Ah, but Nature's elegant design for an embodied creature is precisely a bounded-Bayesian reasoner! You just minimize the free energy of the environment.

Yikes! No. :-)

That paper couldn't be a more perfect example of what I meant when I said

that seems to force the real world to conform to the idealized world of a branch of mathematics

In other words, the paper talks about a theoretical entity which is a descriptive model (not a functional model) of one aspect of human decision making behavior. That means you cannot jump to the conclusion that this is "nature's design for an embodide creature".

About your second question. I can only give you an overview, but the essential ingredient is that to go beyond the standard neural nets you need to consider neuron-like objects that are actually free to be created and destroyed like processes on a network, and which interact with one another using more elaborate, generalized versions of the rules that govern simple nets.

From there it is easy to get to unsupervised concept building because the spontaneous activity of these atoms (my preferred term) involves searching for minimum-energy* configurations that describe the world.

• There is actually more than one type of 'energy' being simultaneously minimized in the systems I work on.

You can read a few more hints of this stuff in my 2010 paper with Trevor Harley (which is actually on a different topic, but I threw in a sketch of the cognitive system for purposes of illustrating my point in that paper).

Reference: Loosemore, R.P.W. & Harley, T.A. (2010). Brains and Minds: On the Usefulness of Localisation Data to Cognitive Psychology. In M. Bunzl & S.J. Hanson (Eds.), Foundational Issues of Neuroimaging. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. http://richardloosemore.com/docs/2010a_BrainImaging_rpwl_tah.pdf