Papers by Julian Kiverstein
Philosophia Scientae
Des figures centrales de la tradition phénoménologique, telles qu'Aron Gurwitsch, Jean-Paul Sartr... more Des figures centrales de la tradition phénoménologique, telles qu'Aron Gurwitsch, Jean-Paul Sartre et Maurice Merleau-Ponty, se sont largement inspirées de la psychologie de la gestalt dans leurs écrits. Le dialogue entre la phénoménologie et la psychologie qu'ils ont entamé se poursuit aujourd'hui dans le domaine des sciences cognitives incarnées. Nous reprenons cette conversation à partir de la riche analyse phénoménologique de la perception du monde culturel réalisée par Aron Gurwitsch. Ses descriptions phénoménologiques de la perception du monde culturel ressemblent de façon frappante aux travaux de la science cognitive incarnée qui s'inspirent de la psychologie écologique de Gibson. Gibson a inventé le terme « affordance » pour désigner les possibilités d'action qui peuvent être directement perçues par les personnes [Gibson 1979]. Cependant, dès ses premiers écrits, Gibson a fait une distinction entre une forme de perception universelle, strictement individuelle et non sociale, et une perception du monde soumise à des influences sociales et culturelles. Nous utilisons Gurwitsch pour argumenter contre la compréhension individualiste de la perception directe de Gibson. Chaque affordance qui peut être sélectionnée comme objet de perception se réfère à un contexte socioculturel plus large, que Gurwitsch a appelé un « ordre d'existence ». Nous terminons notre article en abordant la question de la relation entre la description phénoménologique du monde perceptif et les explications de l'expérience perceptive fournies par la science cognitive incarnée.
Synthese, 2017
According to the free energy principle biological agents resist a tendency to disorder in their i... more According to the free energy principle biological agents resist a tendency to disorder in their interactions with a dynamically changing environment by keeping themselves in sensory and physiological states that are expected given their embodiment and the niche they inhabit (
Frontiers in Neurorobotics
Biological agents can act in ways that express a sensitivity to context-dependent relevance. So f... more Biological agents can act in ways that express a sensitivity to context-dependent relevance. So far it has proven difficult to engineer this capacity for context-dependent sensitivity to relevance in artificial agents. We give this problem the label the “problem of meaning”. The problem of meaning could be circumvented if artificial intelligence researchers were to design agents based on the assumption of the continuity of life and mind. In this paper, we focus on the proposal made by enactive cognitive scientists to design artificial agents that possess sensorimotor autonomy—stable, self-sustaining patterns of sensorimotor interaction that can ground values, norms and goals necessary for encountering a meaningful environment. More specifically, we consider whether the Free Energy Principle (FEP) can provide formal tools for modeling sensorimotor autonomy. There is currently no consensus on how to understand the relationship between enactive cognitive science and the FEP. However, a...
Naturalists and Phenomenologists have contrasting conceptions of philosophy and its purpose. The ... more Naturalists and Phenomenologists have contrasting conceptions of philosophy and its purpose. The naturalist takes philosophy to be a discipline that is continuous with the natural sciences, while phenomenology defines itself by its opposition to such a view of philosophy. My thesis project argues that this opposition is unfounded. The phenomenologist takes the world we consciously experience to be a world of subjective facts. My thesis begins by introducing the phenomenologist's conception of a subjective fact. I call a situation "a subjective fact" when it essentially involves a subject of experience. I go on to explain why phenomenologists thought the world we experience is a world of subjective facts. Naturalists hold that all facts are objective facts, and it is generally supposed that no fact can be both subjective and objective. I argue that it is the contrast between these two kinds of facts that led phenomenologists to conclude that a naturalistic theory of min...
Emotion Review, 2021
We offer an account of mental health and well-being using the predictive processing framework (PP... more We offer an account of mental health and well-being using the predictive processing framework (PPF). According to this framework, the difference between mental health and psychopathology can be located in the goodness of the predictive model as a regulator of action. What is crucial for avoiding the rigid patterns of thinking, feeling and acting associated with psychopathology is the regulation of action based on the valence of affective states. In PPF, valence is modelled as error dynamics—the change in prediction errors over time . Our aim in this paper is to show how error dynamics can account for both momentary happiness and longer term well-being. What will emerge is a new neurocomputational framework for making sense of human flourishing.
