The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience.

First published in 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s monumental _Phénoménologie de la perception _signalled the arrival of a major new philosophical and intellectual voice in post-war Europe. Breaking with the prevailing picture of existentialism and phenomenology at the time, it has become one of the landmark works of twentieth-century thought. This new translation, the first for over fifty years, makes this classic work of philosophy available to a new generation of readers. _Phenomenology of Perception _stands in the great phenomenological tradition of Husserl, (...) Heidegger, and Sartre. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s contribution is decisive, as he brings this tradition and other philosophical predecessors, particularly Descartes and Kant, to confront a neglected dimension of our experience: the lived body and the phenomenal world. Charting a bold course between the reductionism of science on the one hand and "intellectualism" on the other, Merleau-Ponty argues that we should regard the body not as a mere biological or physical unit, but as the body which structures one’s situation and experience within the world. Merleau-Ponty enriches his classic work with engaging studies of famous cases in the history of psychology and neurology as well as phenomena that continue to draw our attention, such as phantom limb syndrome, synaesthesia, and hallucination. This new translation includes many helpful features such as the reintroduction of Merleau-Ponty’s discursive Table of Contents as subtitles into the body of the text, a comprehensive Translator’s Introduction to its main themes, essential notes explaining key terms of translation, an extensive Index, and an important updating of Merleau-Ponty’s references to now available English translations. Also included is a new foreword by Taylor Carman and an introduction to Merleau-Ponty_ _by Claude Lefort. Translated by Donald A. Landes. (shrink)

"Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us," writes Alva Noe. "It is something we do." In Action in Perception, Noe argues that perception and perceptual consciousness depend on capacities for action and thought — that ...

What are 'emotions'? This book offers a balanced survey of facts and theory.

Brains, it has recently been argued, are essentially prediction machines. They are bundles of cells that support perception and action by constantly attempting to match incoming sensory inputs with top-down expectations or predictions. This is achieved using a hierarchical generative model that aims to minimize prediction error within a bidirectional cascade of cortical processing. Such accounts offer a unifying model of perception and action, illuminate the functional role of attention, and may neatly capture the special contribution of cortical processing to (...) adaptive success. This target article critically examines this approach, concluding that it offers the best clue yet to the shape of a unified science of mind and action. Sections 1 and 2 lay out the key elements and implications of the approach. Section 3 explores a variety of pitfalls and challenges, spanning the evidential, the methodological, and the more properly conceptual. The paper ends (sections 4 and 5) by asking how such approaches might impact our more general vision of mind, experience, and agency. (shrink)

An exciting theory in neuroscience is that the brain is an organ for prediction error minimization. This theory is rapidly gaining influence and is set to dominate the science of mind and brain in the years to come. PEM has extreme explanatory ambition, and profound philosophical implications. Here, I assume the theory, briefly explain it, and then I argue that PEM implies that the brain is essentially self-evidencing. This means it is imperative to identify an evidentiary boundary between the brain (...) and its environment. This boundary defines the mind-world relation, opens the door to skepticism, and makes the mind transpire as more inferentially secluded and neurocentrically skull-bound than many would nowadays think. Therefore, PEM somewhat deflates contemporary hypotheses that cognition is extended, embodied and enactive; however, it can nevertheless accommodate the kinds of cases that fuel these hypotheses. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so. The result of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural cognition and (...) evolution, enabling everything from the creation and use of linguistic symbols to the construction of social norms and individual beliefs to the establishment of social institutions. In support of this proposal we argue and present evidence that great apes understand the basics of intentional action, but they still do not participate in activities involving joint intentions and attention. Human children's skills of shared intentionality develop gradually during the first 14 months of life as two ontogenetic pathways intertwine: the general ape line of understanding others as animate, goal-directed, and intentional agents; and a species-unique motivation to share emotions, experience, and activities with other persons. The developmental outcome is children's ability to construct dialogic cognitive representations, which enable them to participate in earnest in the collectivity that is human cognition. Key Words: collaboration; cooperation; cultural learning; culture; evolutionary psychology; intentions; shared intentionality; social cognition; social learning; theory of mind; joint attention. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to assess whether the construct of neural representations plays an explanatory role under the variational free-energy principle and its corollary process theory, active inference; and (2) if so, to assess which philosophical stance - in relation to the ontological and epistemological status of representations - is most appropriate. We focus on non-realist (deflationary and fictionalist-instrumentalist) approaches. We consider a deflationary account of mental representation, according to which the explanatorily relevant contents of neural (...) representations are mathematical, rather than cognitive, and a fictionalist or instrumentalist account, according to which representations are scientifically useful fictions that serve explanatory (and other) aims. After reviewing the free-energy principle and active inference, we argue that the model of adaptive phenotypes under the free-energy principle can be used to furnish a formal semantics, enabling us to assign semantic content to specific phenotypic states (the internal states of a Markovian system that exists far from equilibrium). We propose a modified fictionalist account: an organism-centered fictionalism or instrumentalism. We argue that, under the free-energy principle, pursuing even a deflationary account of the content of neural representations licenses the appeal to the kind of semantic content involved in the aboutness or intentionality of cognitive systems; our position is thus coherent with, but rests on distinct assumptions from, the realist position. We argue that the free-energy principle thereby explains the aboutness or intentionality in living systems and hence their capacity to parse their sensory stream using an ontology or set of semantic factors. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

