Entangled predictive brain: emotion, prediction and embodied cognition
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Date
28/11/2018Author
Miller, Mark Daniel
Metadata
Abstract
How does the living body impact, and perhaps even help constitute, the thinking, reasoning,
feeling agent? This is the guiding question that the following work seeks to answer. The subtitle
of this project is emotion, prediction and embodied cognition for good reason: these are the
three closely related themes that tie together the various chapters of the following thesis. The
central claim is that a better understanding of the nature of emotion offers valuable insight for
understanding the nature of the so called ‘predictive mind’, including a powerful new way to
think about the mind as embodied
Recently a new perspective has arguably taken the pole position in both philosophy of mind and
the cognitive sciences when it comes to discussing the nature of mind. This framework takes the
brain to be a probabilistic prediction engine. Such engines, so the framework proposes, are
dedicated to the task of minimizing the disparity between how they expect the world to be and
how the world actually is. Part of the power of the framework is the elegant suggestion that
much of what we take to be central to human intelligence - perception, action, emotion, learning
and language - can be understood within the framework of prediction and error reduction. In
what follows I will refer to this general approach to understanding the mind and brain as
'predictive processing'.
While the predictive processing framework is in many ways revolutionary, there is a tendency for
researchers interested in this topic to assume a very traditional ‘neurocentric’ stance concerning
the mind. I argue that this neurocentric stance is completely optional, and that a focus on
emotional processing provides good reasons to think that the predictive mind is also a deeply
embodied mind. The result is a way of understanding the predictive brain that allows the body
and the surrounding environment to make a robust constitutive contribution to the predictive
process. While it’s true that predictive models can get us a long way in making sense of what
drives the neural-economy, I will argue that a complete picture of human intelligence requires us
to also explore the many ways that a predictive brain is embodied in a living body and embedded
in the social-cultural world in which it was born and lives.