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

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

Delusions, Illusions and Inference under Uncertainty

Three challenges to a unified understanding of delusions emerge from Radden’s On Delusion (2011). Here, I propose that to respond to these challenges, and to work towards a unifying framework for delusions, we should see delusions as arising in inference under uncertainty. This proposal is based on the observation that delusions in key respects are surprisingly like perceptual illusions, and it is developed further by focusing particularly on individual differences in uncertainty expectations. 1

The Experience of Mental Causation

ABSTRACT: Most of us have a very firm belief in mental causation; that is, we firmly believe that our own distinctly mental properties are causally efficacious in the production of our behavior. This belief is dominating in contemporary philosophy of mind as a part of the causal explanatory exclusion problem for non-reductive materialists. I do not discuss the exclusion problem; rather, I assess the conception of mental causation that is presupposed in the current debate. I propose that in order to make sense of our firm belief in mental causation we need to operate with a broader conception of it than is normally seen, focusing on common-sense aspects concerning the timing, awareness, control, and tracking of mental causation. However, prominent studies in social psychology and cognitive neuroscience show that mental causation is not as self-evident, robust, and pervasive as our firm belief in it would suggest. There is therefore a tension between the common-sense, broad conception of mental causation and our empirical evidence for mental causation. A full defense of mental causation is not just a matter of securing causal efficacy but also of situating our notion of mental properties in relation to difficult issues concerning awareness, control, and judgment