Both a method of therapy and an exploration of psychic reality, free association is a fundamental element of psychoanalytical practices that refers to the way a patient is asked to describe what comes spontaneously to mind in the therapeutic setting. This paper examines the role of free association from the point of view of psychoanalysis and neuroscience in order to improve our understanding of therapeutic effects induced by psychoanalytic therapies and psychoanalysis. In this regard, we first propose a global overview (...) of the historical origins of the concept of free association in psychoanalysis and examine how Freud established its principles. Then, from Freud’s distinction between primary and secondary processes, we proceed to compare the psychoanalytic model with research originating from cognitive psychology and neuroscience. The notions of entropy and free energy appear particularly relevant at the intersection of these different domains. Finally, we propose the notion of symbolizing transmodality to describe certain specificities of symbolization processes within free association and we summarize the main functions of free association in psychoanalytic practices. (shrink)

Baggs and Chemero (2018)propose that certain tensions between enaction and ecological psychology arise due different interpretations about what is meant by the “environment.” In the enactive approach the emphasis is on the umwelt, which describes the environment as the “meaningful, lived surroundings of a given individual.” The ecological approach, on the other hand, emphasises what they refer to as the habitat “the environment as a set of resources for a typical, or ideal, member of a species.” By making this distinction, (...) these authors claim they are able to retain the best of both the ecological and the enactive approaches. Herein I propose an account of the individuation of habits that straddles this distinction, what I call a compatabilist account. This is done in two parts. The first part teases out a host of compatibilities that exist between the enactive account as developed byDi Paolo et al. (2017)and the skilled intentionality framework as developed byBruineberg and Rietveld (2014)andRietveld and Kiverstein (2014). In part two these compatibilities are brought together with the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon to develop the notion of enhabiting. Enhabiting describes a set of ongoing processes by which an umwelt emerges from and is reproduced within the relationship between an embodied subject and their habitat. Thus, enhabiting points toward a point of intersection between enaction and ecological psychology. To enhabit is bring forth (to enact), within (to inhabit). (shrink)

In 1895 in the Project for a Scientific Psychology Freud tried to integrate psychology and neurology in order to develop a neuroscientific psychology. Since 1880 Freud made no distinction between psychology and physiology. His papers from the end of the 1880s to1890 were very clear on this scientific overlap: as with many of its contemporaries, Freud thought about psychology essentially as the physiology of the brain. Years later he had to surrender, realizing a technological delay, not capable to pursue its (...) ambitious aim, and until that moment psychoanalysis would have to use its more suitable clinical method. Also, he seemed skeptical about the phrenology drift, typical of that time, in which any psychological function needed to be located in its neuroanatomical area. He could not see the progresses of neurosciences and its fruitful dialogue with psychoanalysis, occurred also thanks to the improvements in the field of neuroimaging, which has made possible a remarkable advance in the knowledge of the mind-brain system and a better observation of the psychoanalytical theories. After years of investigations, deriving from research and clinical work of the last century, the discovery of neural networks, together with the free energy principle, we are observing under a new light the psychodynamic neuroscience in its exploration of the mind-brain system. In this narrative review we summarize the important developments of the psychodynamic neuroscience, with particular regard to the free energy principle, the resting state networks, especially the Default Mode Network in its link with the Self; finally we suggest a discussion by approaching the concept of Alpha Function, proposed by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Ruprecht Bion, trying to speculate about the connection with neuroscience. (shrink)

The neural correlates of rapid eye movements (REMs) in sleep are extraordinarily robust; including REM-locked activation in the retrosplenial cortex, the supplementary eye field and areas overlapping cholinergic basal nucleus. The phenomenology of REMs speaks to the notion that perceptual experience in both sleep and wakefulness is a constructive process – in which we generate predictions of sensory inputs and then test those predictions through actively sampling the sensorium with eye movements. On this view, REMs during sleep may index an (...) internalized active sampling or ‘scanning’ of self-generated visual constructs that are not constrained by visual input. If this view is correct, it renders REMs an ideal probe to study consciousness as “an exclusively internal affair” (Metzinger 2009). In other words, REMs offer a probe of active inference – in the sense of predictive coding – when the brain is isolated from the sensorium in virtue of the natural blockade of sensory input during REM sleep. REMs are temporally precise events that enable powerful inferences based on timeseries analyses. As a natural, task-free probe, [REMs] could be used in non-compliant subjects, including infants and animals. In short, REM constitutes a promising probe to study the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of consciousness and perhaps its abnormal development in schizophrenia and autism, which have been considered in terms of aberrant predictive coding. (shrink)

In addition to active wake, emotions are generated and experienced in a variety of functionally different states such as those of sleep, during which external stimulation and cognitive control are lacking. The neural basis of emotions can be specified by regarding the multitude of emotion-related brain states, as well as the distinct neuro- and psychodynamic stages (generation and regulation) of emotional experience.

