In this paper, by means of a novel use of insights from the literature on scientific modelling, I will argue in favour of an instrumentalist approach to the models that are crucially involved in the study of adaptive systems within the Free-Energy Principle (FEP) framework. I will begin (§2) by offering a general, informal characterisation of FEP. Then (§3), I will argue that the models involved in FEP-theorising are plausibly intended to be isomorphic to their targets. This will allow (§4) (...) to turn the criticisms moved against isomorphism-based accounts of representation towards the FEP modelling practice. Since failure to establish an isomorphism between model and target would result in the former’s failure to represent the latter, and given that it is highly unlikely that FEP-models are ever isomorphic to their targets, maintaining that FEP-models represent their targets as they are, in a realist sense, is unwarranted. Finally (§5), I will consider what implications my argument in favour of an instrumentalist reading of FEP-models has for attempts at making use of the FEP to elaborate an account of what cognition exactly is. My conclusion is that we should not dismiss FEP-based accounts of cognition, as they would still be informative and would further our understanding of the nature of cognition. Nonetheless, the prospects of settling the philosophical debates that sparked the interest in having a “mark of the cognitive” are not good. (shrink)

This book aims to show that recent developments in neuroscience permit a defense of free will. Through language, human beings can escape strict biological determinism.

This chapter argues that the only tenable unconscious inferences theories of cognitive achievement are ones that employ a theory internal technical notion of representation, but that once we give cash-value definitions of the relevant notions of representation and inference, there is little left of the ordinary notion of representation. We suggest that the real value of talk of unconscious inferences lies in (a) their heuristic utility in helping us to make fruitful predictions, such as about illusions, and (b) their providing (...) a high-level description of the functional organization of subpersonal faculties that makes clear how they equip an agent to navigate its environment and pursue its goals. (shrink)

I discuss Clark’s predictive processing/extended mind hybrid, diagnosing a problem: Clark’s hybrid suggests that, when we use them, we pay attention to mind-extending external resources. This clashes with a commonly accepted necessary condition of cognitive extension; namely, that mind-extending resources must be phenomenally transparent when used. I then propose a solution to this problem claiming that the phenomenal transparency condition should be rejected. To do so, I put forth a parity argument to the effect that phenomenal transparency cannot be a (...) necessary condition on cognitive extension: roughly, since internal cognitive resources can fail to be transparent when used, by parity, external resources can fail to be phenomenally transparent too. Further, I argue that phenomenal transparency is not even a reliable indicator of cognitive extension; hence its absence should not be considered a problem for Clark’s extended mind-predictive processing hybrid. Lastly, I consider and allay a number of worries my proposal might raise, and conclude the paper. (shrink)

The predictive processing account of action, cognition, and perception is one of the most influential approaches to unifying research in cognitive science. However, its promises of grand unification will remain unfulfilled unless the account becomes theoretically robust. In this paper, we focus on empirical commitments of PP, since they are necessary both for its theoretical status to be established and for explanations of individual phenomena to be falsifiable. First, we argue that PP is a varied research tradition, which may employ (...) various kinds of scientific representations, differing in the scope of empirical commitments they entail. Two major perspectives on PP qua cognitive theory may then be distinguished: generalized vs. hierarchical. The first one fails to provide empirical detail, and the latter constrains possible physical implementations. However, we show that even hierarchical PP is insufficiently restrictive to disallow incorrect models and may be adjusted to explain any neurocognitive phenomenon–including non-existent or impossible ones–through flexible adjustments. This renders PP a universal modeling tool with an unrestricted number of degrees of freedom. Therefore, in contrast with declarations of its proponents, it should not be understood as a unifying theoretical perspective, but as a computational framework, possibly informing further theory development in cognitive science. (shrink)

This article compares situated cognition to contemporary Neo-Aristotelian approaches to the mind. The article distinguishes two components in this paradigm: an Aristotelian essentialism which is alien to situated cognition and a Wittgensteinian “capacity approach” to the mind which is not just congenial to it but provides important conceptual and argumentative resources in defending social cognition against orthodox cognitive science. It focuses on a central tenet of that orthodoxy. According to what I call “encephalocentrism,” cognition is primarily or even exclusively a (...) computational process occurring inside the brain. Neo-Aristotelians accuse this claim of committing a “homuncular” or “mereological fallacy”. The article explains why the label “fallacy” is misleading, reconstructs the argument to the effect that encephalocentric applications of psychological predicates to the brain and its parts amount to a category mistake, and defends this argument against objections by Dennett, Searle, and Figdor. At the same time it criticizes the Neo-Aristotelian denial that the brain is the organ of cognition. It ends by suggesting ways in which the capacity approach and situated cognition might be combined to provide a realistic and ecologically sound picture of cognition as a suite of powers that flesh-and-blood animals exercise within their physical and social environments. (shrink)

