Synthese
January 1, 2018
Micah Allen, Karl J Friston
387 citations
Predictive processing (PP) approaches to the mind vary widely, from cognitivist views that rely on modular, internal mental representations to radical enactive and embodied theories. This review maps the continuum of PP theories, showing that some emphasize body-representations while others align with dynamic, enactive accounts. The Free Energy Principle (FEP) offers a formal framework that reconciles internalist and externalist perspectives by explaining how internal representations arise from autopoietic self-organization. The FEP thus provides a foundation for empirically productive process theories, such as PP, that guide research through formal modeling of the embodied mind.
Synthese
January 1, 2018
Shaun Gallagher, Micah Allen
221 citations
Three philosophical views on predictive models in neuroscience are distinguished: predictive coding, which relies on internal Bayesian models and prediction error minimization; predictive processing, linked to radical connectionism and simple embodiment; and predictive engagement, aligned with enactivist approaches to cognition. The concept of active inference is examined under each model, and its implications for social cognition are explored. The authors consider Frith and Friston's proposal for a neural hermeneutics and contrast it with an enactivist hermeneutics, offering an alternative account of how social understanding might work.
Synthese
January 1, 2021
Joel Krueger
55 citations
Cognition is tied to action and extends beyond the brain into the body and environment, according to enactive approaches. If we can directly perceive other people's mental states through their embodied actions and interactions, then we may also directly perceive features of mental disorders. Drawing on Daniel Stern's concept of "forms of vitality," which has been overlooked in debates about direct social perception, the author uses autism as a case study to develop this idea. An enactive account of direct social perception suggests that people play a regulative role in shaping the temporal and phenomenal character of a disorder, which may have practical significance for clinical and therapeutic encounters.
Synthese
January 1, 2021
Erik Myin, Jasper C. Van den Herik
34 citations
The Radical Enactive/Embodied view of Cognition (REC) holds that all cognition is skilled performance, but distinguishes basic cognition from content-involving cognition, claiming a developmental "kink" between them. Critics worry this creates an "interface problem"—how two minds could interact in the same activity—and an unjustified difference in kind between animal and human cognition. The authors argue that REC's emphasis on sociocultural practices resolves the interface problem by showing content-involving cognition requires specific practices. They clarify REC's notion of content to justify marking basic and content-involving cognition as a difference in kind, while maintaining both are forms of skilled performance, though genuinely different forms.
Synthese
March 1, 2021
Tomasz Korbak
23 citations
Enactivism and computationalism, two opposing traditions in cognitive science, can be reconciled through the free energy principle (FEP). FEP describes cognitive systems as encoding generative models of their environments and minimizing free energy to maintain non-equilibrium steady-states. A computationalist interprets this as Bayesian inference underlying perception and action, making cognition a computational process. An enactivist sees it as continuous self-organization. The paper argues both interpretations are simultaneously true and mutually illuminating.
Synthese
January 1, 2023
Walter Veit
20 citations
This paper argues that the concepts of health and consciousness are deeply connected and best understood together through an evolutionary lens. Using state-based behavioral and life-history theory as a teleonomic tool, the author shows that Darwinizing the agent- and subject-side of organisms clarifies both health and consciousness as natural phenomena. The work is programmatic, aiming to reframe core problems in the philosophy of medicine and philosophy of mind by integrating evolutionary perspectives.
Synthese
June 18, 2020
Maurizio Meloni, J. Reynolds
19 citations
Most philosophers working on embodied cognition, enactivism, and 4e cognition engage with the life sciences, but they have overlooked recent findings in epigenetics and post-genomic biology. Surveying this research offers a chance to reconsider the link between embodiment and genetics. The authors argue that current epigenetic evidence supports extending an enactivist approach to mind and life, rather than the extended functionalist view of embodied cognition, which is more substrate neutral.
Synthese
April 1, 2022
Silvano Zipoli Caiani
6 citations
Intelligent behavior requires attributing representational contents to agents, including for basic actions like perceiving affordances. Radical enactivists claim intelligent behaviors can be explained without representational content, but this paper argues that intelligence depends on how purposes and environments are presented to the agent. Therefore, either affordance-related behaviors are not intelligent and can be explained without content, or they are intelligent but require content and modes of presentation. The argument challenges contentless accounts of cognition.
Synthese
March 1, 2025
Lorena Sganzerla, Daniel D. Hutto, Michael D. Kirchhoff
5 citations
The extended mind thesis holds that cognitive processes can extend beyond the brain to include parts of the body and environment under certain conditions. This paper revives and clarifies the commitments of Radical Enactivism's Extensive Enactivism, compares it to related frameworks like embodied and distributed cognition, and provides new arguments for preferring it over other positions in the extended-distributed-enactive family.
