-
17Authors’ Response: Mind Never The Gap, ReduxConstructivist Foundations 11 (2): 370-374. 2016.Upshot: We respond to three main challenges that the commentaries have raised. First, we argue that to deal successfully with the hard problem of consciousness, it is not enough to posit a remedy by which to move beyond the hard problem. Second, we argue that it makes no sense to explain identity. Yet this does not commit us to definitions by fiat. The strategy we pursue here, and in the target article, is not to explain identity but to explain away the appearance of non-identity. Finally, while…Read more
-
41An Embodied Predictive Processing Theory of Pain ExperienceReview of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (4): 973-998. 2022.This paper aims to provide a theoretical framework for explaining the subjective character of pain experience in terms of what we will call ‘embodied predictive processing’. The predictive processing (PP) theory is a family of views that take perception, action, emotion and cognition to all work together in the service of prediction error minimisation. In this paper we propose an embodied perspective on the PP theory we call the ‘embodied predictive processing (EPP) theory. The EPP theory propos…Read more
-
12Plastic People and Distributed Cognitive Agency: Contribution or Compromise?Constructivist Foundations 17 (3): 241-243. 2022.Open peer commentary on the article “A Moving Boundary, a Plastic Core: A Contribution to the Third Wave of Extended-Mind Research” by Timotej Prosen. Abstract: We explore both some novel claims made by Prosen’s account of plastic cores and some overlaps between his and other accounts of third-wave extended mind. In the first instance we discuss whether the Markov blanket formalism should be regarded as incompatible with a third-wave extended view. Secondly, we discuss whether Prosen’s proposal …Read more
-
7Authors’ Response: The Sympoietic Roots of AdaptivityConstructivist Foundations 18 (3): 382-386. 2023.We delineate the distinctness of sympoiesis from adaptive notions of autopoiesis and explain why we see it as helpful to the exploration and explanation of agentive and adaptive cognitive systems.
-
18Beyond Individual-Centred 4E Cognition: Systems Biology and SympoiesisConstructivist Foundations 18 (3): 351-364. 2023.Context: A central motivation behind various embodied, extended, and enactive (4E) approaches to cognition is to ground our understanding of minds and cognition within the biological structures that give rise to life. Because of this, their advocates often claim a natural kinship with dynamical and developmental systems theories. However, these accounts also explicitly or implicitly privilege individual organisms in ways that contrast with many of the insights of systems and developmental system…Read more
-
5Commentary on “Extended Cognition and the Search for the Mark of Constitution – A Promising Strategy?”In Mark-Oliver Casper & Giuseppe Flavio Artese (eds.), Situated Cognition Research: Methodological Foundations, Springer Verlag. pp. 147-153. 2023.The discussion of extended cognition is premised on a metaphysical distinction between causation and constitution. For example, Rowlands (2009) notes that “EM [extended mind] is a claim about the composition or constitution of (some) mental processes” (2009, p. 54). Or, as Wheeler puts it: “Bare causal dependency of mentality on external factors […] is simply not enough for genuine cognitive extension. What is needed is constitutive dependence” (2010, p. 246). In this sense, Krickel (this volume…Read more
-
10Commentary on “Predictive Processing and Extended Consciousness”In Mark-Oliver Casper & Giuseppe Flavio Artese (eds.), Situated Cognition Research: Methodological Foundations, Springer Verlag. pp. 209-216. 2023.We are grateful to Facchin and Negro (henceforth F&N) for their rich and generous engagement with our arguments for the hypothesis of the extended conscious mind (ECM). They offer a careful and insightful reconstruction of the key arguments from our 2019 monograph (Kirchhoff & Kiverstein, 2019a). In the end however they are not persuaded by the arguments of our book and raise a number of intriguing and puzzling challenges. We deal with each of their challenges and conclude that these challenges …Read more
-
11Dissolving the Causal-Constitution Fallacy: Diachronic Constitution and the Metaphysics of Extended CognitionIn Mark-Oliver Casper & Giuseppe Flavio Artese (eds.), Situated Cognition Research: Methodological Foundations, Springer Verlag. pp. 155-173. 2023.This chapter questions the causal-constitution fallacy raised against the extended mind. It does so by presenting our signature temporal thesis about how to understand constitutive relations in the context of the extended mind, and with respect to dynamical systems, more broadly. We call this thesis diachronic constitution. We will argue that temporalising the constitution relation is not as remarkable (nor problematic) as it might initially seem. It is (arguably) inevitable, given local interac…Read more
-
91How to determine the boundaries of the mind: a Markov blanket proposalSynthese 198 (5): 4791-4810. 2019.We develop a truism of commonsense psychology that perception and action constitute the boundaries of the mind. We do so however not on the basis of commonsense psychology, but by using the notion of a Markov blanket originally employed to describe the topological properties of causal networks. We employ the Markov blanket formalism to propose precise criteria for demarcating the boundaries of the mind that unlike other rival candidates for “marks of the cognitive” avoids begging the question in…Read more
-
43Attuning to the World: The Diachronic Constitution of the Extended Conscious MindFrontiers in Psychology 11. 2020.