The prediction error minimization framework denotes a family of views that aim at providing a unified theory of perception, cognition, and action. In this paper, I discuss some of the theoretical limitations of PEM. It appears that PEM cannot provide a satisfactory explanation of motivated reasoning, as instantiated in phenomena such as self-deception, because its cognitive ontology does not have a separate category for motivational states such as desires. However, it might be thought that this objection confuses levels of explanation. (...) Self-deception is a personal level phenomenon, while PEM offers subpersonal explanations of psychological abilities. Thus, the paper examines how subpersonal explanations couched in the PEM framework can be thought of as related to personal level explanations underlying self-deception. In this regard, three views on the relation between personal and subpersonal explanations are investigated: the autonomist, the functionalist, and the co-evolutionary perspective. I argue that, depending on which view of the relation between the personal and subpersonal is adopted, the PEM paradigm faces a dilemma: either its explanatory ambitions should be reduced to the subpersonal domain, or it cannot provide a satisfactory account of motivated reasoning as instantiated in self-deception. (shrink)

Comparatively easy questions we might ask about creativity are distinguished from the hard question of explaining transformative creativity. Many have focused on the easy questions, offering no reason to think that the imagining relied upon in creative cognition cannot be reduced to more basic folk psychological states. The relevance of associative thought processes to songwriting is then explored as a means for understanding the nature of transformative creativity. Productive artificial neural networks—known as generative antagonistic networks (GANs)—are a recent example of (...) how a system’s ability to generate novel products can both be finely tuned by prior experience and grounded in strategies that cannot be articulated by the system itself. Further, the kinds of processes exploited by GANs need not be seen as incorporating something akin to sui generis imaginative states. The chapter concludes with reflection on the added relevance of personal character to explanations of creativity. [This is Chapter 12 of the book Explaining Imagination.]. (shrink)

Currie’s (2010) argument that “i-desires” must be posited to explain our responses to fiction is critically discussed. It is argued that beliefs and desires featuring ‘in the fiction’ operators—and not sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" or "i-desires")—are the crucial states involved in generating fiction-directed affect. A defense of the “Operator Claim” is mounted, according to which ‘in the fiction’ operators would be also be required within fiction-directed sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" and "i-desires"), were there such. Once we appreciate that (...) even fiction-directed sui generis imaginings would need to incorporate ‘in the fiction’ operators, the main appeal of the idea that sui generis imaginings (or "i-beliefs" or "i-desires") are at work in fiction-appreciation dissipates. [This is Chapter 10 of Explaining Imagination (OUP, 2020)]. (shrink)

Advancing a radically enactive account of cognition, we provide arguments in favour of the possibility that cultural factors permeate rather than penetrate cognition, such that cognition extensively and transactionally incorporates cultural factors rather than there being any question of cultural factors having to break into the restricted confines of cognition. The paper reviews the limitations of two classical cognitivist, modularist accounts of cognition and a revisionary, new order variant of cognitivism – a Predictive Processing account of Cognition, or PPC. It (...) argues that the cognitivist interpretation of PPC is conservatively and problematically attached to the idea of inner models and stored knowledge. In abandoning that way of understanding PPC, it offers a radically enactive alternative account of how cultural factors matter to cognition – one that abandons all vestiges of the idea that cultural factors might contentfully communicate with basic forms of cognition. In place of that idea, the possibility that culture permeates cognition is promoted. (shrink)

Contemporary accounts on fictional emotions, i.e., emotions experienced towards objects we know to be fictional, are mainly concerned with explaining their rationality or lack thereof. In this context dominated by an interest in the role of belief, questions regarding their phenomenal quality have received far less attention: it is often assumed that they feel “similar” to emotions that target real objects. Against this background, this paper focuses on the possible specificities of fictional emotions’ qualitative feel. It starts by presenting what (...) I call the “phenomenological question” about the qualitative feel of fictional emotions (section 1) and by showing that this is irreducible to questions about their cognitive, intentional, evaluative, and embodied nature (section 2). Drawing on some insights from early phenomenologists, the next two sections elaborate criteria to distinguish between real and sham emotions on the one side (section 3) and between genuine and non-genuine emotions on the other (section 4). Finally, I apply this orthogonal distinction to the particular case of fictional emotions (section 5). The paper argues that fictional emotions are neither sham emotions nor quasi-emotions, but full-fledged emotional experiences, despite them displaying the distinctive phenomenology of emotions experienced as non-genuine. In the particular case of fictional emotions, they are non-genuine because our psychology is in fact in a state dominated by aesthetic enjoyment. (shrink)

