their approaches to understanding persons. FEP-AI contributes a potentially valuable formal modeling framework for CB5T, while CB5T provides detail about the science and structure of personality. In this chapter, we explore how CB5T and FEP-AI may begin to be integrated into a unified approach to modeling persons.