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  1. Agential Teleosemantics.Tiago Rama - 2022 - Dissertation, Autonomous University of Barcelona
    The field of the philosophy of biology is flourishing in its aim to evaluate and rethink the view inherited from the previous century ---the Modern Synthesis. Different research areas and theories have come to the fore in the last decades in order to account for different biological phenomena that, in the first instance, fall beyond the explanatory scope of the Modern Synthesis. This thesis is anchored and motivated by this revolt in the philosophy of biology. -/- The central target in (...)
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  • Dosis sola facit venenum: reconceptualising biological realism.Majid D. Beni - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (6):1-18.
    Richard Levins’s (Am Sci 54(4):421–431, 1966) paper sets a landmark for the significance of scientific model-making in biology. Colombo and Palacios (Biol Philos 36(5):1–26. 10.1007/s10539-021-09818-x, 2021) have recently built their critique of the explanatory power of the Free Energy Principle on Levins’s insight into the relationship between generality, realism, and precision. This paper addresses the issue of the plausibility of biological explanations that are grounded in the Free Energy Principle (FEP) and deals with the question of the realist fortitude of (...)
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  • Life, mind, agency: Why Markov blankets fail the test of evolution.Walter Veit & Heather Browning - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e214.
    There has been much criticism of the idea that Friston's free-energy principle can unite the life and mind sciences. Here, we argue that perhaps the greatest problem for the totalizing ambitions of its proponents is a failure to recognize the importance of evolutionary dynamics and to provide a convincing adaptive story relating free-energy minimization to organismal fitness.
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  • Enough blanket metaphysics, time for data-driven heuristics.Wiktor Rorot, Tomasz Korbak, Piotr Litwin & Marcin Miłkowski - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e206.
    Bruineberg and colleagues criticisms' have been received but downplayed in the free energy principle (FEP) literature. We strengthen their points, arguing that Friston blanket discovery, even if tractable, requires a full formal description of the system of interest at the outset. Hence, blanket metaphysics is futile, and we postulate that researchers should turn back to heuristic uses of Pearl blankets.
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  • Laying down a forking path: Tensions between enaction and the free energy principle.Ezequiel Di Paolo, Evan Thompson & Randall Beer - 2022 - Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 3.
    Several authors have made claims about the compatibility between the Free Energy Principle and theories of autopoiesis and enaction. Many see these theories as natural partners or as making similar statements about the nature of biological and cognitive systems. We critically examine these claims and identify a series of misreadings and misinterpretations of key enactive concepts. In particular, we notice a tendency to disregard the operational definition of autopoiesis and the distinction between a system’s structure and its organization. Other misreadings (...)
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  • (1 other version)Extended Predictive Minds: do Markov Blankets Matter?Marco Facchin - 2021 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology (3):1-30.
    The extended mind thesis claims that a subject’s mind sometimes encompasses the environmental props the subject interacts with while solving cognitive tasks. Recently, the debate over the extended mind has been focused on Markov Blankets: the statistical boundaries separating biological systems from the environment. Here, I argue such a focus is mistaken, because Markov Blankets neither adjudicate, nor help us adjudicate, whether the extended mind thesis is true. To do so, I briefly introduce Markov Blankets and the free energy principle (...)
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  • (1 other version)Extended Predictive Minds: do Markov Blankets Matter?Marco Facchin - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (3):909-938.
    The extended mind thesis claims that a subject’s mind sometimes encompasses the environmental props the subject interacts with while solving cognitive tasks. Recently, the debate over the extended mind has been focused on Markov Blankets: the statistical boundaries separating biological systems from the environment. Here, I argue such a focus is mistaken, because Markov Blankets neither adjudicate, nor help us adjudicate, whether the extended mind thesis is true. To do so, I briefly introduce Markov Blankets and the free energy principle (...)
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  • Is a Cognitive Revolution in Theoretical Biology Underway?Tiago Rama - 2024 - Foundations of Science 1:1-22.
    The foundations of biology have been a topic of debate for the past few decades. The traditional perspective of the Modern Synthesis, which portrays organisms as passive entities with limited role in evolutionary theory, is giving way to a new paradigm where organisms are recognized as active agents, actively shaping their own phenotypic traits for adaptive purposes. Within this context, this article raises the question of whether contemporary biological theory is undergoing a cognitive revolution. This inquiry can be approached in (...)
