Modeling the Model: the World Beyond the Immediate Sensorium (original) (raw)
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Entropy, 2021
Drawing from both enactivist and cognitivist perspectives on mind, I propose that explaining teleological phenomena may require reappraising both “Cartesian theaters” and mental homunculi in terms of embodied self-models (ESMs), understood as body maps with agentic properties, functioning as predictive-memory systems and cybernetic controllers. Quasi-homuncular ESMs are suggested to constitute a major organizing principle for neural architectures due to their initial and ongoing significance for solutions to inference problems in cognitive (and affective) development. Embodied experiences provide foundational lessons in learning curriculums in which agents explore increasingly challenging problem spaces, so answering an unresolved question in Bayesian cognitive science: what are biologically plausible mechanisms for equipping learners with sufficiently powerful inductive biases to adequately constrain inference spaces? Drawing on models from neurophysiology, psychology, and developmental robotics, I describe how embodiment provides fundamental sources of empirical priors (as reliably learnable posterior expectations). If ESMs play this kind of foundational role in cognitive development, then bidirectional linkages will be found between all sensory modalities and frontal-parietal control hierarchies, so infusing all senses with somatic-motoric properties, thereby structuring all perception by relevant affordances, so solving frame problems for embodied agents. Drawing upon the Free Energy Principle and Active Inference framework, I describe a particular mechanism for intentional action selection via consciously imagined (and explicitly represented) goal realization, where contrasts between desired and present states influence ongoing policy selection via predictive coding mechanisms and backward-chained imaginings (as self-realizing predictions). This embodied developmental legacy suggests a mechanism by which imaginings can be intentionally shaped by (internalized) partially-expressed motor acts, so providing means of agentic control for attention, working memory, imagination, and behavior. I further describe the nature(s) of mental causation and self-control, and also provide an account of readiness potentials in Libet paradigms wherein conscious intentions shape causal streams leading to enaction. Finally, I provide neurophenomenological handlings of prototypical qualia including pleasure, pain, and desire in terms of self-annihilating free energy gradients via quasi-synesthetic interoceptive active inference. In brief, this manuscript is intended to illustrate how radically embodied minds may create foundations for intelligence (as capacity for learning and inference), consciousness (as somatically-grounded self-world modeling), and will (as deployment of predictive models for enacting valued goals).
A mathematical model of embodied consciousness
Journal of theoretical biology, 2017
We introduce a mathematical model of embodied consciousness, the Projective Consciousness Model (PCM), which is based on the hypothesis that the spatial field of consciousness (FoC) is structured by a projective geometry and under the control of a process of active inference. The FoC in the PCM combines multisensory evidence with prior beliefs in memory and frames them by selecting points of view and perspectives according to preferences. The choice of projective frames governs how expectations are transformed by consciousness. Violations of expectation are encoded as free energy. Free energy minimization drives perspective taking, and controls the switch between perception, imagination and action. In the PCM, consciousness functions as an algorithm for the maximization of resilience, using projective perspective taking and imagination in order to escape local minima of free energy. The PCM can account for a variety of psychological phenomena: the characteristic spatial phenomenolog...
The Bayesian stance: Equations for ‘as-if’ sensorimotor agency
Adaptive Behavior
The verb 'to do' plays a vital part in our understanding of the world, and it goes hand-in-hand with words such as active, action and agent. But the physical sciences describe only mechanical happenings, not acts. Their theoretical language is, in essence, a strict mathematical formalism applied to the description of variables (usually quantitative ones) that canat least in principle-be measured by mechanical instruments. In such a language, what is the definition of an agent? Of an act? In contrast to previous approaches, which attempt to discriminate between agent and non-agent systems, we pursue a more Dennettian approach that attempts only to characterise the explanatory logic of intentional (agentive) interpretations of a physical system; we wish to do so purely in terms of the formal relations that hold between variables in a dynamical system or stochastic process. Our approach is straightforward: we use Pearl's causal formalism to identify physical variables at the causal boundary between 'agent' and 'environment', and identify these with variables in Bayesian decision theory; this provides a rigorous bridge between mathematical models of physics and mathematical models of rational decision-making.