Synthese
January 1, 2016
Tom McClelland
5 citations
A self-representationalist (SR) theory of consciousness aims to explain both how conscious experience arises from brain processes and why consciousness misleadingly appears irreducible to the physical. This paper examines whether SR succeeds at the second task. The theory distinguishes subjective character (being conscious at all) from qualitative character (what it is like to be in a state). While SR plausibly explains why subjective character seems irreducible, it cannot explain why qualitative character also appears irreducible. The author concludes that a hybrid position combining SR with another account may be needed to fully address the apparent irreducibility of qualitative character.
Synthese
January 1, 2022
Bradford Saad
4 citations
Experiences are typically followed by states for which they provide normative reasons, a correlation that demands explanation. Theories that address this explanatory challenge have an advantage. Biological theories, which hold that conscious subjects are generally biological entities, face problems in responding to this need. Panpsychism, the view that conscious subjects are ubiquitous in nature, offers an attractive response. These considerations support a 'psychophysical fine-tuning' argument for panpsychism, analogous to cosmological fine-tuning arguments for multiverse hypotheses.
Synthese
June 23, 2025
Ric Sims
1 citation
Cognition, even in its simplest forms, has social and historical dimensions. The coordinated systems approach (CSA) models cognition as a coalition of loosely autonomous processes that together produce goal-directed behavior. The key mechanism is stigmergy, where the material traces left by one process in the environment serve as signs that coordinate future actions of other processes. The historical dimension refers to longer-term processes that establish these signs' coordinative power and normative force. The paper applies CSA to puzzles in 4E cognition, such as cognitive bloat and the slime mold Physarum polycephalum's external memory, suggesting the approach can analyze minimal cognition across scales from bacteria to humans.
Synthese
June 19, 2025
Niccolò Negro
1 citation
Understanding consciousness requires describing its relational and structural properties, a view called phenomenal structuralism. This paper distinguishes three types: methodological, epistemological, and metaphysical structuralism. It critically evaluates metaphysical structuralism, which claims that the phenomenal character of an experience is fully determined by its relational properties, and presents three arguments demonstrating its inadequacy. However, this critique does not affect the fruitfulness of methodological and epistemological structuralism. The analysis clarifies that these latter forms can contribute to consciousness science without heavy and counterintuitive metaphysical commitments.
Synthese
June 11, 2026
Lorenzo Magnani
Large Language Models (LLMs) are exceptionally skilled at manipulating language and symbols, making them superior masters of the Symbolic register in Lacanian psychoanalysis. However, because they lack a body and subjective experience, they have no access to the Imaginary or the Real, and are fundamentally incapable of lack, desire, or genuine creativity. The paper argues that LLMs operate as closed, pre-packaged cognitive systems, effective only for locked symbolic tasks, and lack the dissipative openness needed to confront the Real. Intelligence is redefined as managing lack and desire, not benchmark performance. Ethical warnings about over-reliance on LLMs and recommendations for hybrid designs informed by psychoanalysis conclude the argument.
Synthese
May 28, 2026
Juan Diego Bogotá
The minimal self, often described as the pre-reflective sense that experience is 'mine,' is not neutral about the body but is fundamentally embodied and agential. Evidence from multisensory integration and interoceptive processing shows that neurocognitive mechanisms for bodily ownership and presence span brain and body, grounding the quality of mineness. Phenomenologically, the lived body manifests as an absolute 'here' inseparable from a practical, outward orientation toward the world. This orientation corresponds to background agency: a passive, pre-reflective bodily self-awareness captured by the 'I can.' Enactive and dynamical approaches suggest that processes underlying background agency and bodily ownership are entangled and co-emergent, giving rise to minimal selfhood as an embodied and agential subjectivity.
Synthese
May 7, 2026
Matthew Kinakin
When you sprain an ankle or eat a favorite dessert, the experience feels unpleasant or pleasant, prompting action to end or continue it. The standard view explains this by a second-order desire about the experience's quality—wanting the unpleasantness to stop or the pleasantness to continue. But a popular theory of phenomenal character, strong representationalism, holds that we are directly aware only of external objects, not the experiences themselves. This conflicts with the second-order desire account, which requires direct awareness of experiences. The author argues that desire theorists should instead adopt object-involving desires that require direct awareness of experiences, making representationalism and desire theory incompatible.
Synthese
May 4, 2026
Zixuan Liu
The minimal self hypothesis—that every conscious experience carries an inherent sense of "for-me-ness" or "mineness"—is meant to solve how we individuate selves. This paper argues that the hypothesis fails on two counts: it is not the most parsimonious account of the experience-experiencer relation, because it smuggles a private/public contrast into plain experience via the terms "self" and "me"; and it is theoretically infertile, explaining neither the origin of the first/third-person distinction nor the variety of disownership phenomena. As an alternative, the author proposes fragmenting the minimal self into more fundamental concepts called "proto-subjects" or "subjective guises," whose convergence and divergence can explain disownership disorders and the first- and third-person perspectives. The explanatory benefits of this fragmentation are argued to balance its costs.
