From Allostatic Agents to Counterfactual Cognisers: Active Inference, Biological Regulation, and The Origins of Cognition

Abstract

What is the function of cognition? On one influential account, cognition evolved to co-ordinate behaviour with environmental change or complexity (Godfrey-Smith 1996). Liberal interpretations of this view ascribe cognition to an extraordinarily broad set of biological systems – even bacteria, which modulate their activity in response to salient external cues, would seem to qualify as cognitive agents. However, equating cognition with adaptive flexibility per se glosses over important distinctions in the way biological organisms deal with environmental complexity. Drawing on contemporary advances in theoretical biology and computational neuroscience, we cash these distinctions out in terms of the representation and resolution of different varieties of uncertainty. This analysis leads us to propose a formal criterion for delineating cognition from other, more pervasive forms of adaptive plasticity. On this view, biological cognition is rooted in a particular kind of functional organisation; namely, one that enables the agent to detach from the present and engage in counterfactual (active) inference.

Dissolving the self

“…Of course, autonomic regulation alone is not sufficient to ensure continued existence -to avoid hunger or thirst the animal must engage actions, such as seeking out food and water. Collectively, these actions are termed allostasis, the process via which the brain regulates the needs of the body (Corcoran & Hohwy, 2018;Corcoran, Pezzulo, & Hohwy, 2019;Schulkin & Sterling, 2019). Crucially, to stay viable on longer timescales, this action must be anticipatory -avoiding dyshomeostatic conditions before they arise Sterling, 2012).…”

Integrated World Modeling Theory (IWMT) Revisited

“…It has recently been suggested that cognition requires a functional organization in which agents are able to detach from the present moment and engage in counterfactual active inference (Corcoran et al, 2019). IWMT does not have a clear position on whether or not the word "cognition" ought to be reserved for systems capable of generating counterfactual simulations.…”

An Integrated World Modeling Theory (IWMT) of consciousness: Combining Integrated Information and Global Neuronal Workspace Theories with the Free Energy Principle and Active Inference Framework; towards solving the Hard problem and characterizing agentic causation

“…3. Conscious access-and possibly phenomenal consciousness-likely requires generative processes capable of counterfactual modeling (Friston, 2018;Pearl and Mackenzie, 2018;Corcoran et al, 2019;Kanai et al, 2019) with respect to selfhood and self-generated actions. In what follows I attempt to justify these claims by integrating across leading theories of emergent causation and consciousness.…”

“…The DMN and its imaginative capacities (Beaty et al, 2014(Beaty et al, , 2015Hassabis et al, 2014) may instantiate this kind of (informational) creative dynamo, constituting sources of strongly internally coherent predictions, so being capable of temporarily absorbing and then releasing free energy via the shaping of perception and driving of action. The network properties of the DMN are ideally suited to serve these functions, having both high centrality-and so high potential for integrating information and exerting control -while also being located distally from primary modalities, and so being capable of supporting dynamics that are more decoupled from immediate sensorimotor engagements (Sormaz et al, 2018;Corcoran et al, 2019). Further, the DMN is likely to support some of the most stable inferences available to embodied-embedded persons, with major nodes allowing for egocentric perspective-i.e., providing a subjective point of view in generating world models with spatial, temporal, and causal coherence-integrated memory, and even the foundations of selfhood (Hassabis and Maguire, 2009;Northoff, 2012;Brewer et al, 2013;Dennett, 2014;Davey and Harrison, 2018).…”

“…This deep organization allows these systems to model not only transient events at lower levels, but also their organization into more temporally extended sequences at higher levels (Hawkins and Blakeslee, 2004;Baldassano et al, 2017;Friston et al, 2017c). Further, deep internal dynamics create a potential for functional decoupling between modeling and the unfolding of particular sensorimotor engagements (Tani, 2016;Sormaz et al, 2018;Corcoran et al, 2019), so enabling counterfactual simulations (Kanai et al, 2019) with temporal "thickness"/"depth" (Humphrey, 2017;Friston, 2018), which, when conscious, enable imagination and explicit planning. These capacities afford the possibility of constructing rich causal world models (Hassabis and Maguire, 2009;Buchsbaum et al, 2012;Pearl and Mackenzie, 2018;MacKay, 2019), and as discussed below, preconditions for coherent conscious experience.…”