The cybernetic Bayesian brain: from interoceptive inference to sensorimotor contingencies
2014
Is there a single principle by which neural operations can account for perception, cognition, action, and even consciousness? A strong candidate is now taking shape in the form of "predictive processing". On this theory, brains engage in predictive inference on the causes of sensory inputs by continuous minimization of prediction errors or informational "free energy". Predictive processing can account, supposedly, not only for perception, but also for action and for the essential contribution of the body and environment in structuring sensorimotor interactions. In this paper I draw together some recent developments within predictive processing that involve predictive modelling of internal physiological states (interoceptive inference), and integration with "enactive" and "embodied" approaches to cognitive science (predictive perception of sensorimotor contingencies). The upshot is a development of predictive processing that originates, not in Helmholtzian perception-as-inference, but rather in 20 th-century cybernetic principles that emphasized homeostasis and predictive control. This way of thinking leads to (i) a new view of emotion as active interoceptive inference; (ii) a common predictive framework linking experiences of body ownership, emotion, and exteroceptive perception; (iii) distinct interpretations of active inference as involving disruptive and disambiguatory-not just confirmatory-actions to test perceptual hypotheses; (iv) a neurocognitive operationalization of the "mastery of sensorimotor contingencies" (where sensorimotor contingencies reflect the rules governing sensory changes produced by various actions); and (v) an account of the sense of subjective reality of perceptual contents ("perceptual presence") in terms of the extent to which predictive models encode potential sensorimotor relations (this being "counterfactual richness"). This is rich and varied territory, and surveying its landmarks emphasizes the need for experimental tests of its key contributions.
2019
Enactivists have criticized traditional cognitive science as hamstrung by naïve Cartesian assumptions that mischaracterize minds as analyzable apart from the context of embedded bodies. Indeed, the starting place for understanding minds must be in terms of their evolution and development as control systems for niche-constructing organisms. Here, I will draw from both enactivist and cognitivist perspectives on mind, proposing that an adequate characterization of teleological phenomena may require a reappraisal of mental homunculi as embodied self models (ESMs), understood as body maps with quasi-agentic properties. Further, these homunculi may attain awareness through inner theaters (i.e., generative models of space and causation), with which they experience and modify representational content. In brief, this manuscript is an attempt at unification in cognitive science, endeavoring to show how a radically embodied cybernetic Bayesian brain may create foundations for intelligence, con...
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF EMBODIED COGNITION AND CONSCIOUSNESS
Classical cognitive scientists have operated with a strict separation of cognition from consciousness. At the same time they have attempted to explain consciousness using the same concepts of computation and representation as they employ to explain unconscious cognition. This has led some philosophers to argue that an unbridgeable gap separates sub-personal cognition from first-personal conscious experience. I shall argue that the appearance of such a gap is due to an assumption that classical cognitive science inherits from behaviourism that cognitive processes function independently from consciousness. My aim in this paper will be to argue against this assumption. I will develop an embodied theory of cognitive processes as constituted by temporally extended, skilled and practical engagements with the world. Such a conception of cognitive processes challenges any separation of conscious from non-conscious cognitive processes. It does so by showing how both conscious and non-conscious cognitive processes mutually constrain each other as dynamical processes evolving over different spatial and temporal scales. In virtue of the mutual constraints that hold between conscious and non-conscious cognitive processes, I argue against the view that cognition and consciousness can be separated. I finish up by showing how this move opens the door to a deflation of the hard problem.
Sensorimotor Theory and the Problems of Consciousness
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2017
The sensorimotor theory is an influential account of perception and phenomenal qualities that builds, in an empirically-supported way, on the basic claim that conscious experience is best construed as an attribute of the whole embodied agent’s skill-driven interactions with the environment. This paper, in addition to situating the theory as a response to certain well-known problems of consciousness, develops a sensorimotor account of why we are perceptually conscious rather than not.