-
422Extensive enactivism: why keep it all in?Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (706): 102178. 2014.Radical enactive and embodied approaches to cognitive science oppose the received view in the sciences of the mind in denying that cognition fundamentally involves contentful mental representation. This paper argues that the fate of representationalism in cognitive science matters significantly to how best to understand the extent of cognition. It seeks to establish that any move away from representationalism toward pure, empirical functionalism fails to provide a substantive “mark of the cognit…Read more
-
57Breaking boundaries: The Bayesian Brain Hypothesis for perception and predictionConsciousness and Cognition 111 (C): 103510. 2023.
-
28Scientific realism about Friston blankets without literalismBehavioral and Brain Sciences 45. 2022.Bruineberg and colleagues' critique of Friston blankets relies on what we call the “literalist fallacy”: the assumption that in order for Friston blankets to represent real boundaries, biological systems must literally possess or instantiate Markov blankets. We argue that it is important to distinguish a realist view of Friston blankets from the literalist view of Bruineberg and colleagues’ critique.
-
79The Problem of Meaning: The Free Energy Principle and Artificial AgencyFrontiers in Neurorobotic 1. 2022.Biological agents can act in ways that express a sensitivity to context-dependent relevance. So far it has proven difficult to engineer this capacity for context-dependent sensitivity to relevance in artificial agents. We give this problem the label the “problem of meaning”. The problem of meaning could be circumvented if artificial intelligence researchers were to design agents based on the assumption of the continuity of life and mind. In this paper, we focus on the proposal made by enactive c…Read more
-
55The Literalist Fallacy and the Free Energy Principle: Model-Building, Scientific Realism, and InstrumentalismBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.
-
817An Embodied Predictive Processing Theory of PainReview of Philosophy and Psychology 1 (1): 1-26. 2022.This paper aims to provide a theoretical framework for explaining the subjective character of pain experience in terms of what we will call ‘embodied predictive processing’. The predictive processing (PP) theory is a family of views that take perception, action, emotion and cognition to all work together in the service of prediction error minimisation. In this paper we propose an embodied perspective on the PP theory we call the ‘embodied predictive processing (EPP) theory. The EPP theory propos…Read more
-
366Disagreement about how best to think of the relation between theories and the realities they represent has a longstanding and venerable history. We take up this debate in relation to the free energy principle (FEP) - a contemporary framework in computational neuroscience, theoretical biology and the philosophy of cognitive science. The FEP is very ambitious, extending from the brain sciences to the biology of self-organisation. In this context, some find apparent discrepancies between the map (t…Read more
-
1071Free energy: a user’s guideBiology and Philosophy 37 (4): 1-35. 2022.Over the last fifteen years, an ambitious explanatory framework has been proposed to unify explanations across biology and cognitive science. Active inference, whose most famous tenet is the free energy principle, has inspired excitement and confusion in equal measure. Here, we lay the ground for proper critical analysis of active inference, in three ways. First, we give simplified versions of its core mathematical models. Second, we outline the historical development of active inference and its…Read more
-
48It is often argued that constitution and causation are different kinds of metaphysical relations. Constitution, like other grounding relations, is assumed to be synchronic, while causation is diachronic. It is this synchronic-diachronic division that, more than other difference-makers, is argued to distinguish grounding relations such as constitution from causation. This paper develops an account of a species of constitution that happens over time. We call this type of constitution, diachronic c…Read more
-
81Enactive social cognition: Diachronic constitution & coupled anticipationConsciousness and Cognition 70 1-10. 2019.This paper targets the constitutive basis of social cognition. It begins by describing the traditional and still dominant cognitivist view. Cognitivism assumes internalism about the realisers of social cognition; thus, the embodied and embedded elements of intersubjective engagement are ruled out from playing anything but a basic causal role in an account of social cognition. It then goes on to advance and clarify an alternative to the cognitivist view; namely, an enactive account of social cogn…Read more
-
104Extended active inference: Constructing predictive cognition beyond skullsMind and Language 37 (3): 373-394. 2022.Cognitive niche construction is the process whereby organisms create and maintain cause–effect models of their niche as guides for fitness influencing behavior. Extended mind theory claims that cognitive processes extend beyond the brain to include predictable states of the world. Active inference and predictive processing in cognitive science assume that organisms embody predictive (i.e., generative) models of the world optimized by standard cognitive functions (e.g., perception, action, learni…Read more
