Radical Enactivism claims that basic cognition does not involve mental representations, presenting itself as a revolutionary alternative to standard cognitive science. Some proponents argue this radicalization should extend to predictive processing, another influential approach to cognition. This paper argues that radicalizing predictive processing adds no value to that framework. It further analyzes whether Radical Enactivism itself constitutes a revolution within cognitive science and concludes it does not. The authors ultimately advocate for cognitive science to embrace heterogeneity rather than pursuing a single revolutionary framework.
The standard view that higher-level properties are grounded in micro-physical properties fails even in physics and chemistry, so arguments that phenomenal consciousness is a special exception to physicalism are misguided. The paper introduces a general notion of grounding, then examines the zombie and knowledge arguments against physicalism about consciousness. It shows that in particle physics and chemistry, the expected reductive relation does not hold, undermining the claim that consciousness is uniquely problematic. The authors propose an alternative way to naturalize phenomenal consciousness within the natural world.