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65Enaction: 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
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404Extensive 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
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83Multiscale integration: beyond internalism and externalismSynthese 198 (Suppl 1): 41-70. 2019.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
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34An 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
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32Between pebbles and organisms: weaving autonomy into the Markov blanketSynthese 199 (3-4): 6623-6644. 2021.The free energy principle is sometimes put forward as accounting for biological self-organization and cognition. It states that for a system to maintain non-equilibrium steady-state with its environment it can be described as minimising its free energy. It is said to be entirely scale-free, applying to anything from particles to organisms, and interactive machines, spanning from the abiotic to the biotic. Because the FEP is so general in its application, one might wonder whether this framework c…Read more
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22A universal ethology challenge to the free energy principle: species of inference and good regulatorsBiology and Philosophy 36 (2): 1-24. 2021.The free energy principle (FEP) portends to provide a unifying principle for the biological and cognitive sciences. It states that for a system to maintain non-equilibrium steady-state with its environment it must minimise its (information-theoretic) free energy. Under the FEP, to minimise free energy is equivalent to engaging in approximate Bayesian inference. According to the FEP, therefore, inference is at the explanatory base of biology and cognition. In this paper, we discuss a specific cha…Read more
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41Attuning to the World: The Diachronic Constitution of the Extended Conscious MindFrontiers in Psychology 11. 2020.
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88How 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
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177Predictive processing, perceiving and imagining: Is to perceive to imagine, or something close to it?Philosophical Studies 175 (3): 751-767. 2018.This paper examines the relationship between perceiving and imagining on the basis of predictive processing models in neuroscience. Contrary to the received view in philosophy of mind, which holds that perceiving and imagining are essentially distinct, these models depict perceiving and imagining as deeply unified and overlapping. It is argued that there are two mutually exclusive implications of taking perception and imagination to be fundamentally unified. The view defended is what I dub the e…Read more
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161Autopoiesis, free energy, and the life–mind continuity thesisSynthese 195 (6): 2519-2540. 2018.The life–mind continuity thesis is difficult to study, especially because the relation between life and mind is not yet fully understood, and given that there is still no consensus view neither on what qualifies as life nor on what defines mind. Rather than taking up the much more difficult task of addressing the many different ways of explaining how life relates to mind, and vice versa, this paper considers two influential accounts addressing how best to understand the life–mind continuity thes…Read more