We present a theory of human artistic experience and the neural mechanisms that mediate it. Any theory of art has to ideally have three components. The logic of art: whether there are universal rules or principles; The evolutionary rationale: why did these rules evolve and why do they have the form that they do; What is the brain circuitry involved? Our paper begins with a quest for artistic universals and proposes a list of ‘Eight laws of artistic experience’ -- a (...) set of heuristics that artists either consciously or unconsciously deploy to optimally titillate the visual areas of the brain. One of these principles is a psychological phenomenon called the peak shift effect: If a rat is rewarded for discriminating a rectangle from a square, it will respond even more vigorously to a rectangle that is longer and skinnier that the prototype. We suggest that this principle explains not only caricatures, but many other aspects of art. Example: An evocative sketch of a female nude may be one which selectively accentuates those feminine form-attributes that allow one to discriminate it from a male figure; a Boucher, a Van Gogh, or a Monet may be a caricature in ‘colour space’ rather than form space. Even abstract art may employ ‘supernormal’ stimuli to excite form areas in the brain more strongly than natural stimuli. Second, we suggest that grouping is a very basic principle. The different extrastriate visual areas may have evolved specifically to extract correlations in different domains , and discovering and linking multiple features into unitary clusters -- objects -- is facilitated and reinforced by direct connections from these areas to limbic structures. In general, when object-like entities are partially discerned at any stage in the visual hierarchy, messages are sent back to earlier stages to alert them to certain locations or features in order to look for additional evidence for the object . Finally, given constraints on allocation of attentional resources, art is most appealing if it produces heightened activity in a single dimension rather than redundant activation of multiple modules. This idea may help explain the effectiveness of outline drawings and sketches, the savant syndrome in autists, and the sudden emergence of artistic talent in fronto-temporal dementia. In addition to these three basic principles we propose five others, constituting a total of ‘eight laws of aesthetic experience’. (shrink)

What makes a living system a living system? What kind of biological phenomenon is the phenomenon of cognition? These two questions have been frequently considered, but, in this volume, the authors consider them as concrete biological questions. Their analysis is bold and provocative, for the authors have constructed a systematic theoretical biology which attempts to define living systems not as objects of observation and description, nor even as interacting systems, but as self-contained unities whose only reference is to themselves. The (...) consequence of their investigations and of their living systems as self-making, self-referring autonomous unities, is that they discovered that the two questions have a common answer: living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. The result of their investigations is a completely new perspective of biological (human) phenomena. During the investigations, it was found that a complete linguistic description pertaining to the ‘organization of the living’ was lacking and, in fact, was hampering the reporting of results. Hence, the authors have coined the word ‘autopoiesis’ to replace the expression ‘circular organization’. Autopoiesis conveys, by itself, the central feature of the organization of the living, which is autonomy. (shrink)

