Representation Wars: Enacting an Armistice Through Active Inference

Abstract

Over the last 30 years, representationalist and dynamicist positions in the philosophy of cognitive science have argued over whether neurocognitive processes should be viewed as representational or not. Major scientific and technological developments over the years have furnished both parties with ever more sophisticated conceptual weaponry. In recent years, an enactive generalization of predictive processing – known as active inference – has been proposed as a unifying theory of brain functions. Since then, active inference has fueled both representationalist and dynamicist campaigns. However, we believe that when diving into the formal details of active inference, one should be able to find a solution to the war; if not a peace treaty, surely an armistice of a sort. Based on an analysis of these formal details, this paper shows how both representationalist and dynamicist sensibilities can peacefully coexist within the new territory of active inference.

Perceptual justification in the Bayesian brain: a foundherentist account

“…In sum, it is reasonable to claim that in PP, Bayesian inference is approximated with a genuinely inferential process. to add, however, that some authors working at the forefront of Active-Inference-based modeling have argued that there is still some room for (inferentially-updated) internal representations within this framework (see Constant et al, 2020;Ramstead et al, 2020).…”

“…Inferring a posterior involves searching the space of hypotheses in the generative model for one that (best) minimizes the VFE. This effectively means comparing one representation, that is, the candidate perceptual estimate, to another representation, that is, the model of the causal structure of the environment (see also Constant et al 2020;Kiefer et al 2017). In other words, inferring the best causal explanation for the current sensory input means inferring the best explanation relative to the generative model brought to bear on interpreting this input.…”

Embodying Bounded Rationality: From Embodied Bounded Rationality to Embodied Rationality

“…Downright rejection of representationalism is, instead, the trademark of embodied rationality. In this context, it is worth mentioning that a computational view based on the so-called “free energy principle” has recently tried to reconcile representationalism and anti-representationalism (see Constant et al, 2021 ), although it is doubtful whether it can be the last word on such a controversial matter. Finally, another comparative criterion concerns heuristics.…”

Thinking like a State - Embodied intelligence in the deep history of our collective minds

“…The concept of Active Inference derives from a formal result known as the Free Energy Principle, which states that the synchronisation dynamics between a Markovblanketed system and its environment entails the minimisation of VFE (Da Costa et al, 2021). Since VFE is a classical measure of Bayesian model fitness, this enables an epistemic / semantical interpetation of self-organisation in cognitive systems (Constant et al, 2021;. The attraction of the agent-niche system toward its most probable regions can therefore be interpreted as "self-evidencing" (Hohwy, 2016), in the sense that it constitutes an epistemical activity by which the agent proves that their world is indeed what they expect it to be.…”