Enactive-Dynamic Social Cognition and Active Inference

Abstract

This aim of this paper is two-fold: it critically analyses and rejects accounts blending active inference as theory of mind and enactivism; and it advances an enactivist-dynamic understanding of social cognition that is compatible with active inference. While some social cognition theories seemingly take an enactive perspective on social cognition, they explain it as the attribution of mental states to other people, by assuming representational structures, in line with the classic Theory of Mind (ToM). Holding both enactivism and ToM, we argue, entails contradiction and confusion due to two ToM assumptions widely known to be rejected by enactivism: that (1) social cognition reduces to mental representation and (2) social cognition is a hardwired contentful ‘toolkit’ or ‘starter pack’ that fuels the model-like theorising supposed in (1). The paper offers a positive alternative, one that avoids contradictions or confusion. After rejecting ToM-inspired theories of social cognition and clarifying the profile of social cognition under enactivism, that is without assumptions (1) and (2), the last section advances an enactivist-dynamic model of cognition as dynamic, real-time, fluid, contextual social action, where we use the formalisms of dynamical systems theory to explain the origins of socio-cognitive novelty in developmental change and active inference as a tool to demonstrate social understanding as generalised synchronisation.

Restoring the missing person to personalized medicine and precision psychiatry

“…The 4E cognitive approach begins with insights from phenomenology and links them to empirical work on development and everyday cognitive functioning. Many of the theoretical claims of 4E cognitive science can be operationalized in terms of current models of active inference in computational psychiatry ( Badcock et al, 2019 ; Hipólito and van Es, 2022 ). This allows us to build models of cognitive function and adaptation that include both the brain and the social world, through interactions with other people and institutions that present cultural affordances ( Ramstead et al, 2016 ; Kirmayer and Ramstead, 2017 ; Veissière et al, 2020 ; Tison and Poirier, 2021 ; Constant et al, 2022 ).…”

Digitally embodied lifespan neurocognitive development and Tactile Internet: Transdisciplinary challenges and opportunities

“…In this regard, cognitive neuroscience research that compare peri-personal space and body illusion in real and virtual environments offer another potential interface (see Serino, 2019 for review). Lastly, cognitive and neuroscience research on representations of joint action (see Shea et al, 2014;Prinz, 2015; for review) and the associated age differences (e.g., Keitel et al, 2014) as well as the research on making active inference in social situations (e.g., Friston and Frith, 2015;Hipólito and van Es, 2022) is another interface designing algorithms for digitally transmitted multi-person/agent interactions.…”

On the Map-Territory Fallacy Fallacy

“…or neo-Kantian, indirect accounts of perception [55]-and then proceeds to present a reading of the FEP that fits as well as possible with those assumptions. This seems especially common in scholarship that is independently committed to philosophical theses that are, in many crucial ways, contradictory to the core commitments of the FEP, such as staunch anti-representationalism and the rejection of computational and information theoretic tools to study self-organising systems [56,57].…”