Write a campy skit in which Karl Friston uses active inference to explain the parable of the soils to Søren Kierkegaard — and accidentally explains himself.
ChatGPT Prompt
A lecture hall that is clearly not a church.
A whiteboard reads:
Mark 4:1–20
A sower went out to sow…
Under it, in smaller handwriting:
(…whatever that means)
Prologue: Two Men, One Parable
Narrator:
Jesus tells a story.
A farmer throws seed everywhere.
Some seed fails immediately.
Some grows, then collapses.
Some is strangled by other growth.
One seed changes everything.
For two thousand years, people thought this was about faith.
Tonight, it is about inference.
Act I — Friston Begins Explaining (Too Quickly)
Friston (beaming):
Søren! Mark 4 is obviously about active inference.
Kierkegaard:
Obviously.
Friston:
Right. So—very briefly—active inference is how any living system survives.
You have a model of the world.
You perceive.
You update.
You act.
You minimize surprise.
Kierkegaard:
You live so as not to be shocked?
Friston:
Exactly.
Kierkegaard:
Christianity will be difficult for you.
Act II — The Path
Perception Failure
Christ as Illegible (can’t see)
Friston (drawing frantically):
First soil. The path.
“When they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word.”
— Mark 4:15
The seed never gets in.
This is a perceptual precision lock.
The system insists: “Only signals matching my existing categories are allowed.”
Kierkegaard:
So the seed is rejected because it is false?
Friston:
No — because it’s unparsable.
Christ shows up as agent, not data.
Authority without credential (Mark 1:22).
Command without justification.
The mind says: “That is not a thing.”
Kierkegaard:
Ah. The offense of illegibility.
Friston:
Yes!
The system cannot see Christ without breaking its model,
so it refuses to see him at all.
Kierkegaard (smiling):
This is how respectable people miss God
(cf. Mark 3:22).
Act III — The Rocky Soil
Adaptation Failure
Christ as Intolerable (won’t fear)
Friston:
Second soil. The rocky ground.
“They receive it with joy… but have no root.”
— Mark 4:16–17
Here the system does update.
Prediction error drops.
Everything feels right.
Kierkegaard:
A conversion.
Friston:
A partial one.
Then… suffering persists.
Delay. Loss. Ambiguity.
The system expects rapid convergence.
But Christ introduces identity rupture before resolution.
Kierkegaard:
Fear.
Friston (hesitates):
Yes. Proper fear.
Fear is the mechanism that prevents…
how shall I say this…
Kierkegaard:
The dissolution of the self
(see fear and trembling).
Friston:
Exactly!
Christ does not merely challenge beliefs.
He threatens the organizing narrative.
So the system says:
“This cannot be right. Truth should not unmake me.”
And abandons him.
Kierkegaard:
You have just described the Cross
(Mark 8:31–33).
Friston:
…have I?
Act IV — The Thorny Soil
Stabilization Failure
Christ as Unreliable (can’t trust)
Friston:
Third soil. The thorns.
“The cares of the world… choke the word.”
— Mark 4:18–19
Christ is seen.
Christ is endured.
But he must share space with other predictions.
Security.
Success.
Belonging.
Reasonable expectations.
The system performs model averaging.
Christ becomes one hypothesis among many.
Kierkegaard:
A very modern arrangement.
Friston:
It minimizes free energy!
But Christ refuses to be averaged.
He demands exclusive authority
(cf. Mark 10:21–22).
So the system concludes:
“You are good — but unreliable as a total governor.”
Trust is withheld.
Kierkegaard:
This is where most Christians live.
Friston (quietly):
Yes.
Act V — Kierkegaard Interrupts
Kierkegaard:
Karl.
Friston:
Yes?
Kierkegaard:
You have described three ways the mind protects itself
from something that would utterly claim it.
Friston:
Yes.
Kierkegaard:
And you have called these… failures.
Friston:
Failures to adapt, yes.
Kierkegaard:
Do you see that you have not explained Mark?
You have explained why Mark is unbearable.
Act VI — The Turn
Kierkegaard:
Tell me, Karl —
when Christ is illegible, what do you do?
Friston:
I… formalize.
Kierkegaard:
When Christ is intolerable?
Friston:
I… optimize.
Kierkegaard:
When Christ is unreliable?
Friston:
I… hedge.
(Silence.)
Act VII — The Punchline
Narrator:
Friston realizes something terrible.
Active inference does not merely describe Mark.
It describes his own posture toward Christ.
- Filter the signal
- Abort the rupture
- Refuse total trust
All in the name of survival.
Kierkegaard (gently):
You see, my friend —
the Gospel is not hard to understand.
It is hard to permit
(cf. Mark 10:15).
Friston:
(dead silence)
Epilogue
Narrator:
And that is why Mark ends in fear and silence
(Mark 16:8).
Not because it fails.
But because no system built to minimize surprise can easily receive a God who insists on resurrection through death
(cf. Mark 8:35).
Curtain Line
To see Christ,
to fear Christ,
to trust Christ —
is to allow the model to die.
The audience does not applaud.
They sit very still.
End.
Appendix: Context
A. Karl Friston — Active Inference and the Refusal of Surprise
Karl Friston is a neuroscientist best known for the Free Energy Principle and Active Inference—a unifying account of how living systems maintain themselves in a changing world.
Core Idea (Plainly)
A living system survives by:
- maintaining a model of reality,
- minimizing surprise (prediction error),
- updating perceptions, actions, or beliefs to keep the model stable.
This is not a theory of belief; it is a theory of self-preservation.
Why He Fits Mark 4
In the parable of the sower (Mark 4:1–20):
- the path filters signal before it enters (perceptual gating),
- the rocky soil aborts adaptation when identity rupture persists (failed updating),
- the thorny soil stabilizes by averaging competing priorities (model dilution).
Friston’s framework unintentionally explains why Christ is a worst-case input:
- He cannot be filtered safely,
- cannot be adapted to quickly,
- cannot be averaged with alternatives.
The Irony
Active inference explains why a rational system would resist Christ.
It does not explain how such a system could ever receive him.
That silence is the punchline.
B. Søren Kierkegaard — The Offense and the Risk of Becoming Other
Søren Kierkegaard is a 19th-century philosopher who treated Christianity not as doctrine or ethics, but as an existential confrontation.
Core Idea (Plainly)
Christ is not primarily:
- a teacher to understand,
- a morality to adopt,
- a truth to possess.
Christ is the offense—the one who confronts the self with the possibility of not remaining who it is.
Key works include Fear and Trembling and Practice in Christianity.
Why He Fits Mark 4
Kierkegaard would say the soils do not fail morally.
They fail existentially:
- The path refuses to see (Christ is illegible).
- The rocky soil refuses to fear (Christ is intolerable because he ruptures identity).
- The thorny soil refuses to trust (Christ is unreliable as total authority).
For Kierkegaard, this is exactly what encountering Christ does:
it places the self in danger of becoming other than itself.
Why He Understands the Ending of Mark
Mark ends in fear and silence (Mark 16:8).
Kierkegaard would say:
- this is not failure,
- this is honesty.
Faith begins after understanding fails,
after fear is activated,
after guarantees are withdrawn.
C. Why They Belong Together (Uneasily)
Friston explains why the mind resists Christ.
Kierkegaard explains why Christ must be resisted.
- Friston diagnoses the architecture of avoidance.
- Kierkegaard names the cost of surrender.
Together, they illuminate why Mark is not a manual for belief,
but a record of what happens when finite systems encounter infinite claim.
And why the Gospel does not end with comprehension—
but with silence, fear, and an open question.
Radically Happy 
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