The mainstream view in cognitive science is that computation lies at the basis of and explains cognition. Our analysis reveals that there is no compelling evidence or argument for thinking that brains compute. It makes the case for inverting the explanatory order proposed by the computational basis of cognition thesis. We give reasons to reverse the polarity of standard thinking on this topic, and ask how it is possible that computation, natural and artificial, might be based on cognition and not (...) the other way around. (shrink)

Whilst much has been said about the implications of predictive processing for our scientific understanding of cognition, there has been comparatively little discussion of how this new paradigm fits with our everyday understanding of the mind, i.e. folk psychology. This paper aims to assess the relationship between folk psychology and predictive processing, which will first require making a distinction between two ways of understanding folk psychology: as propositional attitude psychology and as a broader folk psychological discourse. It will be argued (...) that folk psychology in this broader sense is compatible with predictive processing, despite the fact that there is an apparent incompatibility between predictive processing and a literalist interpretation of propositional attitude psychology. The distinction between these two kinds of folk psychology allows us to accept that our scientific usage of folk concepts requires revision, whilst rejecting the suggestion that we should eliminate folk psychology entirely. (shrink)

An emerging consensus in cognitive science views the biological brain as a hierarchically-organized predictive processing system that relies on generative models to predict the structure of sensory information. Such a view resonates with a body of work in machine learning that has explored the problem-solving capabilities of hierarchically-organized, multi-layer (i.e., deep) neural networks, many of which acquire and deploy generative models of their training data. The present chapter explores the extent to which the ostensible convergence on a common neurocomputational architecture (...) (centred on predictive processing schemes, hierarchical organization, and generative models) might provide inroads into the problem of digital immortality. In contrast to approaches that seek to recapitulate the connectomic microstructure of the human brain, the present chapter advocates an approach that is rooted in the use of machine learning algorithms. The claim is that a future form of deep learning system could be used to acquire generative models of a given individual or (alternatively) the sensory data that is processed by the brain of a given individual during the course of their biological life. The differences between these two forms of digital immortality are explored, as are some of the options for digital resurrection. (shrink)

Clark and Chalmers propose that the mind extends further than skin and skull. If they are right, then we should expect this to have some effect on our way of knowing our own mental states. If the content of my notebook can be part of my belief system, then looking at the notebook seems to be a way to get to know my own beliefs. However, it is at least not obvious whether self-ascribing a belief by looking at my notebook (...) is a case of introspection the same way that knowing my non-extended beliefs is. Traditionally this sort of introspection is thought to be privileged and special in ways that the extended introspection case seems not to be. There is nothing privileged about looking at my notebook. Anyone could do it. The aim of the paper is to find out how to understand extended introspection and whether there is something privileged and special about knowing one’s own extended beliefs. Moreover, the notebook case has close analogs using twenty-first century technology. It seems possible to know our beliefs that are extended to smartphones, wearable technology or a cloud-based data store. First, I present the case of extended introspection. I then discuss whether it should be understood as ordinary introspection or as mind-reading. Both seem to be bad fits, which finally prompts an original account for extended introspection based on epistemic rules. (shrink)

In a recently published paper, we argued that theories of cultural evolution can gain explanatory power by being more pluralistic. In his reply to it, Dennett agreed that more pluralism is needed. Our paper’s main point was to urge cultural evolutionists to get their hands dirty by describing the fine details of cultural products and by striving to offer detailed and, when explanatory, varied algorithms or mechanisms to account for them. While Dennett’s latest work on cultural evolution does marvelously well (...) on the first point, it has only whet our appetite on the second. Accordingly, the present paper aims to show what an evolutionary explanation of culture that takes the variety of cultural evolution mechanisms seriously would look like. We will focus on the cultural evolution of social epistemic mechanisms and we will propose that Darwinian algorithms should be complemented with a cultural analogue of the error reduction mechanism proposed to account for human cognition, with a particular emphasis on the necessity to build independencies between different sub-systems in charge of tracking states of the world. To illustrate our point, we will present how the evolution of the legal system as epistemic systems can be understood as a process of building increasingly better independencies and how various criticisms of the actual legal system calls for building even more of them. (shrink)