The clear and not so clear signatures of perceptual reality in the Bayesian brain
Consciousness and Cognition, 2022
In a Bayesian brain, every perceptual decision will take into account internal priors as well as new incoming evidence. A reality monitoring system—eventually providing the agent us with a subjective sense of reality avoids us them being confused about whether our experience is perceptual or imagined. Yet not all confusions we experience mean that we wonder wonder whether we may be imagining: some confused experiences feel clearly perceptual but still feel not right. What happens in such confused perceptions, and can the Bayesian brain explain this kind of confusion? In this paper, we offer a characterisation of perceptual confusion and argue that it requires our subjective sense of reality to be a composite of several subjective markers, including a categorical one that can clearly identify an experience as perceptual and connecting us to reality. Our composite account makes new predictions regarding the robustness, the non-linear development, and the possible breakdowns of the sense of reality in perception.
Perceptual Presence in the Kuhnian-Popperian Bayesian Brain. A Commentary on Anil K. Seth.
Anil Seth’s target paper connects the framework of PP (predictive processing) and the FEP (free-energy principle) to cybernetic principles. Exploiting an analogy to theory of science, Seth draws a distinction between three types of active inference. The first type involves confirmatory hypothesis-testing. The other types involve seeking disconfirming and disambiguating evidence, respectively. Furthermore, Seth applies PP to various fascinating phenomena, including perceptual presence. In this commentary, I explore how far we can take the analogy between explanation in perception and explanation in science. In the first part, I draw a slightly broader analogy between PP and concepts in theory of science, by asking whether the Bayesian brain is Kuhnian or Popperian. While many aspects of PP are in line with Karl Popper’s falsificationism, other aspects of PP conform to how Thomas Kuhn described scientific revolutions. Thus, there is both a sense in which the Bayesian brain is Kuhnian, and a sense in which it is Popperian. The upshot of these considerations is that falsification in PP can take many different forms. In particular, active inference can be used to falsify a model in more ways than identified by Seth. In the second part of this commentary, I focus on Seth’s PPSMCT (predictive processing account of sensorimotor contingency theory) and its application to perceptual presence, which assigns a crucial role to counterfactual richness. In my discussion, I question the significance of counterfactual richness for perceptual presence. First, I highlight an ambiguity inherent in Seth’s descriptions of the target phenomenon (perceptual presence vs. objecthood). Then I suggest that counterfactual richness may not be the crucial underlying feature (of either perceptual presence of objecthood). Giving a series of examples, I argue that the degree of represented causal integration is an equally good candidate for accounting for perceptual presence (or objecthood), although more work needs to be done.
Editorial: Predictive Processing and Consciousness
Review of Philosophy and Psychology
Predictive Processing (henceforth PP) is a recent, exciting framework emerging at the crossroads of cognitive science, statistical modeling and philosophy of mind (Friston 2005, 2010). Informed by recent developments in computational neuroscience and Bayesian psychology, it offers a paradigm shifting approach to studying cognition, often being presented as "the first truly unifying account of perception, cognition and action" (Clark 2015, p. 2). Its highly ambitious character is expressed in Jakob Hohwy's statement that it postulates only one mechanism which has the potential to "explain perception and action and everything mental in between" (Hohwy, 2013, p. 1). The account has already been successfully applied to a rich variety of mental phenomena, but only recently have philosophers and psychologists begun to apply it to one of the more mysterious aspects of mind, namely, consciousness. This special issue assembles some of the leading experts on the predictive processing paradigm and discusses some of its prospects and problems in this regard. In this introduction, we first sketch the explanatory framework and introduce some of the key recurring notions in this context. We then lay out some of the tasks arising from the goal of addressing consciousness with it, distinguishing those pertaining to different aspects (or kinds or concepts) of consciousness. We then provide an overview of the main ideas of the papers.