Desire and Motivation in Predictive Processing: An Ecological-Enactive Perspective.

Desire motivates action through affective sense-making within the brain's predictive processing framework. The brain implements a hierarchical predictive model to minimize prediction errors, but philosophers have questioned how belief-like predictions account for desire's conative role. The authors introduce 'first priors'—prioritized predictions—and argue that agents use them for affective sense-making, which has been overlooked in understanding desire. Affective sense-making modulates precision expectations (estimates of prediction reliability) in context-sensitive ways, causing agents to experience their environment through desire as a field of inviting affordances. Predictive processing thus bridges first-person phenomenological descriptions of desire with third-person ecological-enactive analysis.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The predictive processing theory refers to a family of theories that take the brain and body of an organism to implement a hierarchically organized predictive model of its environment that works in the service of prediction-error minimization. Several philosophers have wondered how belief-like states of prediction account for the conative role desire plays in motivating a person to act. A compelling response to this challenge has begun to take shape that starts from the idea that certain predictions are prioritized in the predictive processing hierarchy. We use the term "first priors" to refer to such predictions. We will argue that agents use first priors to engage in affective sense-making. What has been missing in the literature that seeks to understand desire in terms of predictive processing is a recognition of the role of affective sense-making in motivating action. We go on to describe how affective sense-making can play a role in the context-sensitive shifting assignments of precision to predictions. Precision expectations refer to estimates of the reliability of predictions of the sensory states that are the consequences of acting. Given the role of affect in modulating precision-estimation, we argue that agents will tend to experience their environment through the lens of their desires as a field of inviting affordances. We will show how PP provides a neurocomputational framework that can bridge between first-person phenomenological descriptions of what it is to be a desiring creature, and a third-person, ecological-enactive analysis of desire.