-
323Breaking explanatory boundaries: flexible borders and plastic mindsPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18 (1): 185-204. 2019.In this paper, we offer reasons to justify the explanatory credentials of dynamical modeling in the context of the metaplasticity thesis, located within a larger grouping of views known as 4E Cognition. Our focus is on showing that dynamicism is consistent with interventionism, and therefore with a difference-making account at the scale of system topologies that makes sui generis explanatory differences to the overall behavior of a cognitive system. In so doing, we provide a general overview of …Read more
-
66Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive SciencePhilosophical Psychology 26 (1): 163-167. 2013.Philosophical Psychology, Volume 0, Issue 0, Page 1-5, Ahead of Print
-
76Material AgencyTechné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 13 (3): 206-220. 2009.This article attempts to articulate a theoretical framework, the target of which is to systematically unearth the conditions validating the ascription of agency to material culture. A wide range of studies, located within the interdisciplinary field known as material culture studies, testify to and aim at (re)uniting the materials of material culture with the notion of agency. In this article the argument is advanced that material entities have agency only if two necessary conditions are met: an…Read more
-
17Dreaming: Ontological and Methodological ConsiderationsConstructivist Foundations 11 (2): 420-423. 2016.Open peer commentary on the article “Exploring the Depth of Dream Experience: The Enactive Framework and Methods for Neurophenomenological Research” by Elizaveta Solomonova & Xin Wei Sha. Upshot: This commentary focuses on an ontological claim made by the authors of this target article: that perceiving, imagining and dreaming are inseparable. It explores how best to understand this “inseparability condition.” It is shown that the evidence needed to justify a strict reading of the inseparability …Read more
-
76Never Mind the Gap: Neurophenomenology, Radical Enactivism, and the Hard Problem of ConsciousnessConstructivist Foundations 11 (2). 2016.Context: Neurophenomenology, as formulated by Varela, offers an approach to the science of consciousness that seeks to get beyond the hard problem of consciousness. There is much to admire in the practical approach to the science of consciousness that neurophenomenology advocates. Problem: Even so, this article argues, the metaphysical commitments of the enterprise require a firmer foundation. The root problem is that neurophenomenology, as classically formulated by Varela, endorses a form of no…Read more
-
167Extended cognition and fixed properties: steps to a third-wave version of extended cognition (review)Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11 (2): 287-308. 2012.This paper explores several paths a distinctive third wave of extended cognition might take. In so doing, I address a couple of shortcomings of first- and second-wave extended cognition associated with a tendency to conceive of the properties of internal and external processes as fixed and non-interchangeable. First, in the domain of cognitive transformation, I argue that a problematic tendency of the complementarity model is that it presupposes that socio-cultural resources augment but do not s…Read more
-
664A New, Better BET: Rescuing and Revising Basic Emotion TheoryFrontiers in Psychology 9 1-12. 2018.Basic Emotion Theory, or BET, has dominated the affective sciences for decades (Ekman, 1972, 1992, 1999; Ekman and Davidson, 1994; Griffiths, 2013; Scarantino and Griffiths, 2011). It has been highly influential, driving a number of empirical lines of research (e.g., in the context of facial expression detection, neuroimaging studies and evolutionary psychology). Nevertheless, BET has been criticized by philosophers, leading to calls for it to be jettisoned entirely (Colombetti, 2014; Hufendiek,…Read more
-
105Enactivism and predictive processing: A non-representational viewPhilosophical Explorations 21 (2): 264-281. 2018.This paper starts by considering an argument for thinking that predictive processing (PP) is representational. This argument suggests that the Kullback–Leibler (KL)-divergence provides an accessible measure of misrepresentation, and therefore, a measure of representational content in hierarchical Bayesian inference. The paper then argues that while the KL-divergence is a measure of information, it does not establish a sufficient measure of representational content. We argue that this follows fro…Read more
-
24Emotions On the Playing FieldIn Massimiliano L. Cappuccio (ed.), Handbook of Embodied Cognition and Sport Psychology, Mit Press. 2019.There is more to skillful performance in sport than technical proficiency. How an athlete feels – whether he or she is confident, elated, nervous or fearful – also matters to how they perform in certain situations. Taking stock of this, some sports psychologists have begun to develop techniques for ensuring more robust, reliable performances by focusing on how athletes respond emotionally to situations while, at the same time, training their action-oriented skills. This chapter adds theoretical…Read more
Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia