From cognitivism to autopoiesis: towards a computational framework for the embodied mind

TLDR

Predictive processing approaches to the mind are increasingly popular, sparking philosophical debate about their relation to enactive and embodied cognition and raising concerns about overlooking the diversity of predictive frameworks. The authors aim to review the spectrum of predictive processing theories—from cognitivist to enactive—to show that any new predictive theory must account for this continuum and that the Free Energy Principle offers a unifying, empirically productive framework for modeling the embodied mind. They review neuroscientific, cognitive, and philosophical accounts of predictive processing and illustrate how the Free Energy Principle provides a formal synthetic account linking internal representations to autopoietic self‑organization. The authors find that the Free Energy Principle reconciles internalist and externalist views and supplies empirically productive process theories for guiding discovery of the embodied mind.

Abstract

Predictive processing (PP) approaches to the mind are increasingly popular in the cognitive sciences. This surge of interest is accompanied by a proliferation of philosophical arguments, which seek to either extend or oppose various aspects of the emerging framework. In particular, the question of how to position predictive processing with respect to enactive and embodied cognition has become a topic of intense debate. While these arguments are certainly of valuable scientific and philosophical merit, they risk underestimating the variety of approaches gathered under the predictive label. Here, we first present a basic review of neuroscientific, cognitive, and philosophical approaches to PP, to illustrate how these range from solidly cognitivist applications—with a firm commitment to modular, internalistic mental representation—to more moderate views emphasizing the importance of 'body-representations', and finally to those which fit comfortably with radically enactive, embodied, and dynamic theories of mind. Any nascent predictive processing theory (e.g., of attention or consciousness) must take into account this continuum of views, and associated theoretical commitments. As a final point, we illustrate how the Free Energy Principle (FEP) attempts to dissolve tension between internalist and externalist accounts of cognition, by providing a formal synthetic account of how internal 'representations' arise from autopoietic self-organization. The FEP thus furnishes empirically productive process theories (e.g., predictive processing) by which to guide discovery through the formal modelling of the embodied mind.