Street formulated a Darwinian Dilemma for realist theories of value. Much criticism of her formulation of the dilemma targets the second horn, posed by the scientifically implausible assumption of a tracking relation between our attitudes and evaluative truth. This paper shows how a recent wave of metaethical realism, most prominently defended by Scanlon, succeeds without a tracking relation and thus avoids the Darwinian Dilemma in Street's formulation. However, Scanlon's approach, which builds on the concept of a reason relation and defends (...) a metaphysically pluralist, domain‐specific conception of truth, runs into another version of the Darwinian Dilemma. The problem is not that Scanlon's realism assumes a tracking relation but that it assumes what I call reason monolithism – the idea that there is one possible expression of the faculty of reason and that this cognitive faculty could not be otherwise, which is scientifically implausible on similar grounds. (shrink)

Predictive processing models of cognition are promising an elegant way to unite action, perception, and learning. However, in the current formulations, they are species-unspecific and have very little particularly human about them. I propose to examine how, in this framework, humans can be able to massively interact and to build shared worlds that are both material and symbolic.

Hilary Kornblith argues that many traditional philosophical accounts involve problematic views of reflection (understood as second-order mental states). According to Kornblith, reflection does not add reliability, which makes it unfit to underlie a separate form of knowledge. We show that a broader understanding of reflection, encompassing Type 2 processes, working memory, and episodic long-term memory, can provide philosophy with elucidating input that a restricted view misses. We further argue that reflection in fact often does add reliability, through generalizability, flexibility, and (...) creativity that is helpful in newly encountered situations, even if the restricted sense of both reflection and knowledge is accepted. And so, a division of knowledge into one reflexive (animal) form and one reflective form remains a plausible, and possibly fruitful, option. (shrink)

Hilary Kornblith argues that many traditional philosophical accounts involve problematic views of reflection. According to Kornblith, reflection does not add reliability, which makes it unfit to underlie a separate form of knowledge. We show that a broader understanding of reflection, encompassing Type 2 processes, working memory, and episodic long-term memory, can provide philosophy with elucidating input that a restricted view misses. We further argue that reflection in fact often does add reliability, through generalizability, flexibility, and creativity that is helpful in (...) newly encountered situations, even if the restricted sense of both reflection and knowledge is accepted. And so, a division of knowledge into one reflexive form and one reflective form remains a plausible, and possibly fruitful, option. (shrink)

Much of the literature on the free energy principle has focused on how organisms maintain homeostasis amidst a constantly changing environment. A fundamental feature of the FEP is that biological entities are “hard-wired” towards self-preservation.However, contrary to this notion, there do exist organisms that appear to seek out rather than avoid conditions that pose an elevated risk of serious injury or death, thereby jeopardizing their physiological integrity. Borrowing a term used in 1990s popular culture to refer to stunt performers like (...) Evel Knievel, these organisms that exhibit such behavioural characteristics can be referred to as daredevils.This paper presents the case of daredevils as a challenge to the FEP’s homeostasis- and optimization-based construal of biological systems. It also introduces three possible explanatory strategies by which the FEP can account for daredevils. The broader objective of the paper is to enhance the FEP’s ability to account for a diverse range of complex behaviour. (shrink)

The use of forward models is well established in cognitive and computational neuroscience. We compare and contrast two recent, but interestingly divergent, accounts of the place of forward models in the human cognitive architecture. On the Auxiliary Forward Model account, forward models are special-purpose prediction mechanisms implemented by additional circuitry distinct from core mechanisms of perception and action. On the Integral Forward Model account, forward models lie at the heart of all forms of perception and action. We compare these neighbouring (...) but importantly different visions and consider their implications for the cognitive sciences. We end by asking what kinds of empirical research might offer evidence favouring one or the other of these approaches. (shrink)