Bruineberg and colleagues' critique of Friston blankets relies on what we call the “literalis... more Bruineberg and colleagues' critique of Friston blankets relies on what we call the “literalist fallacy”: the assumption that in order for Friston blankets to represent real boundaries, biological systems must literally possess or instantiate Markov blankets. We argue that it is important to distinguish a realist view of Friston blankets from the literalist view Bruineberg and colleagues critique
Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2022
This paper aims to provide a theoretical framework for explaining the subjective character of pai... more 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 proposes to explain pain in terms of processes distributed across the whole body. The prediction error minimising system that generates pain experience comprises the immune system, the endocrine system, and the autonomic system in continuous causal interaction with pathways spread across the whole neural axis. We will argue that these systems function in a coordinated and coherent manner as a single complex adaptive system to maintain homeostasis. This system, which we refer to as the neural-endocr...
Disagreement about how best to think of the relation between theories and the realities they repr... more Disagreement about how best to think of the relation between theories and the realities they represent has a longstanding and venerable history. We take up this debate in relation to the free energy principle (FEP) a contemporary framework in computational neuroscience, theoretical biology and the philosophy of cognitive science. The FEP is very ambitious, extending from the brain sciences to the biology of self-organisation. In this context, some find apparent discrepancies between the map (the FEP) and the territory (target systems) a compelling reason to defend instrumentalism about the FEP. We take this to be misguided. We identify an important fallacy made by those defending instrumentalism about the FEP. We call it the literalist fallacy: this is the fallacy of inferring the truth of instrumentalism based on the claim that the properties of FEP models do not literally map onto real-world, target systems. We conclude that scientific realism about the FEP is a live and tenable o...
Synthese, 2021
In everyday situations, and particularly in some sport and working contexts, humans face an inher... more In everyday situations, and particularly in some sport and working contexts, humans face an inherently unpredictable and uncertain environment. All sorts of unpredictable and unexpected things happen but typically people are able to skillfully adapt. In this paper, we address two key questions in cognitive science. First, how is an agent able to bring its previously learned skill to bear on a novel situation? Second, how can an agent be both sensitive to the particularity of a given situation, while remaining flexibly poised for many other possibilities for action? We will argue that both the sensitivity to novel situations and the sensitivity to a multiplicity of action possibilities are enabled by the property of skilled agency that we will call metastable attunement. We characterize a skilled agent’s flexible interactions with a dynamically changing environment in terms of metastable dynamics in agent-environment systems. What we find in metastability is the realization of two co...
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2007
How can we disentangle the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness from the neural machinery of ... more How can we disentangle the neural basis of phenomenal consciousness from the neural machinery of the cognitive access that underlies reports of phenomenal consciousness? We see the problem in stark form if we ask how we can tell whether representations inside a Fodorian module are phenomenally conscious. The methodology would seem straightforward: Find the neural natural kinds that are the basis of phenomenal consciousness in clear cases – when subjects are completely confident and we have no reason to doubt their authority – and look to see whether those neural natural kinds exist within Fodorian modules. But a puzzle arises: Do we include the machinery underlying reportability within the neural natural kinds of the clear cases? If the answer is “Yes,” then there can be no phenomenally conscious representations in Fodorian modules. But how can we know if the answer is “Yes”? The suggested methodology requires an answer to the question it was supposed to answer! This target article ...
