The Behavioral and brain sciences
May 30, 2019
Samuel P L Veissière, Axel Constant, Maxwell J D Ramstead et al.
362 citations
A unifying account of how humans acquire shared cultural habits, norms, and expectations is developed by integrating the variational free-energy principle from theoretical neuroscience with concepts of cultural evolution and implicit learning. Humans construct social niches that provide epistemic resources called cultural affordances. Through immersive participation in patterned cultural practices, agents learn by inferring what other people expect—a process termed "thinking through other minds" (TTOM). This makes information about others' expectations the primary statistical regularity humans use to predict and organize behavior. The model aims to resolve debates in cognitive science between internalist and externalist accounts of theory of mind and between dynamical and representational views of enactivism.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2021
Lars Sandved-Smith, Casper Hesp, Jérémie Mattout et al.
116 citations
Meta-awareness, the ability to notice the current content of consciousness, is crucial for controlling cognitive states like directing attention. This paper models meta-awareness and attentional control using hierarchical active inference, treating mental actions as policy choices over higher-level cognitive states. A further hierarchical level represents meta-awareness states that modulate the expected confidence in the mapping between observations and hidden cognitive states. Simulations of mind-wandering during a sustained selective attention task illustrate how this inferential architecture enables accessing and controlling cognitive states, offering a computational foundation for a phenomenology of mental action and self-monitoring.
Review of philosophy and psychology
January 1, 2022
Maxwell J D Ramstead, Anil K Seth, Casper Hesp et al.
75 citations
A version of neurophenomenology is presented that uses generative modelling techniques from computational neuroscience and biology to formally model descriptions of lived experience from the phenomenological tradition (e.g., Husserl, Merleau-Ponty). The approach, called computational phenomenology, is situated within the broader project of naturalizing phenomenology. Philosophical objections to that project are evaluated, and the generative modelling framework is reviewed. The approach differs from previous uses of generative modelling for consciousness by constructing computational models of inferential or interpretive processes that best explain particular kinds of lived experience.
Neuroscience of consciousness
January 1, 2025
Chris Fields, Mahault Albarracin, Karl Friston et al.
6 citations
The free-energy principle (FEP) constrains possible models of consciousness, especially those of attentional control and imaginative experiences like episodic memory and planning. The paper first reviews classical and quantum formulations of the FEP, focusing on multi-component systems where only some parts interact directly with the environment. It discusses internal boundaries structured as Markov blankets, which act as classical information channels. The analysis shows how this framework supports models of attention and imagination, explaining how imaginative experience can use the same spatio-temporal and object-recognition frames as ordinary perception, and how it can be internally generated yet still surprising. The paper concludes with implications for implementation, phenomenology, phylogeny, and the large variability of imaginative experience in humans.