Emotions have long been of interest to philosophers and have deep historical roots going back to the Ancients. They have also become one of the most exciting areas of current research in philosophy, the cognitive sciences, and beyond. -/- This book explains the philosophy of the emotions, structuring the investigation around seven fundamental questions: What are emotions? Are emotions natural kinds? Do animals have emotions? Are emotions epistemically valuable? Are emotions the foundation for value and morality? Are emotions the basis (...) for responsibility? Do emotions make us better people? -/- In the course of exploring these questions, the book also discusses cutting-edge empirical research on emotion, feminist approaches to emotions and their value, and methodological questions on how to theorize about the emotions. The book also contains in-depth discussions of specific emotions like compassion, disgust, anxiety, and curiosity. It also highlights emerging trends in emotion research. (shrink)

​Imagination will remain a mystery—we will not be able to explain imagination—until we can break it into parts we already understand. Explaining Imagination is a guidebook for doing just that, where the parts are other ordinary mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions. In different combinations and contexts, these states constitute cases of imagining. This reductive approach to imagination is at direct odds with the current orthodoxy, according to which imagination is a sui generis mental state or process—one with (...) its own inscrutable principles of operation. Explaining Imagination upends that view, showing how, on closer inspection, the imaginings at work in hypothetical reasoning, pretense, the enjoyment of fiction, and creativity are reducible to other familiar mental states—judgments, beliefs, desires, and decisions among them. Crisscrossing contemporary philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and aesthetics, Explaining Imagination argues that a clearer understanding of imagination is already well within reach. (shrink)

Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel. Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of the brain were (...) hard at work. If we want to properly understand the evolution of the mind, we must explore this more primal capability that we share with other animals: the power to feel. Emotions saturate every thought and perception with the weight of feelings. The Emotional Mind reveals that many of the distinctive behaviors and social structures of our species are best discerned through the lens of emotions. Even the roots of so much that makes us uniquely human—art, mythology, religion—can be traced to feelings of caring, longing, fear, loneliness, awe, rage, lust, playfulness, and more. From prehistoric cave art to the songs of Hank Williams, Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel explore how the evolution of the emotional mind stimulated our species’ cultural expression in all its rich variety. Bringing together insights and data from philosophy, biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology, The Emotional Mind offers a new paradigm for understanding what it is that makes us so unique. (shrink)

This book reports on the results of the third edition of the premier conference in the field of philosophy of artificial intelligence, PT-AI 2017, held on November 4 - 5, 2017 at the University of Leeds, UK. It covers: advanced knowledge on key AI concepts, including complexity, computation, creativity, embodiment, representation and superintelligence; cutting-edge ethical issues, such as the AI impact on human dignity and society, responsibilities and rights of machines, as well as AI threats to humanity and AI safety; (...) and cutting-edge developments in techniques to achieve AI, including machine learning, neural networks, dynamical systems. The book also discusses important applications of AI, including big data analytics, expert systems, cognitive architectures, and robotics. It offers a timely, yet very comprehensive snapshot of what is going on in the field of AI, especially at the interfaces between philosophy, cognitive science, ethics and computing. (shrink)

A prominent view holds that perception and memory are distinguished at least partly by their temporal orientation: Perception functions to represent the present, while memory functions to represent the past. Call this view perceptual presentism. This chapter critically examines perceptual presentism in light of contemporary perception science. I adduce evidence for three forms of perceptual sensitivity to the past: (i) shaping perception by past stimulus exposure, (ii) recruitment of mnemonic representations in perceptual processing, and (iii) perceptual representation of present objects (...) as possessing past properties. I argue that forms (i) and (ii) are consistent with perceptual presentism, while form (iii) poses a genuine threat to the view. While the empirical case for form (iii) remains inconclusive, I suggest that the most serious challenges to perceptual presentism derive from representations that integrate mnemonic and present-tensed elements in the performance of canonical perceptual functions, such as perceiving object continuity over time. (shrink)