Prediction-based accounts of language acquisition have the potential to explain several different effects in child language acquisition and adult language processing. However, evidence regarding the developmental predictions of such accounts is mixed. Here, we consider several predictions of these accounts in two large-scale developmental studies of syntactic priming of the English dative alternation. Study 1 was a cross-sectional study (N = 140) of children aged 3−9 years, in which we found strong evidence of abstract priming and the lexical boost, but (...) little evidence that either effect was moderated by age. We found weak evidence for a prime surprisal effect; however, exploratory analyses revealed a protracted developmental trajectory for verb-structure biases, providing an explanation as for why prime surprisal effects are more elusive in developmental populations. In a longitudinal study (N = 102) of children in tightly controlled age bands at 42, 48, and 54 months, we found priming effects emerged on trials with verb overlap early but did not observe clear evidence of priming on trials without verb overlap until 54 months. There was no evidence of a prime surprisal effect at any time point and none of the effects were moderated by age. The results relating to the emergence of the abstract priming and lexical boost effects are consistent with prediction-based models, while the absence of age-related effects appears to reflect the structure-specific challenges the dative presents to English-acquiring children. Overall, our complex pattern of findings demonstrates the value of developmental data sets in testing psycholinguistic theory. (shrink)

Over the last decade or so, several researchers have considered the predictive processing framework (PPF) to be a useful perspective from which to shed some much-needed light on the mechanisms behind psychosis. Most approaches to psychosis within PPF come down to the idea of the “atypical” brain generating inaccurate hypotheses that the “typical” brain does not generate, either due to a systematic top-down processing bias or more general precision weighting breakdown. Strong at explaining common individual symptoms of psychosis, such approaches (...) face some issues when we look at a more general clinical picture. In this paper, we propose an update on the current accounts of psychosis based on the realization that a neurotypical brain constantly generates non-actual, de-coupled, counterfactual hypotheses as part of healthy cognition. We suggest that what is going on in psychosis, at least in some cases, is not so much a generation of erroneous hypotheses, but rather an inability to correctly use the counterfactual ones. This updated view casts “accurate” cognition as more fragile and delicate, but also closes the gap between psychosis and typical cognition. (shrink)

The subject of musical emotions has emerged only recently as a major area of research. While much work in this area offers fascinating insights to musicological research, assumptions about the nature of emotional experience seem to remain committed to appraisal, representations, and a rule-based or information-processing model of cognition. Over the past three decades alternative ‘embodied’ and ‘enactive’ models of mind have challenged this approach by emphasising the self-organising aspects of cognition, often describing it as an ongoing process of dynamic (...) interactivity between an organism and its environment. More recently, this perspective has been applied to the study of emotion in general, opening up interesting new possibilities for theory and research. This new approach, however, has received rather limited attention in musical contexts. With this in mind, we critically review the history of music and emotion studies, arguing that many existing theories offer only limited views of what musical-emotional experience entails. We then attempt to provide preliminary grounding for an alternative perspective on music and emotion based on the enactive/dynamic systems approach to the study of mind. (shrink)

The nature of time is rooted in our body. Constellations of impulses arising from the flesh constantly create our interoceptive perception and, in turn, the unfolding of these perceptions defines human awareness of time. This study explored the connection between time perception and interoception and proposes the Interoceptive Buffer saturation (IBs) index. IBs evaluates subjects’ ability to process salient stimuli from the body by measuring subjective distortions of interoceptive time perception, i.e., the estimated duration of tactile interoceptive stimulations. Thirty female (...) healthy subjects were recruited through consecutive sampling and assessed for common variables related to interoceptive alterations: depressive symptoms (Beck Depression Inventory, BDI-II), eating disorders (EDI-3) risk, and anxiety levels (State Trait Anxiety Inventory, STAI). Interoceptive cardiac accuracy (IAc) was assessed as well. Subjects performed verbal time estimation of interoceptive stimuli (IBs) delivered using a specifically designed interoceptive tactile stimulator, as well as verbal time estimation of visual and auditory stimuli. Results showed that IBs index positively correlated with IAc, and negatively with EDI-3 Drive for Thinness (DT) risk subscale. Moreover, IBs index was positively predicted by IAc, and negatively predicted by DT and somatic factors of depression. Our results suggest that underestimations in interoceptive time perception are connected to different psychological conditions characterized by a diminished processing of high salience stimuli from the body. Conversely, overestimations of the duration of interoceptive stimuli appear to be function of subjects’ ability to correctly perceive their own bodily information. Evidence supported IBs index, fostering the concept of interoceptive treatments for clinical purposes. (shrink)