Concepts are the elementary units of reason and linguistic meaning. They are conventional and relatively stable. As such, they must somehow be the result of neural activity in the brain. The questions are: Where? and How? A common philosophical position is that all concepts—even concepts about action and perception—are symbolic and abstract, and therefore must be implemented outside the brain’s sensory-motor system. We will argue against this position using (1) neuroscientific evidence; (2) results from neural computation; and (3) results about (...) the nature of concepts from cognitive linguistics. We will propose that the sensory-motor system has the right kind of structure to characterise both sensory-motor and more abstract concepts. Central to this picture are the neural theory of language and the theory of cogs, according to which, brain structures in the sensory-motor regions are exploited to characterise the so-called “abstract” concepts that constitute the meanings of grammatical constructions and general inference patterns. (shrink)

In this paper, we set out to develop a theoretical and conceptual framework for the new field of Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience. This framework should be able to integrate insights from several relevant disciplines: theory on embodied cognition, ecological psychology, phenomenology, dynamical systems theory, and neurodynamics. We suggest that the main task of Radical Embodied Cognitive Neuroscience is to investigate the phenomenon of skilled intentionality from the perspective of the self-organization of the brain-body-environment system, while doing justice to the phenomenology (...) of skilled action. In previous work, we have characterized skilled intentionality as the organism's tendency toward an optimal grip on multiple relevant affordances simultaneously. Affordances are possibilities for action provided by the environment. In the first part of this paper, we introduce the notion of skilled intentionality and the phenomenon of responsiveness to a field of relevant affordances. Second, we use Friston's work on neurodynamics, but embed a very minimal version of his Free Energy Principle in the ecological niche of the animal. Thus amended, this principle is helpful for understanding the embeddedness of neurodynamics within the dynamics of the system “brain-body-landscape of affordances.” Next, we show how we can use this adjusted principle to understand the neurodynamics of selective openness to the environment: interacting action-readiness patterns at multiple timescales contribute to the organism's selective openness to relevant affordances. In the final part of the paper, we emphasize the important role of metastable dynamics in both the brain and the brain-body-environment system for adequate affordance-responsiveness. We exemplify our integrative approach by presenting research on the impact of Deep Brain Stimulation on affordance responsiveness of OCD patients. (shrink)

Long awaited and eagerly anticipated, this remarkable volume allows English-speaking readers to experience a profound dialogue between the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the Swiss psychiatrist Medard Boss.

Daybreak marks the arrival of Nietzsche's 'mature' philosophy and is indispensable for an understanding of his critique of morality and 'revaluation of all values'. This volume presents the distinguished translation by R. J. Hollingdale, with a new introduction that argues for a dramatic change in Nietzsche's views from Human, All Too Human to Daybreak, and shows how this change, in turn, presages the main themes of Nietzsche's later and better-known works such as On the Genealogy of Morality. The main themes (...) of Daybreak are located in their intellectual and philosophical contexts: in Nietzsche's training as a classical philologist and his fascination with the Sophists and Thucydides; in the moral philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer, which are the central foci of Nietzsche's critique of morality; and in the German Materialist movement of the 1850s and after, which shaped Nietzsche's conception of persons. The edition is completed by a chronology, notes and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

We distinguish between three philosophical views on the neuroscience of predictive models: predictive coding, predictive processing and predictive engagement. We examine the concept of active inference under each model and then ask how this concept informs discussions of social cognition. In this context we consider Frith and Friston’s proposal for a neural hermeneutics, and we explore the alternative model of enactivist hermeneutics.

Nietzsche's mature masterpiece, Beyond Good and Evil considers the origins and nature of Judeo-Christian morality; the end of philosophical dogmatism and beginning of perspectivism; the questionable virtues of science and scholarship; liberal democracy, nationalism, and women's emancipation. A superb and new translation by Marion Faber, this highly annotated edition is complemented by a lucid introduction by one of the most eminent of Nietzsche scholars, Robert C. Holub.