Recently, it has been objected that naïve realism is inconsistent with an empirically well-supported claim that mental states of the same fundamental kind as ordinary conscious seeing can occur unconsciously (SFK). The main aim of this paper is to establish the following conditional claim: if SFK turns out to be true, the naïve realist can and should accommodate it into her theory. Regarding the antecedent of this conditional, I suggest that empirical evidence renders SFK plausible but not obvious. For it (...) is possible that what is currently advocated as unconscious perception of the stimulus is in fact momentaneous perceptual awareness (or residual perceptual awareness) of the stimulus making the subject prone to judge in some way rather than another, or to act in some way rather than another. As to the apodosis, I show that neither the core of naïve realism nor any of its main motivations is undermined if SFK is assumed. On the contrary, certain incentives for endorsing naïve realism become more tempting on this assumption. Since the main motivations for naïve realism retain force under SFK, intentionalism is neither compulsory nor the best available explanation of unconscious perception. (shrink)

Cultural attachment (CA) refers to processes that allow culture and its symbols to provide psychological security when facing threat. Epistemologically, although we currently have an adequate predictivist model of CA, it is necessary to prepare for a mechanistic approach that will not only predict, but also explain CA phenomena. Towards that direction, we first examine the concepts and mechanisms that are the building blocks of both prototypical maternal attachment and CA. Based on existing robust neuroscience models we associate these concepts (...) and mechanisms with bona fide neurobiological functions to advance an integrative neurobiological model of CA. We end by discussing the unresolved relationship of CA to other similar socio-cognitive concepts. The aim of the paper is to highlight the importance of integrating CA theory into computational approaches to culture and evolution (such as predictive processing computations explaining niche construction) as this will allow a dynamic interpretation of cultural processes. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the relationship between bodily experiences in dreams and the sleeping, physical body. I question the popular view that dreaming is a naturally and frequently occurring real-world example of cranial envatment. This view states that dreams are functionally disembodied states: in a majority of dreams, phenomenal experience, including the phenomenology of embodied selfhood, unfolds completely independently of external and peripheral stimuli and outward movement. I advance an alternative and more empirically plausible view of dreams as weakly (...) phenomenally-functionally embodied states. The view predicts that bodily experiences in dreams can be placed on a continuum with bodily illusions in wakefulness. It also acknowledges that there is a high degree of variation across dreams and different sleep stages in the degree of causal coupling between dream imagery, sensory input, and outward motor activity. Furthermore, I use the example of movement sensations in dreams and their relation to outward muscular activity to develop a predictive processing account. I propose that movement sensations in dreams are associated with a basic and developmentally early kind of bodily self-sampling. This account, which affords a central role to active inference, can then be broadened to explain other aspects of self- and world-simulation in dreams. Dreams are world-simulations centered on the self, and important aspects of both self- and world-simulation in dreams are closely linked to bodily self-sampling, including muscular activity, illusory own-body perception, and vestibular orienting in sleep. This is consistent with cognitive accounts of dream generation, in which long-term beliefs and expectations, as well as waking concerns and memories play an important role. What I add to this picture is an emphasis on the real-body basis of dream imagery. This offers a novel perspective on the formation of dream imagery and suggests new lines of research. (shrink)

False consciousness requires a general explanation for why, and how, oppressed individuals believe propositions against, as opposed to aligned with, their own well-being in virtue of their oppressed status. This involves four explanatory desiderata: belief acquisition, content prevalence, limitation, and systematicity. A social constructionist approach satisfies these by understanding the concept of false consciousness as regulating social research rather than as determining the exact mechanisms for all instances: the concept attunes us to a complex of mechanisms conducing oppressed individuals to (...) mistake social understandings of themselves as natural self-understandings—the limits lie where these overlap (sometimes), or are entirely absent. (shrink)

Clark has recently suggested that predictive processing advances a theory of neural function with the resources to put an ecumenical end to the “representation wars” of recent cognitive science. In this paper I defend and develop this suggestion. First, I broaden the representation wars to include three foundational challenges to representational cognitive science. Second, I articulate three features of predictive processing’s account of internal representation that distinguish it from more orthodox representationalist frameworks. Specifically, I argue that it posits a resemblance-based (...) representational architecture with organism-relative contents that functions in the service of pragmatic success, not veridical representation. Finally, I argue that internal representation so understood is either impervious to the three anti-representationalist challenges I outline or can actively embrace them. (shrink)

