The paper assumes a fundamental difference between the study of consciousness and the study of intelligence and cognition more widely construed. I question this assumption, drawing on work by the (badly named) "illusionists." Once we see past the illusions, the landscape looks different, although Seth's core conclusions (about the importance of living organisations) might still obtain.
Mismatches between perceived and veridical physiological signals during false feedback (FFB) can bias emotional judgements. Paradigms using auditory FFB suggest perceived changes in heart rate (HR) increase ratings of emotional intensity irrespective of feedback type (increased or decreased HR), implicating right anterior insula as a mismatch comparator between exteroceptive and interoceptive...
This article applies the thesis of the extended mind to ambient smart environments. These systems are characterised by an environment, such as a home or classroom, infused with multiple, highly networked streams of smart technology working in the background, learning about the user and operating without an explicit interface or any intentional sensorimotor engagement from the user. We analyse...
If we consider the kinds of intelligence generated by brain-body-environment systems, then such emergent minds may be vaster still in terms of their complex combinatorics, with the pinnacle of expressive power potentially being found in language with its “infinite use of finite means”. The field of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) seeks to reproduce the powers of biological...
Predictive Processing (henceforth PP) is a recent, exciting framework emerging at the crossroads of cognitive science, statistical modeling and philosophy of mind (Friston 2005(Friston , 2010)).Informed by recent developments in computational neuroscience and Bayesian psychology, it offers a paradigm shifting approach to studying cognition, often being presented as "the first truly unifying...
Cognitive niche construction is the process whereby organisms create and maintain cause-effect models of their niche as guides for fitness influencing behavior. Extended mind theory claims that cognitive processes extend beyond the brain to include predictable states of the world. Active inference and predictive processing in cognitive science assume that organisms embody predictive (i.e.,...
The Predictive Processing (PP) framework casts the brain as a probabilistic prediction engine that continually generates predictions of the causal structure of the world in order to construct for itself, from the top down, incoming sensory signals. Conceiving of the brain in this way has yielded incredible explanatory power, offering what many believe to be our first glimpse at a unified theory...
Recent work in cognitive and computational neuroscience depicts the human brain as a complex, multi-layer prediction engine. This family of models has had great success in accounting for a wide variety of phenomena involving perception, action, and attention. But despite their clear promise as accounts of the neurocomputational origins of perceptual experience, they have not yet been leveraged...
Howhy (Hohwy 2016, Hohwy 2017) argues there is a tension between the free energy principle and leading depictions of mind as embodied, enactive, and extended (so-called ‘EEE cognition’). The tension is traced to the importance, in free energy formulations, of a conception of mind and agency that depends upon the presence of a ‘Markov blanket’ Andrey Markov demarcating the agent from the...
The Bounds of Cognition, by Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008. Pp. xiii + 197. H/b £50.00/$78.95, P/b £19.99/$29.95. Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind, by Robert D. Rupert. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii + 268. H/b £37.50/$55.00, P/b £18.99/$29.95. Where in physical space lies the machinery of mind and cognition? Is mind all ‘in...
This chapter analyzes the movie Memento and how the questions it poses is analogous with the essay “The Extended Mind.” The essay claims that mental states, including states of believing, could be grounded in physical traces that remained firmly outside the mind, as long as a few simple conditions are met. This chapter attempts to answer objections to this argument—especially those focusing on...
Is consciousness all in the head, or might the minimal physical substrate for some forms of conscious experience include the goings on in the (rest of the) body and the world? Such a view might be dubbed (by analogy with Clark and Chalmers’s (1998) claims concerning ‘the extended mind’) ‘the extended conscious mind’. In this article, I review a variety of arguments for the extended conscious...
Much recent work stresses the role of embodiment and action in thought and reason, and celebrates the power of transmitted cultural and environmental structures to transform the problem-solving activity required of individual brains. By apparent contrast, much work in evolutionary psychology has stressed the selective fit of the biological brain to an ancestral environment of evolutionary...
A suitable project for the new Millenium is to radically reconfigure our image of human rationality. Such a project is already underway, within the Cognitive Sciences, under the umbrellas of work in Situated Cognition, Distributed and De‐centralized Cognition, Real‐world Robotics and Artificial Life. Such approaches, however, are often criticized for giving certain aspects of rationality too...