John Dewey, widely known as "America's philosopher," provided important insights into education and political philosophy, but surprisingly never set down a complete moral or ethical philosophy. Gregory Fernando Pappas presents the first systematic and comprehensive treatment of Dewey's ethics. By providing a pluralistic account of moral life that is both unified and coherent, Pappas considers ethics to be key to an understanding of Dewey's other philosophical insights, especially his views on democracy. Pappas unfolds Dewey's ethical vision by looking carefully at (...) the virtues and values of ideal character and community. Showing that Dewey's ethics are compatible with the rest of his philosophy, Pappas corrects the reputation of American pragmatism as a philosophy committed to skepticism and relativism. Readers will find a robust and boldly detailed view of Dewey's ethics in this groundbreaking book. (shrink)

Simulation theories of social cognition abound in the literature, but it is often unclear what simulation means and how it works. The discovery of mirror neurons, responding both to action execution and observation, suggested an embodied approach to mental simulation. Over the last years this approach has been hotly debated and alternative accounts have been proposed. We discuss these accounts and argue that they fail to capture the uniqueness of embodied simulation (ES). ES theory provides a unitary account of basic (...) social cognition, demonstrating that people e their own mental states or processes represented with a bodily format in functionally attributing them to others. (shrink)

Introduction : facets of the alien -- The human as a liminal being -- Between pathos and response -- Response to the alien -- Corporeal experience between selfhood and otherness -- Thresholds of attention -- Between cultures.

This second edition features a new 48-page Afterword--1980 updating Professor Beardsley's classic work.

According to the free energy principle biological agents resist a tendency to disorder in their interactions with a dynamically changing environment by keeping themselves in sensory and physiological states that are expected given their embodiment and the niche they inhabit :127–138, 2010. doi: 10.1038/nrn2787). Why would a biological agent that aims at minimising uncertainty in its encounters with the world ever be motivated to seek out novelty? Novelty for such an agent would arrive in the form of sensory and physiological (...) states that are unexpected. Such an agent ought therefore to avoid novel and surprising interactions with the world one might think. Yet humans and many other animals find play and other forms of novelty-seeking and exploration hugely rewarding. How can this be understood in frameworks for studying the mind that emphasise prediction error minimisation? This problem has been taken up in recent research concerned with epistemic action—actions an agent engages in to reduce uncertainty. However that work leaves two questions unanswered, which it is the aim of our paper to address. First, no account has been given yet of why it should feel good to the agent to engage the world playfully and with curiosity. Second an appeal is made to precision-estimation to explain epistemic action, yet it remains unclear how precision-weighting works in action more generally, or active inference. We argue that an answer to both questions may lie in the bodily states of an agent that track the rate at which free energy is being reduced. The recent literature on the predictive brain has connected the valence of emotional experiences to the rate of change in the reduction of prediction error :e1003094, 2013. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003094; Van de Cruys, in Metzinger and Wiese Philosophy and predictive processing, vol 24, MIND Group, Frankfurt am Main, 2017. doi: 10.15502/9783958573253). In this literature valenced emotional experiences are hypothesised to be identical with changes in the rate at which prediction error is reduced. Experiences are negatively valenced when overall prediction error increases and are positively valenced when the sum of prediction errors decrease. We offer an ecological-enactive interpretation of the concept of valence and its connection to rate of change of prediction error. We show how rate of change should be understood in terms of embodied states of affordance-related action readiness. We then go on to apply this ecological-enactive account of error dynamics to provide an answer to the first question we have raised: It may explain why it should feel good to an agent to be curious and playful. Our ecological-enactive account also allows us to show how error dynamics may provide an answer to the second question we have raised regarding how precision-weighting works in active inference. An agent that is sensitive to rates of error reduction can tune precision on the fly. We show how this ability to tune precision on the go can allow agents to develop skills for adapting better and better to the unexpected, and search out opportunities for resolving uncertainty and progressing in its learning. (shrink)

