I draw on work by John Perry to argue that the standard predictive processing theory of attention (SPPA) has the surprising consequence that any agent endowed with a predictive architecture and the capacity for attention can explicitly represent itself qua agent. I argue that this consequence presents us with a hard choice among four competing theoretical options: (1) preserve our intuitions about the self-representational capacities of non-human organisms and reject SPPA, (2) abandon our intuit…
Read moreI draw on work by John Perry to argue that the standard predictive processing theory of attention (SPPA) has the surprising consequence that any agent endowed with a predictive architecture and the capacity for attention can explicitly represent itself qua agent. I argue that this consequence presents us with a hard choice among four competing theoretical options: (1) preserve our intuitions about the self-representational capacities of non-human organisms and reject SPPA, (2) abandon our intuitions and preserve SPPA, (3) preserve our intuitions and preserve SPPA, but reject Perry’s theory of self-knowledge, or (4) preserve our intuitions, preserve SPPA, and preserve Perry’s theory, but qualify predictive processing such that not all adaptive self-organizing systems are PP agents.