I identify three lessons from Kenneth Craik’s landmark book “The Nature of Explanation” for contemporary debates surrounding the existence, extent, and nature of mental representation: first, an account of mental representations as neural structures that function analogously to public models; second, an appreciation of prediction as the central component of intelligence in demand of such models; and third, a metaphor for understanding the brain as an engineer, not a scientist. I then relate these insights to discussions surrounding the representational status (...) of predictive processing – which, I argue, provides a contemporary vindication of Craik’s extremely prescient “hypothesis on the nature of thought.”. (shrink)

Predictive processing has recently been advanced as a global cognitive architecture for the brain. I argue that its commitments concerning the nature and format of cognitive representation are inadequate to account for two basic characteristics of conceptual thought: first, its generality—the fact that we can think and flexibly reason about phenomena at any level of spatial and temporal scale and abstraction; second, its rich compositionality—the specific way in which concepts productively combine to yield our thoughts. I consider two strategies for (...) avoiding these objections and I argue that both confront formidable challenges. (shrink)

Predictive processing and its apparent commitment to explaining cognition in terms of Bayesian inference over hierarchical generative models seems to flatly contradict the pragmatist conception of mind and experience. Against this, I argue that this appearance results from philosophical overlays at odd with the science itself, and that the two frameworks are in fact well-poised for mutually beneficial theoretical exchange. Specifically, I argue: first, that predictive processing illuminates pragmatism’s commitment to both the primacy of pragmatic coping in accounts of the (...) mind and the profound organism-relativity of experience; second, that this pragmatic, “narcissistic” character of prediction error minimization undermines its ability to explain the distinctive normativity of intentionality; and third, that predictive processing therefore mandates an extra-neural account of intentional content of exactly the sort that pragmatism’s communitarian vision of human thought can provide. (shrink)

Two striking claims are advanced on behalf of the free energy principle in cognitive science and philosophy: that it identifies a condition of the possibility of existence for self-organising systems; and that it has important implications for our understanding of how the brain works, defining a set of process theories—roughly, theories of the structure and functions of neural mechanisms—consistent with the free energy minimising imperative that it derives as a necessary feature of all self-organising systems. I argue that the conjunction (...) of claims and rests on a fallacy of equivocation. The FEP can be interpreted in two ways: as a claim about how it is possible to redescribe the existence of self-organising systems, and as a claim about how such systems maintain their existence. Although the Descriptive FEP plausibly does identify a condition of the possibility of existence for self-organising systems, it has no important implications for our understanding of how the brain works. Although the Explanatory FEP would have such implications if it were true, it does not identify a condition of the possibility of existence for self-organising systems. I consider various ways of responding to this conclusion, and I explore its implications for the role and importance of the FEP in cognitive science and philosophy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT How can imagination generate knowledge when its contents are voluntarily determined? Several philosophers have recently answered this question by pointing to the constraints that underpin imagination when it plays knowledge-generating roles. Nevertheless, little has been said about the nature of these constraints. In this paper, I argue that the constraints that underpin sensory imagination come from the structure of causal probabilistic generative models, a construct that has been highly influential in recent cognitive science and machine learning. I highlight several (...) attractions of this account, and I favourably contrast it with Peter Langland-Hassan’s account of sensory imagination in terms of the forward models exploited in sensorimotor control. (shrink)

We argue that one important aspect of the “cognitive neuroscience revolution” identified by Boone and Piccinini :1509–1534. doi: 10.1007/s11229-015-0783-4, 2015) is a dramatic shift away from thinking of cognitive representations as arbitrary symbols towards thinking of them as icons that replicate structural characteristics of their targets. We argue that this shift has been driven both “from below” and “from above”—that is, from a greater appreciation of what mechanistic explanation of information-processing systems involves, and from a greater appreciation of the problems (...) solved by bio-cognitive systems, chiefly regulation and prediction. We illustrate these arguments by reference to examples from cognitive neuroscience, principally representational similarity analysis and the emergence of dynamical models as a central postulate in neurocognitive research. (shrink)

I aim to provide some evidence that Husserl’s description of perceptual updating actually fits very nicely into the Bayesian Brain paradigm, articulated by Karl Friston and others, and that that paradigm, in turn, can be taken as an excellent example of “Neurophenomenology”. The apparently un-phenomenological Helmholtzian component of the Bayesian Brain paradigm, according to which what one consciously seems to see is a product of unconscious causal reasoning to the best explanation of one’s sensory stimulations, can be finessed, I claim, (...) in a way that makes it compatible with a phenomenological orientation. I begin by roughly characterizing the Bayesian Brain paradigm as it relates to perceptual cognition. I then show how Husserl’s descriptions of the conscious perceptual process relate to the paradigm. I conclude with some considerations about how to understand the relation between conscious and unconscious brain process in the present case and in relation to Neurophenomenology generally. (shrink)