A weak version of the life-mind continuity thesis entails that every living system also has a basic mind (with a non-representational form of intentionality). The strong version entails that the same concepts that are sufficient to explain basic minds (with non-representational states) are also central to understanding non-basic minds (with representational states). We argue that recent work on the free energy principle supports the following claims with respect to the life-mind continuity thesis: (i) there is a strong continuity between life (...) and mind; (ii) all living systems can be described as if they had representational states; (iii) the ’as-if representationality’ entailed by the free energy principle is central to understanding both basic forms of intentionality and intentionality in non-basic minds. In addition to this, we argue that the free energy principle also renders realism about computation and representation compatible with a strong life-mind continuity thesis (although the free energy principle does not entail computational and representational realism). In particular, we show how representationality proper can be grounded in ’as-if representationality’. (shrink)

Why are negative emotions so central in art reception far beyond tragedy? Revisiting classical aesthetics in the light of recent psychological research, we present a novel model to explain this much discussed (apparent) paradox. We argue that negative emotions are an important resource for the arts in general, rather than a special license for exceptional art forms only. The underlying rationale is that negative emotions have been shown to be particularly powerful in securing attention, intense emotional involvement, and high memorability, (...) and hence is precisely what artworks strive for. Two groups of processing mechanisms are identified that conjointly adopt the particular powers of negative emotions for art's purposes. The first group consists of psychological distancing mechanisms that are activated along with the cognitive schemata of art, representation, and fiction. These schemata imply personal safety and control over continuing or discontinuing exposure to artworks, thereby preventing negative emotions from becoming outright incompatible with expectations of enjoyment. This distancing sets the stage for a second group of processing components that allow art recipients to positively embrace the experiencing of negative emotions, thereby rendering art reception more intense, more interesting, more emotionally moving, more profound, and occasionally even more beautiful. These components include compositional interplays of positiveandnegative emotions, the effects of aesthetic virtues of using the media of (re)presentation (musical sound, words/language, color, shapes) on emotion perception, and meaning-making efforts. Moreover, our Distancing-Embracing model proposes that concomitant mixed emotions often help integrate negative emotions into altogether pleasurable trajectories. (shrink)

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, (...) structural, content-related and functional aspects, respectively. The various ways that these different aspects matter in arriving at representational or non-representational interpretations of the Free Energy Principle are discussed. We also discuss how the Free Energy Principle may be seen as a unified view where terms that traditionally belong to different ontologies—e.g., notions of model and expectation versus notions of autopoiesis and synchronization—can be harmonized. However, rather than attempting to settle the representationalist versus non-representationalist debate and reveal something about what representations are simpliciter, this paper demonstrates how the Free Energy Principle may be used to reveal something about those partaking in the debate; namely, what our hidden assumptions about what representations are—assumptions that act as sometimes antithetical starting points in this persistent philosophical debate. (shrink)

Based on the belief that computational modeling (thinking in terms of representation and computations) can help to clarify controversial issues in emotion theory, this article examines emotional experience from the perspective of the Computational Belief–Desire Theory of Emotion (CBDTE), a computational explication of the belief–desire theory of emotion. It is argued that CBDTE provides plausible answers to central explanatory challenges posed by emotional experience, including: the phenomenal quality,intensity and object-directedness of emotional experience, the function of emotional experience and its relation (...) to cognition and motivation, and the relation between emotional experience and emotion. In addition, CBDTE avoids most objections that have been raised against cognitive theories of emotion. A remaining objection, that beliefs are not necessary for the emotions covered by CBDTE, is rejected as empirically unsupported. (shrink)

