A Proposal Extending the Free Energy Principle

A survey of AI-related dreams found that 93% of individuals who experienced AI-associated nightmares focused on the interaction interface itself rather than on narrative content. The authors propose an Interaction Architecture Internalization Model (IAIM), grounded in the Free Energy Principle, to explain this and related phenomena. The model argues that temporal delay is a key statistical feature driving internalization of interaction architecture, formalized as a Learning Time Delay Dose. When this dose crosses an individual-specific threshold, a phase transition occurs, making the external interaction architecture a stable prior in the agent's generative model. The Formal Priority Law predicts that off-line cognition reproduces formal-structural elements of a repeatedly experienced architecture over narrative-semantic content, supported by six independent sources.

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Abstract

A survey of AI-related dreams (Mayer, 2025) reports that 93% of individuals who experienced AI-associated nightmares fixated on the interaction interface itself rather than on narrative content. We propose an Interaction Architecture Internalization Model (IAIM) to account for this finding and for a broader class of phenomena spanning language acquisition, cultural meme propagation, and personality formation. The model is grounded in, and extends, the Free Energy Principle (FEP; Friston et al., 2006): while the FEP's perceptual-learning pathway (optimisation of slow synaptic parameters μₕ) already encodes structural regularities of the environment, we argue that temporal delay is the specific, hitherto under-exploited statistical feature that drives internalisation of interaction architecture. We formalise this via the Learning Time Delay Dose D = Σᵢ[wᵢ(Δtᵢ - Δt꜀)] and show that once D crosses an individual-specific critical threshold Θ꜀, a precision-weighted phase transition occurs in which the external interaction architecture becomes a stable prior in the agent's generative model. A key empirical implication—the Formal Priority Law (FPL)—is that off-line cognition reproduces the formal-structural elements of a repeatedly experienced architecture preferentially over its narrative-semantic content. This prediction is now supported by six independent sources, including the first polysomnographically verified, real-time-signalled lucid-dreaming study of a VR interaction architecture (Morris et al., 2025). The proposal draws on Piaget's constructivist internalisation, Chomsky's architectural nativism, Wiener's cybernetics, and Landau-Hale phase-transition mathematics, all interpreted within the FEP variational framework.