Falmer, Brighton, East Sussex, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
  •  187
    Sources of Richness and Ineffability for Phenomenally Conscious States
    with Xu Ji, Eric Elmoznino, George Deane, Guillaume Dumas, Guillaume Lajoie, Jonathan A. Simon, and Yoshua Bengio
    Neuroscience of Consciousness 2024 (1). 2024.
    Conscious states—state that there is something it is like to be in—seem both rich or full of detail and ineffable or hard to fully describe or recall. The problem of ineffability, in particular, is a longstanding issue in philosophy that partly motivates the explanatory gap: the belief that consciousness cannot be reduced to underlying physical processes. Here, we provide an information theoretic dynamical systems perspective on the richness and ineffability of consciousness. In our framework, t…Read more
  •  42
    Personomics: Precision Psychiatry Done Right
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.
  •  58
    From Generative Models to Generative Passages: A Computational Approach to (Neuro) Phenomenology
    with Maxwell J. D. Ramstead, Anil K. Seth, Casper Hesp, Lars Sandved-Smith, Jonas Mago, Michael Lifshitz, Giuseppe Pagnoni, Ryan Smith, Guillaume Dumas, Antoine Lutz, and Karl Friston
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 13 (4): 829-857. 2022.
    This paper presents a version of neurophenomenology based on generative modelling techniques developed in computational neuroscience and biology. Our approach can be described as _computational phenomenology_ because it applies methods originally developed in computational modelling to provide a formal model of the descriptions of lived experience in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy (e.g., the work of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, etc.). The first section presents a brief re…Read more
  •  44
    Autism Spectrum Condition presents a challenge to social and relational accounts of the self, precisely because it is broadly seen as a disorder impacting social relationships. Many influential theories argue that social deficits and impairments of the self are the core problems in ASC. Predictive processing approaches address these based on general purpose neurocognitive mechanisms that are expressed atypically. Here we use the High, Inflexible Precision of Prediction Errors in Autism approach …Read more
  •  34
    A Bayesian model of legal syllogistic reasoning
    Artificial Intelligence and Law 32 (2): 441-462. 2024.
    Bayesian approaches to legal reasoning propose causal models of the relation between evidence, the credibility of evidence, and ultimate hypotheses, or verdicts. They assume that legal reasoning is the process whereby one infers the posterior probability of a verdict based on observed evidence, or facts. In practice, legal reasoning does not operate quite that way. Legal reasoning is also an attempt at inferring applicable rules derived from legal precedents or statutes based on the facts at han…Read more
  •  163
    A World Unto Itself: Human Communication as Active Inference
    with Jared Vasil, Paul B. Badcock, Karl Friston, and Maxwell J. D. Ramstead
    Frontiers in Psychology 11 480375. 2020.
    Recent theoretical work in developmental psychology suggests that humans are predisposed to align their mental states with those of other individuals. One way this manifests is in cooperative communication ; that is, intentional communication aimed at aligning individuals’ mental states with respect to events in their shared environment. This idea has received strong empirical support. The purpose of this paper is to extend this account by proposing an integrative model of the biobehavioral dyna…Read more
  •  1390
    We review some of the main implications of the free-energy principle (FEP) for the study of the self-organization of living systems – and how the FEP can help us to understand (and model) biotic self-organization across the many temporal and spatial scales over which life exists. In order to maintain its integrity as a bounded system, any biological system - from single cells to complex organisms and societies - has to limit the disorder or dispersion (i.e., the long-run entropy) of its constitu…Read more
  •  96
    We present a multiscale integrationist interpretation of the boundaries of cognitive systems, using the Markov blanket formalism of the variational free energy principle. This interpretation is intended as a corrective for the philosophical debate over internalist and externalist interpretations of cognitive boundaries; we stake out a compromise position. We first survey key principles of new radical views of cognition. We then describe an internalist interpretation premised on the Markov blanke…Read more
  •  27
    Markov blankets and the preformationist assumption
    with Mads Dengsø and Ian Robertson
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45. 2022.
    Bruineberg and colleagues argue that a realist interpretation of Markov blankets inadvertently relies upon unfounded assumptions. However, insofar as their diagnosis is accurate, their prescribed instrumentalism may ultimately prove insufficient as a complete remedy. Drawing upon a process-based perspective on living systems, we suggest a potential way to avoid some of the assumptions behind problems described by Bruineberg and colleagues.
  •  33
    The first prior: From co-embodiment to co-homeostasis in early life
    with Anna Ciaunica, Hubert Preissl, and Katerina Fotopoulou
    Consciousness and Cognition 91 (C): 103117. 2021.
  •  112
    Philosophical writings on the free energy principle in the life sciences often give the impression that minimising free energy is sufficient for life. But minimising free energy is not a sufficient condition for life. In fact, one can perfectly well conceive of a system that actively minimises its free energy, and for this very reason moves inexorably towards death. So, where does the assumption of this entailment relation come from? There is indeed an entailment relation, but it goes the other …Read more
  •  133
    Over the last 30 years, representationalist and dynamicist positions in the philosophy of cognitive science have argued over whether neurocognitive processes should be viewed as representational or not. Major scientific and technological developments over the years have furnished both parties with ever more sophisticated conceptual weaponry. In recent years, an enactive generalization of predictive processing – known as active inference – has been proposed as a unifying theory of brain functions…Read more
  •  120
    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
  •  40
    The target article “Thinking Through Other Minds” (TTOM) offered an account of the distinctively human capacity to acquire cultural knowledge, norms, and practices. To this end, we leveraged recent ideas from theoretical neurobiology to understand the human mind in social and cultural contexts. Our aim was bothsynthetic– building an integrative model adequate to account for key features of cultural learning and adaptation; andprescriptive– showing how the tools developed to explain brain dynamic…Read more
  •  28
    Cognitive Gadgetsoffers a new, convincing perspective on the origins of our distinctive cognitive faculties, coupled with a clear, innovative research program. Although we broadly endorse Heyes’ ideas, we raise some concerns about her characterisation of evolutionary psychology and the relationship between biology and culture, before discussing the potential fruits of examining cognitive gadgets through the lens of active inference.
  •  100
    The processes underwriting the acquisition of culture remain unclear. How are shared habits, norms, and expectations learned and maintained with precision and reliability across large-scale sociocultural ensembles? Is there a unifying account of the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of culture? Notions such as “shared expectations,” the “selective patterning of attention and behaviour,” “cultural evolution,” “cultural inheritance,” and “implicit learning” are the main candidates to underpin…Read more
  •  681
    A variational approach to niche construction
    Journals of the Royal Society Interface 15 1-14. 2018.
    In evolutionary biology, niche construction is sometimes described as a genuine evolutionary process whereby organisms, through their activities and regulatory mechanisms, modify their environment such as to steer their own evolutionary trajectory, and that of other species. There is ongoing debate, however, on the extent to which niche construction ought to be considered a bona fide evolutionary force, on a par with natural selection. Recent formulations of the variational free-energy principle…Read more
  •  608
    Autism Spectrum Condition presents a challenge to social and relational accounts of the self, precisely because it is broadly seen as a disorder impacting social relationships. Many influential theories argue that social deficits and impairments of the self are the core problems in ASC. Predictive processing approaches address these based on general purpose neurocognitive mechanisms that are expressed atypically. Here we use the High, Inflexible Precision of Prediction Errors in Autism approach …Read more