Behavioral and Brain Sciences
2026
Tobias Schlicht
Abstract I argue that we are not epistemically justified to judge whether the neurobiological details of computational mechanisms are relevant to consciousness or not. It is unclear how the medium independence of neural computation required for Computational Functionalism could be established. But it is also unclear whether predictive processing depends on life-sustaining biological processes...
Noûs
May 15, 2025
Tobias Schlicht
The popular predictive processing (PP) framework posits prediction error minimization (PEM) as the sole mechanism in the brain that can account for all mental phenomena, including consciousness. I first highlight three ambitions associated with major presentations of PP: (1) Completeness (PP aims for a comprehensive account of mental phenomena), (2) Bayesian realism (PP claims that PEM is...
Review of Philosophy and Psychology
December 1, 2022
Mark Miller, Andy Clark, Tobias Schlicht
8 citations
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...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
July 19, 2021
Tobias Schlicht, Krzysztof Dołęga
The predictive processing framework has gained significant popularity across disciplines investigating the mind and brain. In this article we critically examine two of the recently made claims about the kind of headway that the framework can make in the neuroscientific and philosophical investigation of consciousness. Firstly, we argue that predictive processing is unlikely to yield significant...
Consciousness and Cognition
November 1, 2018
Tobias Schlicht
This paper exposes a methodological dilemma arising for the research program of finding the neural correlate of consciousness (NCC), the minimal set of brain processes sufficient for a particular percept. The main claim is that it is doubtful that the right kind of correlations will ever be obtained because the foregoing conceptual decisions regarding the relations between consciousness,...
Frontiers in Psychology
2018
Tobias Schlicht
16 citations
Traditionally, intentionality is regarded as that feature of all and only mental states - paradigmatically beliefs and desires - in virtue of which they are directed at or are about something. The problem of intentionality is to explain how it fits into the natural order given the intuition that no physical entity can be intentionally directed in this sense. The basic assumption of this paper,...
International Journal of Philosophical Studies
July 1, 2011
Tobias Schlicht
6 citations
The subjectivity of conscious experience is a central feature of our mental life that puzzles philosophers of mind. Conscious mental representations are presented to me as mine, others remain unconscious. How can we make sense of the difference between them? Some representationalists (e.g. Tye) attempt to explain it in terms of non-conceptual intentional content, i.e. content for which one need...
History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis
April 5, 2007
Tobias Schlicht
1 citation
The dominant position in current debates on the mind-body problem is some version of physicalism, according to which the mind is reducible to the brain and mental phenomena are ultimately explainable in physical terms. But there seems to be an explanatory gap between physicalistic descriptions of neuronal processes and the subjectivity of conscious experience. Some dualists conclude that,...