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  • The structure of intentionality. Insights and challenges for enactivism.Pierre Steiner - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    The purpose of the paper is twofold. It first aims at clarifying and developing an important tension within enactivism concerning the relations between intentionality and content, once representationalism has been abandoned. In which sense(s) do enactivists (still) say that intentionality is contentful and not contentful? Secondly, it puts this tension in perspective with two paradigmatic ways of defining the relations between intentional states and their objects: Husserl’s theory of intentionality in the Logical Investigations, and Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotics.
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  • Beauty and Uncertainty as Transformative Factors: A Free Energy Principle Account of Aesthetic Diagnosis and Intervention in Gestalt Psychotherapy.Pietro Sarasso, Gianni Francesetti, Jan Roubal, Michela Gecele, Irene Ronga, Marco Neppi-Modona & Katiuscia Sacco - 2022 - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 16:906188.
    Drawing from field theory, Gestalt therapy conceives psychological suffering and psychotherapy as two intentional field phenomena, where unprocessed and chaotic experiences seek the opportunity to emerge and be assimilated through the contact between the patient and the therapist (i.e., the intentionality of contacting). This therapeutic approach is based on the therapist’s aesthetic experience of his/her embodied presence in the flow of the healing process because (1) the perception of beauty can provide the therapist with feedback on the assimilation of unprocessed (...)
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  • Modelling ourselves: what the free energy principle reveals about our implicit notions of representation.Matt Sims & Giovanni Pezzulo - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):7801-7833.
    Predictive processing theories are increasingly popular in philosophy of mind; such process theories often gain support from the Free Energy Principle —a normative principle for adaptive self-organized systems. Yet there is a current and much discussed debate about conflicting philosophical interpretations of FEP, e.g., representational versus non-representational. Here we argue that these different interpretations depend on implicit assumptions about what qualifies as representational. We deploy the Free Energy Principle instrumentally to distinguish four main notions of representation, which focus on organizational, (...)
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  • Structural Realism About the Free Energy Principle, the Best of Both Worlds.Majid D. Beni - forthcoming - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie:1-15.
    There are realist and antirealist interpretations of the free energy principle (FEP). This paper aims to chart out a structural realist interpretation of FEP. To do so, it draws on Worrall’s (Dialectica 43(1–2): 99–124, 1989) proposal. The general insight of Worrall’s paper is that there is progress at the level of the structure of theories rather than their content. To enact Worrall’s strategy in the context of FEP, this paper will focus on characterising the formal continuity between fundamental equations of (...)
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  • The Emperor's New Markov Blankets.Jelle Bruineberg, Krzysztof Dołęga, Joe Dewhurst & Manuel Baltieri - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e183.
    The free energy principle, an influential framework in computational neuroscience and theoretical neurobiology, starts from the assumption that living systems ensure adaptive exchanges with their environment by minimizing the objective function of variational free energy. Following this premise, it claims to deliver a promising integration of the life sciences. In recent work, Markov blankets, one of the central constructs of the free energy principle, have been applied to resolve debates central to philosophy (such as demarcating the boundaries of the mind). (...)
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  • Does the metaphysical dog wag its formal tail? The free-energy principle and philosophical debates about life, mind, and matter.Wanja Wiese - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e216.
    According to Bruineberg and colleagues, philosophical arguments on life, mind, and matter that are based on the free-energy principle (FEP) (1) essentially draw on the Markov blanket construct and (2) tend to assume that strong metaphysical claims can be justified on the basis of metaphysically innocuous formal assumptions provided by FEP. I argue against both (1) and (2).
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  • Spór o ciągłość życia i umysłu. Argumenty na rzecz kognitywizmu.Michał Piekarski - 2021 - Argument: Biannual Philosophical Journal 11 (1).
    The dispute over the continuity of life and mind. Arguments for cognitivism: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the position of non-cognitivism on the issue of the so-called dispute over the continuity / discontinuity of life and mind. In discussing the views of Michael Kirchhoff and Tom Froese, I will point out some difficulties related to their position. Next, I will formulate three arguments in favor of the cognitive alternative, emphasizing the need to resort to semantic information in (...)
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