Un-debunking Ordinary Objects with the Help of Predictive Processing

The rational role of the perceptual sense of reality

“…For example, under a common-cause explanation of the sensory input in our toy example, the generative model may predict that manipulating the object should result in a correlated change of the bound features (e.g., the features will be spatiotemporally continuous under manipulation); or that the features are mutually statistically independent, conditioned on the common cause (e.g., the position of the color patch provides no additional information about the position of the shape). A natural extension of this simple idea is to claim that once the generative model postulates a common worldly cause to explain a sensory pattern, it predicts the constancy-in-variance, completion, movement-independence, and object-interaction (see also Gładziejewski, 2021b;Hohwy, 2013;Madary, 2017;Seth, 2014;Wilkinson, 2020). 9…”

“…However, under a relaxed but nontrivial interpretation of this feature, some subpersonal states are answerable to reasons. Of particular interest here is research that establishes that the priors that, according to the Bayesian view, participate in perceptual inferences can be revised when the subject is exposed to sensory stimulation that conflicts with them (for philosophically oriented discussions of this work, see Gładziejewski, 2021b; Rescorla, 2018). Answerability to reasons does not look like a distinctive feature of personal‐level mentality.…”