Human fluid intelligence is closely linked to the sequential solving of complex problems. It has been associated with a distributed cognitive control or multiple-demand network, comprising regions of lateral frontal, insular, dorsomedial frontal, and parietal cortex. Previous neuroimaging research suggests that the MD network may orchestrate the allocation of attentional resources to individual parts of a complex task: in a complex target detection task with multiple independent rules, applied one at a time, reduced response to rule-critical events across the MD (...) network in lower fluid intelligence was observed. This was in particular the case with increasing task complexity, and was accompanied by impairment in performance. Here, we examined the early spatiotemporal neural dynamics of this process in electroencephalography source analyses using a similar task paradigm. Levels of fluid intelligence specifically predicted early neural responses in a left inferiorparietal MD region around 200–300 ms post stimulus onset. Evoked source amplitudes in left parietal cortex within this early time window also correlated with behavioural performance measures. Like in previous research, we observed impaired performance in lower fluid intelligence with increasing number of task rules. This links fluid intelligence to a process of attentional focus on those parts of a task that are most critical for the current behaviour. Within the MD system, our time re-resolved measures suggest that the left parietal cortex specifically impacts on early processes of attentional focus on task critical features. This is novel evidence on the neurocognitive correlates of fluid intelligence suggesting that individual differences are critically linked to an early process of attentional focus on task-relevant information, which is supported by left parietal MD regions. (shrink)

This paper argues that intelligence can be approximated by the ability to produce accurate predictions. It is further argued that general intelligence can be approximated by context dependent predictive abilities combined with the ability to use working memory to abstract away contextual information. The flexibility associated with general intelligence can be understood as the ability to use selective attention to focus on specific aspects of sensory impressions to identify patterns, which can then be used to predict events in novel situations (...) and environments. The argumentation synthesizes Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity theory, adding the notion of niche broadness as well as changes concerning the view of cognition and control, and Hohwy’s predictive mind theory, making explicit the significance of accuracy as a composite of trueness and precision where the nervous system acts as a distributed controller motivating actions that keep the body in homeostasis. (shrink)

Everyday thinking and scientific theorizing about human action control are equally driven by the apparently obvious contrast between will and habit or, in their more modern disguise: intentional and automatic processes, and model-based and model-free action planning. And yet, no comprehensive category system to systematically tell truly willed from merely habitual actions is available. As I argue, this is because the contrast is ill-conceived, because almost every single action is both willed and habitual, intentional and automatic, and model-based and model-free, (...) simply because will and habit (and their successors) do not refer to alternative modes or pathways of action control but rather to different phases of action planning. I further discuss three basic misconceptions about action control that binary theorizing relies on: the assumption that intentional processes compete with automatic processes (rather than the former setting the stage for the latter), the assumption that action control is targeting processes (rather than representations of action outcomes), and the assumption that people follow only one goal at a time (rather than multiple goals). I conclude that (at least the present style of) binary theorizing fails to account for action control and should thus be replaced by a more integrative view. (shrink)

In line with Allen Newell's challenge to develop complete cognitive architectures, and motivated by a recent proposal for a unifying subsymbolic computational theory of cognition, we introduce the cognitive control architecture SEMLINCS. SEMLINCS models the development of an embodied cognitive agent that learns discrete production rule-like structures from its own, autonomously gathered, continuous sensorimotor experiences. Moreover, the agent uses the developing knowledge to plan and control environmental interactions in a versatile, goal-directed, and self-motivated manner. Thus, in contrast to several well-known (...) symbolic cognitive architectures, SEMLINCS is not provided with production rules and the involved symbols, but it learns them. In this paper, the actual implementation of SEMLINCS causes learning and self-motivated, autonomous behavioral control of the game figure Mario in a clone of the computer game Super Mario Bros. Our evaluations highlight the successful development of behavioral versatility as well as the learning of suitable production rules and the involved symbols from sensorimotor experiences. Moreover, knowledge- and motivation-dependent individualizations of the agents’ behavioral tendencies are shown. Finally, interaction sequences can be planned on the sensorimotor-grounded production rule level. Current limitations directly point toward the need for several further enhancements, which may be integrated into SEMLINCS in the near future. Overall, SEMLINCS may be viewed as an architecture that allows the functional and computational modeling of embodied cognitive development, whereby the current main focus lies on the development of production rules from sensorimotor experiences. (shrink)