Paweł Gładziejewski has recently argued that the framework of predictive processing postulates genuine representations. His focus is on establishing that certain structures posited by PP actually play a representational role. The goal of this paper is to promote this discussion by exploring the contents of representations posited by PP. Gładziejewski already points out that structural theories of representational content can successfully be applied to PP. Here, I propose to make the treatment slightly more rigorous by invoking Francis Egan’s distinction between (...) mathematical and cognitive contents. Applying this distinction to representational contents in PP, I first show that cognitive contents in PP are determined by mathematical contents, at least in the sense that computational descriptions in PP put constraints on ascriptions of cognitive contents. After that, I explore to what extent these constraints are specific. I argue that the general mathematical contents posited by PP do not constrain ascriptions of cognitive content in a specific way. However, there are at least three aspects of PP that constrain ascriptions of cognitive contents in more specific ways: formal PP models posit specific mathematical contents that define more specific constraints; PP entails claims about how computational mechanisms underpin cognitive phenomena ; the processing hierarchy posited by PP goes along with more specific constraints. (shrink)

According to active inference, action is enabled by a top-down modulation of sensory signals. Computational models of this mechanism complement ideomotor theories of action representation. Such theories postulate common neural representations for action and perception, without specifying how action is enabled by such representations. In active inference, motor commands are replaced by proprioceptive predictions. In order to initiate action through such predictions, sensory prediction errors have to be attenuated. This paper argues that such top-down modulation involves systematic misrepresentations. More specifically, (...) the paper first argues for the following conditional claim. If active inference provides an accurate computational description of how action is enabled in the brain, then action is enabled by systematic misrepresentations. Furthermore, it is argued that an inference to the best explanation provides reason for believing the antecedent is true: Firstly, active inference provides a crucial extension to ideomotor theories. Secondly, active inference explains otherwise puzzling phenomena related to sensory attenuation, e.g. in force-matching or self-tickling paradigms. Taken together, these reasons support the claim that action is indeed enabled by systematic misrepresentations. The claim casts doubt on the assumption that representations are systematically beneficial to the extent that they are true: if the argument in this paper is sound, systematically beneficial misrepresentations may lie at the heart of our neural architecture. (shrink)

Both mindreading and stereotyping are forms of social cognition that play a pervasive role in our everyday lives, yet too little attention has been paid to the question of how these two processes are related. This paper offers a theory of the influence of stereotyping on mental-state attribution that draws on hierarchical predictive coding accounts of action prediction. It is argued that the key to understanding the relation between stereotyping and mindreading lies in the fact that stereotypes centrally involve character-trait (...) attributions, which play a systematic role in the action–prediction hierarchy. On this view, when we apply a stereotype to an individual, we rapidly attribute to her a cluster of generic character traits on the basis of her perceived social group membership. These traits are then used to make inferences about that individual’s likely beliefs and desires, which in turn inform inferences about her behavior. (shrink)

Though predictive processing approaches to the mind were originally applied to exteroceptive perception, i.e., vision and action, recent work has started to explore the role of interoceptive perception, i.e., emotion and affect. This article builds on this work by extending PP beyond emotion to the construction of emotional dispositions. I employ principles from dynamical systems theory and PP to provide a model of how dispositional anger can develop in response to early experiences of psychosocial stress. The model is then deployed (...) to explain the established link between psychosocial stress in early life and the appearance of certain organic disease phenotypes in later life. This phenomenon can appear mysterious when viewed through the standard biomedical explanatory lens, which has difficulty accounting for the causal influence of subjective perceptions and evaluations of the social and material environment on the development of organic disease processes. The model provided presents such cases as instances of developmental mismatch. They occur when an organism develops an emotional disposition that leads them to make habitually-biased appraisals of what the social environment affords. The model provides a novel explanation of certain organic disease phenotypes with top-down and developmental causes, and demystifies one class of cases involving apparently spooky ‘mind-to-matter’ causation. (shrink)