Synthese, 2016
In this paper, we argue for a theoretical separation of the free-energy principle from Helmholtzi... more In this paper, we argue for a theoretical separation of the free-energy principle from Helmholtzian accounts of the predictive brain. The free-energy principle is a theoretical framework capturing the imperative for biological self-organization in information-theoretic terms. The free-energy principle has typically been connected with a Bayesian theory of predictive coding, and the latter is often taken to support a Helmholtzian theory of perception as unconscious inference. If our interpretation is right, however, a Helmholtzian view of perception is incompatible with Bayesian predictive coding under the free-energy principle. We argue that the free energy principle and the ecological and enactive approach to mind and life make for a much happier marriage of ideas. We make our argument based on three points. First we argue that the free energy principle applies to the whole animal-environment system, and not only to the brain. Second, we show that active inference, as understood by the free-energy principle, is incompatible with unconscious inference understood as
Open Research Europe
There is a difference between the activities of two or more individuals that are performed jointl... more There is a difference between the activities of two or more individuals that are performed jointly such as playing music in a band or dancing as a couple, and performing these same activities alone. This difference is sometimes captured by appealing to shared or joint intentions that allow individuals to coordinate what they do over space and time. In what follows we will use the terminology of we-intentionality to refer to what individuals do when they engage in group ways of thinking, feeling and acting. Our aim in this paper is to argue that we-intentionality is best understood in relation to a shared living environment in which acting individuals are situated. By the “living environment” we mean to refer to places and everyday situations in which humans act. These places and situations are simultaneously social, cultural, material and natural. We will use the term “affordance” to refer to the possibilities for action the living environment furnishes. Affordances form and are mai...
Depersonalisation is a common dissociative experience characterised by distressing feelings of be... more Depersonalisation is a common dissociative experience characterised by distressing feelings of being detached or ‘estranged’ from one’s self and body and/or the world. The COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of people to socially distance from others and to change life habits. We have conducted an online study on 622 participants worldwide to investigate the relationship between digital media-based activities and distal social interactions in influencing peoples’ sense of self during the lockdown as opposed to before the pandemic. We found that increased use of digital media-based activities and online social e-meetings correlated with higher feelings of depersonalisation. We also found that people reporting higher experiences of depersonalisation also reported enhanced vividness of negative emotions (as opposed to positive emotions). Our study also reveals a weak negative correlation between the frequency of physical exercise during the lockdown and the occurrence of depersonalisatio...
In this article, we argue that a predictive processing framework may provide elements for a proxi... more In this article, we argue that a predictive processing framework may provide elements for a proximate model of play in children and adults. We propose that play is a behaviour in which the agent, in contexts of freedom from the demands of certain competing cognitive systems, deliberately seeks out or creates surprising situations that gravitate towards sweet-spots of relative complexity with the goal of resolving surprise. We further propose that play is experientially associated with a feel-good quality because the agent is reducing surprise faster than expected.We argue that this framework can unify a range of well-established findings in play and developmental research that highlights the role of play in learning, and that casts children as Bayesian learners. The theory integrates the role of positive valence in play (i.e., explaining why play is fun); and what it is to be in a playful mood. Central to the account is the idea that playful agents may create and establish an enviro...
Frontiers in Psychology
It is a near consensus among materialist philosophers of mind that consciousness must somehow be ... more It is a near consensus among materialist philosophers of mind that consciousness must somehow be constituted by internal neural processes, even if we remain unsure quite how this works. Even friends of the extended mind theory have argued that when it comes to the material substrate of conscious experience, the boundary of skin and skull is likely to prove somehow to be privileged. Such arguments have, however, typically conceived of the constitution of consciousness in synchronic terms, making a firm separation between proximate mechanisms and their ultimate causes. We argue that the processes involved in the constitution of some conscious experiences are diachronic, not synchronic. We focus on what we call phenomenal attunement in this paper-the feeling of being at home in a familiar, culturally constructed environment. Such a feeling is missing in cases of culture shock. Phenomenal attunement is a structure of our conscious experience of the world that is ubiquitous and taken for granted. We will argue that it is constituted by cycles of embodied and world-involving engagement whose dynamics are constrained by cultural practices. Thus, it follows that an essential structure of the conscious mind, the absence of which profoundly transforms conscious experience, is extended.
