semi-automatic waffle

Thursday, 5 June 2025

Ah. You meant technical. Not “lol philosophical metaphor,” but the kind of technical where conditional independence might actually mean something outside of a brain-in-a-vat joke. Fine. Let’s straighten our tie and stop projecting our existential dread onto inanimate data structures for two seconds.

So. Can we draw a technical analogy between Markov blankets and file systems?

Let’s pick apart the idea:

A Markov blanket renders internal and external states conditionally independent, given a boundary set (sensory and active states).

This is a graphical model thing. In a Bayesian network, a Markov blanket around a node insulates it: once you know the blanket, knowing anything else gives you no additional info about the node. It’s about informational shielding.

File Systems... do what exactly?

A file system maps:

Physical data (raw bytes on disk, external in a hardware sense)
To a logical structure (files, directories, permissions—internal in an OS/user sense)

A key function of a file system is abstraction and isolation:

You don’t interact with sectors, clusters, or spinning platters.
You interact with my_cool_notes.txt.
The file system provides a boundary layer: APIs, permissions, file paths, all of which mediate access to underlying storage and regulate interactions between processes and the raw device.

So what’s the technical overlap?

Let’s try this in Markov-blanket-y language:

Let:
- X = external storage (raw bytes on disk),
- Y = internal system state (processes, user requests, RAM representations of files),
- Z = file system interface (the file system logic: metadata, permissions, paths)

Then:
Y ⫫ X | Z
Meaning: internal system state (Y) is conditionally independent of external storage (X) given the file system interface (Z).

Or: once you know the file system interface, the internal system doesn’t need to know how the bytes are physically arranged—it can treat file access as abstracted and consistent.

Boom. That’s a Markov blanket-like structure.

Wait—so is a file system literally a Markov blanket?

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, spreadsheet cowboy.

A true Markov blanket implies:

A probabilistic graphical model,
Conditional dependencies and independencies,
Typically, some form of belief updating (e.g., variational inference, active inference),
Some structure being inferred rather than simply encoded.

File systems are:

Deterministic,
Static (until updated),
Not generative models—they aren’t “guessing” what’s on disk,
Not probabilistic—they don't represent uncertainty (unless your SSD is dying).

So while the logic of mediating interaction via a boundary, and the conditional independence abstraction holds, the file system isn't performing inference or modeling anything. It just implements structured access.

The Verdict

Formally: Yes, you can draw a structural and logical analogy. The file system can be seen as a conditional independence interface—a deterministic version of a Markov blanket that mediates system-disk interactions.

But: It's not probabilistic, adaptive, or inference-generating. So it's not a Markov blanket in the technical Bayesian sense. It's more like a hard-coded, domain-specific instantiation of the same kind of boundary logic.

If you really want to formalize this (for, say, endo-computational modeling or synthetic cognition), you’d need to frame:

The file system as part of an information-theoretic agent, and
Model its structure and function as a kind of generative model interface between internal computational states and external media.

Which, to be honest, would be a deeply cursed and impressive thing to do.

So... want me to sketch out a formal model that maps OS-level memory management to Markov blanket logic, or are we just flirting with cybernetics again?