This paper proposes a social account for the origin of the truth value and the emergence of the first declarative sentence. Such a proposal is based on two assumptions. The first is known as the social intelligence hypothesis: that the cognitive evolution of humans is first and foremost an adaptation to social demands. The second is the function-first approach to explaining the evolution of traits: before a prototype of a new trait develops and the adaptation process begins, something already existing (...) is used for a new purpose. Applied to the emergence of declarative sentences (statements), this suggests something already existing––natural signs (such as indexical objects)––was used for the declarative function and thereby integrated into communication. I show that index display (such as the display of hunting trophies) can imply a conceptual structure similar to that informing the syntax of sentences. The view developed in this paper is broadly consistent with the argumentative theory of Mercier and Sperber, which suggests that reasoning is less adapted to decision making than to social purposes such as winning disputes. In this paper I extend this view to the evaluation of propositions expressed in declarative sentences. According to my proposal, the first declarative sentence emerged as the negation of the (implicit) negation of an implicit statement. Thereby, I suggest that the binary structure of the truth value underlying any declarative sentence is founded on disagreements based on conflicts of interests. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for an embodied, embedded approach to predictive processing and thus align the framework with situated cognition. The recent popularity of theories conceiving of the brain as a predictive organ has given rise to two broad camps in the literature that I call free energy enactivism and cognitivist predictive processing. The two approaches vary in scope and methodology. The scope of cognitivist predictive processing is narrow and restricts cognition to brain processes and structures; it does not (...) consider the body-beyond-brain and the environment as constituents of cognitive processes. Free energy enactivism, on the other hand, includes all self-organizing systems that minimize free energy and thus does not offer any unique explanations for more complex cognitive phenomena that are unique to human cognition. Furthermore, because of its strong commitment to the mind-life continuity thesis, it does not provide an explanation of what distinguishes more sophisticated cognitive systems from simple systems. The account that I develop in this paper rejects both of these radical extremes. Instead, I propose a compromise that highlights the necessary components of predictive processing by making use of a mechanistic methodology of explanation. The starting point of the argument in this paper is that despite the interchangeable use of the terms, prediction error minimization and the free energy principle are not identical. But this distinction does not need to disrupt the status quo of the literature if we consider an alternative approach: Embodied, Embedded Predictive Processing. EEPP accommodates the free energy principle, as argued for by free energy enactivism, but it also allows for mental representations in its explanation of cognition. Furthermore, EEPP explains how prediction error minimization is realized but, unlike cognitivist PP, it allocates a constitutive role to the body in cognition. Despite highlighting concerns regarding cognitivist PP, I do not wish to discredit the role of the neural domain or representations as free energy enactivism does. Neural structures and processes undeniably contribute to the minimization of prediction error but the role of the body is equally important. On my account, prediction error minimization and free energy minimization are deeply dependent on the body of an agent, such that the body-beyond-brain plays a constitutive role in cognitive processing. I suggest that the body plays three constitutive roles in prediction error minimization: The body regulates cognitive activity, ensuring that cognition and action are intricately linked. The body acts as distributor in the sense that it carries some of the cognitive load by fulfilling the function of minimizing prediction error. Finally, the body serves to constrain the information that is processed by an agent. In fulfilling these three roles, the agent and environment enter into a bidirectional relation through influencing and modeling the structure of the other. This connects EEPP to the free energy principle because the whole embodied agent minimizes free energy in virtue of being a model of its econiche. This grants the body a constitutive role as part of the collection of mechanisms that minimize prediction error and free energy. The body can only fulfill its role when embedded in an environment, of which it is a model. In this sense, EEPP offers the most promising alternative to cognitivist predictive processing and free energy enactivism. (shrink)

This paper aims to offer an account of affective experiences within Predictive Processing, a novel framework that considers the brain to be a dynamical, hierarchical, Bayesian hypothesis-testing mechanism. We begin by outlining a set of common features of affective experiences that a PP-theory should aim to explain: feelings are conscious, they have valence, they motivate behaviour, and they are intentional states with particular and formal objects. We then review existing theories of affective experiences within Predictive Processing and delineate two families (...) of theories: Interoceptive Inference Theories and Error Dynamics Theories. We highlight the strengths and shortcomings of each family of theories and develop a synthesis: the Affective Inference Theory. Affective Inference Theory claims that valence corresponds to the expected rate of prediction error reduction. In turn, the particular object of a feeling is the object predicted to be the most likely cause of expected changes in prediction error rate, and the formal object of a feeling is a predictive model of the expected changes in prediction error rate caused by a given particular object. Finally, our theory shows how affective experiences bias action selection, directing the organism towards allostasis and towards optimal levels of uncertainty in order to minimise prediction error over time. (shrink)