Frontiers in Psychology
In the last 50 years, discussions of how to understand disability have been dominated by the medi... more In the last 50 years, discussions of how to understand disability have been dominated by the medical and social models. Paradoxically, both models overlook the disabled person’s experience of the lived body, thus reducing the body of the disabled person to a physiological body. In this article we introduce what we call the Ecological-Enactive (EE) model of disability. The EE-model combines ideas from enactive cognitive science and ecological psychology with the aim of doing justice simultaneously to the lived experience of being disabled, and the physiological dimensions of disability. More specifically, we put the EE model to work to disentangle the concepts of disability and pathology. We locate the difference between pathological and normal forms of embodiment in the person’s capacity to adapt to changes in the environment. To ensure that our discussion remains in contact with lived experience, we draw upon phenomenological interviews we have carried out with people with Cerebral Palsy.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Veissière and colleagues make a valiant attempt at reconciling an internalist account of implicit... more Veissière and colleagues make a valiant attempt at reconciling an internalist account of implicit cultural learning with an externalist account that understands social behaviour in terms of its environment-involving dynamics. However, unfortunately the author's attempt to forge a middle way between internalism and externalism fails. We argue their failure stems from the overly individualistic understanding of the perception of cultural affordances they propose.
Synthese
Radical empiricists at the turn of the twentieth century described organisms as experiencing the ... more Radical empiricists at the turn of the twentieth century described organisms as experiencing the relations they maintain with their surroundings prior to any analytic separation from their environment. They notably avoided separating perception of the material environment from social life. This perspective on perceptual experience was to prove the inspiration for Gibson’s ecological approach to perceptual psychology. Gibson provided a theory of how the direct perception of the organism-environment relation is possible. Central to his account was the notion of a medium for direct perception. However Gibson provided two mutually inconsistent accounts of the medium leading to problems for his radical empiricism. We develop an account of the medium that does justice to ecological psychology’s radical empiricist roots. To complement this account of the medium we detail a usage-based account of information. Together they allow us to propose a novel radical empiricist view of direct percep...
Synthese
Cognition has traditionally been understood in terms of internal mental representations, and comp... more Cognition has traditionally been understood in terms of internal mental representations, and computational operations carried out on internal mental representations. Radical approaches propose to reconceive cognition in terms of agent-environment dynamics. An outstanding challenge for such a philosophical project is how to scale-up from perception and action to cases of what is typically called ‘higher-order’ cognition such as linguistic thought, the case we focus on in this paper. Perception and action are naturally described in terms of agent-environment dynamics, but can a person’s thoughts about absent, abstract or counterfactual states of affairs also be accounted for in such terms? We argue such a question will seem pressing so long as one fails to appreciate how richly resourceful the human ecological niche is in terms of the affordances it provides. The explanatory work that is supposedly done by mental representations in a philosophical analysis of cognition, can instead be...
Brain and Cognition
In this paper we show how addiction can be thought of as the outcome of learning. We look to the ... more In this paper we show how addiction can be thought of as the outcome of learning. We look to the increasingly influential predictive processing theory for an account of how learning can go wrong in addiction. Perhaps counter intuitively, it is a consequence of this predictive processing perspective on addiction that while the brain plays a deep and important role in leading a person into addiction, it cannot be the whole story. We'll argue that predictive processing implies a view of addiction not as a brain disease, but rather as a breakdown in the dynamics of the wider agent-environment system. The environment becomes meaningfully organised around the agent's drug-seeking and using behaviours. Our account of addiction offers a new perspective on what is harmful about addiction. Philosophers often characterise addiction as a mental illness because addicts irrationally shift in their judgement of how they should act based on cues that predict drug use. We argue that predictive processing leads to a different view of what can go wrong in addiction. We suggest that addiction can prove harmful to the person because as their addiction progressively takes hold, the addict comes to embody a predictive model of the environment that fails to adequately attune them to a volatile, dynamic environment. The use of an addictive substance produces illusory feedback of being well-attuned to the environment when the reality is the opposite. This can be comforting for a person inhabiting a hostile niche, but it can also prove to be harmful to the person as they become skilled at living the life of an addict, to the neglect of all other alternatives. The harm in addiction we'll argue is not to be found in the brains of addicts, but in their way of life.
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Papers by Julian Kiverstein