How to entrain your evil demon

The notion that the brain is a prediction error minimizer entails, via the notion of Markov blankets and self-evidencing, a form of global scepticism — an inability to rule out evil demon scenarios. This type of scepticism is viewed by some as a sign of a fatally flawed conception of mind and cognition. Here I discuss whether this scepticism is ameliorated by acknowledging the role of action in the most ambitious approach to prediction error minimization, namely under the free energy principle. I argue that the scepticism remains but that the role of action in the free energy principle constrains the demon’s work. This yields new insights about the free energy principle, epistemology, and the place of mind in nature

An Enactive Theory of Need Satisfaction

In this paper, based on the predictive processing approach to cognition, an enactive theory of need satisfaction is discussed. The theory can be seen as a first step towards a computational cognitive model of need satisfaction

Attention and Conscious Perception in the Hypothesis Testing Brain

Conscious perception and attention are difficult to study, partly because their relation to each other is not fully understood. Rather than conceiving and studying them in isolation from each other it may be useful to locate them in an independently motivated, general framework, from which a principled account of how they relate can then emerge. Accordingly, these mental phenomena are here reviewed through the prism of the increasingly influential predictive coding framework. On this framework, conscious perception can be seen as the upshot of prediction error minimization and attention as the optimization of precision expectations during such perceptual inference. This approach maps on well to a range of standard characteristics of conscious perception and attention, and can be used to interpret a range of empirical findings on their relation to each other

The neural organ explains the mind

The free energy principle says that organisms act to maintain themselves in their expected states and that they achieve this by minimizing their free energy. This corresponds to the brain’s job of minimizing prediction error, selective sampling of sensory data, optimizing expected precisions, and minimizing complexity of internal models. These in turn map on to perception, action, attention, and model selection, respectively. This means that the free energy principle is extremely ambitious: it aims to explain everything about the mind. The principle is bound to be controversial, and hostage to empirical fortune. It may also be thought preposterous: the theory may seem either too ambitious or too trivial to be taken seriously. This chapter introduces the ideas behind the free energy principle and then proceeds to discuss the charge of preposterousness from the perspective of philosophy of science. It is shown that whereas it is ambitious, controversial and needs further evidence in its favour, it is not preposterous. The argument proceeds by appeal to: (i) the notion of inference to the best explanation, (ii) a comparison with the theory of evolution, (iii) the notion of explaining-away, and (iv) a “biofunctionalist” account of Bayesian processing. The heuristic starting point is the simple idea that the brain is just one among our bodily organs, each of which has an overall function. The outcome is not just a defence of the free energy principle against various challenges but also a deeper anchoring of this theory in philosophy of science, yielding an appreciation of the kind of explanation of the mind it offers

Social cognition as causal inference: implications for common knowledge and autism

This chapter explores the idea that the need to establish common knowledge is one feature that makes social cognition stand apart in important ways from cognition in general. We develop this idea on the background of the claim that social cognition is nothing but a type of causal inference. We focus on autism as our test-case, and propose that a specific type of problem with common knowledge processing is implicated in challenges to social cognition in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This problem has to do with the individual’s assessment of the reliability of messages that are passed between people as common knowledge emerges. The proposal is developed on the background of our own empirical studies and outlines different ways common knowledge might be comprised. We discuss what these issues may tell us about ASD, about the relation between social and non-social cognition, about social objects, and about the dynamics of social networks

Explaining Away the Body: Experiences of Supernaturally Caused Touch and Touch on Non-Hand Objects within the Rubber Hand Illusion

In rubber hand illusions and full body illusions, touch sensations are projected to non-body objects such as rubber hands, dolls or virtual bodies. The robustness, limits and further perceptual consequences of such illusions are not yet fully explored or understood. A number of experiments are reported that test the limits of a variant of the rubber hand illusion.A variant of the rubber hand illusion is explored, in which the real and foreign hands are aligned in personal space. The presence of the illusion is ascertained with participants' scores and temperature changes of the real arm. This generates a basic illusion of touch projected to a foreign arm. Participants are presented with further, unusual visuotactile stimuli subsequent to onset of the basic illusion. Such further visuotactile stimulation is found to generate very unusual experiences of supernatural touch and touch on a non-hand object. The finding of touch on a non-hand object conflicts with prior findings, and to resolve this conflict a further hypothesis is successfully tested: that without prior onset of the basic illusion this unusual experience does not occur.A rubber hand illusion is found that can arise when the real and the foreign arm are aligned in personal space. This illusion persists through periods of no tactile stimulation and is strong enough to allow very unusual experiences of touch felt on a cardboard box and experiences of touch produced at a distance, as if by supernatural causation. These findings suggest that one's visual body image is explained away during experience of the illusion and they may be of further importance to understanding the role of experience in delusion formation. The findings of touch on non-hand objects may help reconcile conflicting results in this area of research. In addition, new evidence is provided that relates to the recently discovered psychologically induced temperature changes that occur during the illusion