Synthese
May 4, 2026
Giuseppe Pernagallo
Descartes' 'I think, therefore I am' sought an indubitable foundation for knowledge. This paper examines whether that foundation holds when cognitive tasks like reasoning and planning are delegated to AI. Distinguishing the cogito's epistemic function (certainty through self-awareness) from an ontological claim, it argues that delegation presupposes minimal acts of intention, and total delegation would undermine certainty, not existence. The concept of 'Cartesian AI' explains why AI creates the illusion of thought by operationalizing reason as computation without first-person self-relation. AI does not refute Descartes but shifts focus from metaphysical existence to the normative stakes of agency and responsibility.
Synthese
April 21, 2026
Adrian Wieczorek
Radical Enactive Cognition attempts to explain basic intentionality—called Ur-intentionality—without mental representations, using only teleofunctional resources like information-as-covariance and natural selection. This paper argues that this approach fails. It identifies two problems: the Determinacy Problem, concerning how information picks out specific objects, and the Distality Problem, concerning how it relates to distant causes. Teleofunctionalism also risks reducing Ur-intentionality to stimulus-response behaviorism, which Radical Enactivism itself rejects as non-cognitive. The paper develops an enactive stimulus-response account showing teleofunctional mechanisms can explain adaptive behavior without intentionality. These issues pose a serious, overlooked challenge to non-representational, selectionist theories of cognition—the Hard Problem of Intentionality.
Synthese
April 21, 2026
Eugen Fischer, Keith Allen, Paul E. Engelhardt
Laypeople hold conflicting beliefs about vision, simultaneously endorsing both Direct Realist and Indirect Realist conceptions, according to three studies using the newly developed Direct/Indirect Realist Belief Inventory (DIRBI). These conflicting beliefs are not merely superficial agreement but reflect genuine beliefs anchored in implicit knowledge structures: experiential event knowledge about vision and an implicit model of endogenous attention. The findings challenge the common philosophical assumption that there is a single, coherent common-sense conception of vision that can serve as an epistemic default in debates about perception.
Synthese
March 31, 2026
Christian R. De Weerd
The paper argues that the view that biological substrates (as opposed to biological functions) are necessary for consciousness is untenable. It faces a dilemma: if interpreted in an empirically respectable way, it collapses into a biological function view; if interpreted as truly distinct, it becomes empirically intractable and theoretically arbitrary. Therefore, the biological substrate view should be set aside in debates about artificial consciousness. The author suggests that once this view is bracketed, the dispute between biological naturalism and computational functionalism becomes less stark, and progress can focus on identifying which biological or non-biological functions are necessary for consciousness.
Synthese
March 23, 2026
Chris Sawyer
Selfhood is often explained either by the felt quality of conscious experience or by the mental representations that allow thinking about oneself in the first person. Both approaches assume that selfhood is a kind of content—either experiential or conceptual—and so miss the underlying organization that makes such content possible. This paper argues that neither the sense of 'for-me-ness' in phenomenology nor the first-person mode of presentation in analytic philosophy can ground how a subject is individuated, because each already relies on an asymmetry built into the system.
Synthese
January 28, 2026
Jonathan Mitchell
The sense of touch, or haptic touch, is structured by an external spatial field called peripersonal space, which functions similarly to the visual field. Peripersonal space meets the necessary conditions for a spatial field, making it the external spatial field of haptic touch. This argument clarifies structural similarities and differences between the senses, focusing on how touch, like vision, operates within a spatial framework.
Synthese
January 26, 2026
Celia R. Blaise
A recurring finding in psychedelic-assisted therapy is that the subjective intensity and quality of the psychedelic experience contribute more to therapeutic outcomes than the administered dose. Many explanations appeal to what these experiences reveal or enable, such as acquiring mental representations, expanding awareness, or revising beliefs about the self and the world. This paper argues that even if psychedelics work by loosening beliefs or expanding awareness, this alone does not explain why resulting changes should be beneficial rather than neutral or harmful. Existing theories risk describing processes that could worsen distress as easily as alleviate it. The author argues that without a positive shift in affective valence, there is no clear reason why psychedelic experiences should lead to therapeutic outcomes.
Synthese
November 5, 2025
Christopher Kochevar
Psychedelic experiences, though linked to therapeutic benefits for depression and other mood disorders, remain poorly understood. This paper argues that the epistemic dimensions—how knowledge and understanding are gained—should be examined more closely. It proposes a tripartite framework of three phenomenological regularities: fascination, revelation, and improvisation, relating them to everyday epistemic phenomena like curiosity, insight, and intellectual playfulness. Using first-person accounts, the author argues that psychedelic experience, while extraordinary, is best understood as a modification of familiar cognitive processes. The paper concludes with recommendations for new clinical measurement approaches in psychotherapeutic settings.