Current theories propose that our sense of curiosity is determined by the learning progress or information gain that our cognitive system expects to make. However, few studies have explicitly tried to quantify subjective information gain and link it to measures of curiosity. Here, we asked people to report their curiosity about the intrinsically engaging perceptual ‘puzzles’ known as Mooney images, and to report on the strength of their aha experience upon revealing the solution image (curiosity relief). We also asked our (...) participants (279) to make a guess concerning the solution of the image, and used the distribution of these guesses to compute the crowdsourced semantic entropy (or ambiguity) of the images, as a measure of the potential for information gain. Our results confirm that curiosity and, even more so, aha experience is substantially associated with this semantic information gain measure. These findings support the expected information gain theory of curiosity and suggest that the aha experience or intrinsic reward is driven by the actual information gain. In an unannounced memory part, we also established that the often reported influence of curiosity on memory is fully mediated by the aha experience or curiosity relief. We discuss the implications of our results for the burgeoning fields of curiosity and psychoaesthetics. (shrink)

In this chapter I examine past and recent theories of unconscious inference. Most theorists have ascribed inferences to perception literally, not analogically, and I focus on the literal approach. I examine three problems faced by such theories if their commitment to unconscious inferences is taken seriously. Two problems concern the cognitive resources that must be available to the visual system (or a more central system) to support the inferences in question. The third problem focuses on how the conclusions of inferences (...) are supposed to explain the phenomenal aspects of visual experience, the looks of things. Finally, in comparing past and recent responses to these problems, I provide an assessment of the current prospects for inferential theories. (This paper is reprinted in Hatfield 2009, Perception and Cognition: Essays in the Philosophy of Psychology, Clarendon Press, 124-152.). (shrink)

Because little is known about the human trait of affiliation, we provide a novel neurobehavioral model of affiliative bonding. Discussion is organized around processes of reward and memory formation that occur during approach and consummatory phases of affiliation. Appetitive and consummatory reward processes are mediated independently by the activity of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine (DA)–nucleus accumbens shell (NAS) pathway and the central corticolimbic projections of the u-opiate system of the medial basal arcuate nucleus, respectively, although these two projection (...) systems functionally interact across time. We next explicate the manner in which DA and glutamate interact in both the VTA and NAS to form incentive-encoded contextual memory ensembles that are predictive of reward derived from affiliative objects. Affiliative stimuli, in particular, are incorporated within contextual ensembles predictive of affiliative reward via: (a) the binding of affiliative stimuli in the rostral circuit of the medial extended amygdala and subsequent transmission to the NAS shell; (b) affiliative stimulus-induced opiate potentiation of DA processes in the VTA and NAS; and (c) permissive or facilitatory effects of gonadal steroids, oxytocin (in interaction with DA), and vasopressin on (i) sensory, perceptual, and attentional processing of affiliative stimuli and (ii) formation of social memories. Among these various processes, we propose that the capacity to experience affiliative reward via opiate functioning has a disproportionate weight in determining individual differences in affiliation. We delineate sources of these individual differences, and provide the first human data that support an association between opiate functioning and variation in trait affiliation. Key Words: affiliation corticolimbic-striatal networks; appetitive and consummatory reward; dopamine; oxytocin; personality; social bonds; social memory; u-opiates. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 15-30, January 2022. We offer an account of mental health and well-being using the predictive processing framework. According to this framework, the difference between mental health and psychopathology can be located in the goodness of the predictive model as a regulator of action. What is crucial for avoiding the rigid patterns of thinking, feeling and acting associated with psychopathology is the regulation of action based on the valence of affective states. In PPF, valence (...) is modelled as error dynamics—the change in prediction errors over time. Our aim in this paper is to show how error dynamics can account for both momentary happiness and longer term well-being. What will emerge is a new neurocomputational framework for making sense of human flourishing. (shrink)

Uncertainty and affect are fundamental and interrelated aspects of the human condition. Uncertainty is often associated with negative affect, but in some circumstances it is associated with positive affect. In this paper, we review different explanations for the varying relationship between uncertainty and affect. We identify “mental simulation” as a key process that links uncertainty to affective states. We suggest that people have a propensity to simulate negative outcomes, which results in a propensity towards negative affective responses to uncertainty. We (...) also propose the existence of several important moderators of this process, including context and individual differences such as uncertainty tolerance, as well as emotion regulation strategies. Finally, we highlight important knowledge gaps and promising areas for future research, both empirical and conceptual, to further elucidate the relationship between uncertainty and affect. (shrink)