Insight in the conspiracist’s mind

Abstract

The motto of the conspiracist, “Do your own research,” may seem ludicrous to scientists. Indeed, it is often dismissed as a mere rhetorical device that conspiracists use to give themselves the semblance of science. In this perspective paper, we explore the information-seeking activities (“research”) that conspiracists do engage in. Drawing on the experimental psychology of aha experiences, we explain how these activities, as well as the epistemic experiences that precede (curiosity) or follow (insight or “aha” experiences) them, may play a crucial role in the appeal and development of conspiracy beliefs. Aha moments have properties that can be exploited by conspiracy theories, such as the potential for false but seemingly grounded conclusions. Finally, we hypothesize that the need for autonomous epistemic agency and discovery is universal but increases as people experience more uncertainty and/or feel epistemically excluded in society, hence linking it to existing literature on explaining conspiracy theories.

Aesthetics and predictive processing: grounds and prospects of a fruitful encounter

“…At the same time, and by contrast, art and aesthetics could have something to say about those cases in which our self-evidencing goes awry. These include ‘pathologies’ of our individual and collective epistemic behaviour of particular social relevance such as confirmation bias, echo chambers and conspiracy theories, all of which are starting to be examined from a PP perspective [143,144]. However, they also include many psychopathologies such as schizophrenia, delusions, autism spectrum disorder, anxiety disorders, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive–compulsive disorder and addiction, all of which are also increasingly conceptualized within a PP perspective as anomalies of some kind in exteroceptive, interoceptive or proprioceptive inference (see [47–49] for useful summaries and discussions).…”

“…Our experience is therefore always tinged with a myriad of subtle and varying positive and negative affective nuances related to our well we are doing in our attempts to make sense of the world (what are sometimes called 'epistemic emotions' or 'metacognitive feelings' [126,127]). These include feelings like surprise, confusion, curiosity, uncertainty, boredom, insight and (dis)fluency, many of which have been discussed from a PP perspective [42,44,45,128,129]). Now, if the PP view about art and aesthetics is on track, the artists' implicit understanding of the dynamics of inference is also, necessarily, an understanding of the dynamics of affect.…”

A vessel without a pilot: Bodily and affective experience in the Cotard delusion of inexistence

“…The minimization of prediction error is an iterative hierarchical process in which higher‐level models of the organism and its sensory domain predict the sensory consequences of action and the organism acts to realise that prediction. Unpredicted sensory consequences generate error signals that propagate up the hierarchy leading to model revision and/or recalibration of action (Friston & Kiebel, 2009; Hohwy, 2013; Sel, 2014; Seth et al, 2011; Van de Cruys, 2017). This minimization of predictive error produces a model of the structure of the external world as the inferred cause of perceptual experience and of the self as the inferred cause of interoceptive (representation of the internal milieu ) experience.…”

“…In interoception active inference is instrumental , reflecting the role of interoception in homeostatic regulation (Seth & Tsakiris, 2018). Interoceptive experience represents the overall state of the system relative to a predicted state, given a model, in order to calibrate regulatory action (Joffily & Coricelli, 2013; Seth & Tsakiris, 2018; Van de Cruys, 2017; Weise, 2018).…”

“…After all the subject could report feeling affectively flat rather than “as if” not present in the experience. The answer to this question is provided by the hierarchical predictive self‐modelling account (Allen & Friston, 2018; Deane et al, 2020; Gerrans, 2014; Van de Cruys, 2017).…”