La philosophie économique, dont le développement implique un accroissement accéléré de complexité (ce qui est la définition même de la complexité). Les prémices en ont été le second théorème sur l’équilibre général, et les théorèmes d’impossibilité sur le choix collectif, ou le dilemme des biens publics. Certes, il est possible d’utiliser certains facteurs de complexité, comme des mutations aléatoires, pour définir par exemple des équilibres évolutionnaires, mais ces facteurs sont aussi une source d’instabilité. L’économie expérimentale a mis en lumière la (...) dépendance de nos choix par rapport à leurs évolutions et références antérieures, ce qui est une autre source de complexité. Une exploration rationnelle de ces dépendances met elle-même en jeu la complexité de leurs processus, et implique d’incessantes révisions. Il semble inévitable, puisqu’on ne peut pas réduire les complexités qui tiennent à ces réajustements, qui impliquent un bayésianisme multi-niveaux généralisé, d’admettre que ces révisions n’aient qu’une portée limitée (« minimiser l’énergie libre »). On peut réinterpréter en ce sens les expériences sur des incohérences temporelles dans nos choix, une fois pris en compte l’application de cette minimisation aux processus mêmes d’évaluation des situations de choix. D’autres limitations pourraient être définies en combinant les contraintes neurologiques, psychologiques et économiques. Là encore, une telle combinaison est aussi une source de complexités. Mais dans un autre sens, développer ces relations complexes peut permettre de dépasser les circularités de l’inférence inverse (du neurologique à l’économie expérimentale et inversement). Enfin les simulations computationnelles nous révèlent que des évolutions que l’on croyait asymptotiques sont capables de plus lointaines divergences. Compliquer les modèles computationnels peut limiter leur généralité. Inversement les simplifier n’est utile que si cela révèle aussi quelles simplifications nous font manquer quelle complexité des interactions économiques. L’exploration de ces relations entre cette croissance accélérée de complexité liée non seulement à ces interactions mais à l’entreprise même de leur rationalisation est d’abord la tâche de l’économie dans ses différents champs, mais la philosophie de l’économie peut avoir un rôle dans l’élucidation des rapports entre ces différentes sources de complexité et leurs modalités de limitation les plus raisonnablesCode JEL : B490. (shrink)

Veissière et al. disrupt current debates over the nature of mindreading by bringing multiple positions under the umbrella of free-energy. However, it is not clear whether integrating the opposing sides under a common formal framework will yield new insights into how mindreading is achieved, rather than offering a mere redescription of the target phenomenon.

This monograph discusses the question of what it is to be a reason – mainly in practical ethics – and proposes an original contribution to metaethics.It critically examines theories of metaethical realism, constructivism and error theory and identifies several misunderstandings or unclarities in contemporary debates. Based on this examination, the book suggests a distinction between a conceptual question, that can be answered by pure first-personal thinking, and a material question, that targets responses to reasons as a natural phenomenon in space (...) and time and that can be answered by help of the sciences. While this book defends a sharp distinction between these approaches, it also argues that the insights gained by the distinct approaches can be fruitfully integrated into a comprehensive picture.The comprehensive picture promoted in this book, based on both philosophical analysis and resources from psychology and cognitive science, is a picture of reasons as items in a collective archive of mind – reconfiguring the “domain of reasons” as a collectively established and socially cultivated fund of considerations with normative weight. The developed Collective Archive View combines Reasons Fundamentalism as an answer to the conceptual question, with a social ontological proposal, similar to Haslanger’s critical realism, as an answer to the material question.Thereby, it introduces central ideas from the field of social metaphysics into metaethics. At the same time, it offers a way of settling some controversies within metaethics, going on between proponents of Reasons Fundamentalism and Constitutivism, realism and constructivism, as well as proponents of mind-dependence and mind-independence of normative facts. Finally, the proposal enables us to envision and conceptualize genuine normative change within a metaethical theory. (shrink)