ORCID Profile
0000-0001-6351-9975
Current Organisations
University of Tasmania
,
Macquarie University
Does something not look right? The information on this page has been harvested from data sources that may not be up to date. We continue to work with information providers to improve coverage and quality. To report an issue, use the Feedback Form.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 09-2022
Publisher: Equinox Publishing
Date: 04-01-2022
DOI: 10.1558/JASR.20660
Abstract: Susannah Crockford, Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2021, pp. 248, ISBN: 978-0-226-77807-5 (pbk). US$30.00.
Publisher: MIT Press - Journals
Date: 2021
DOI: 10.1162/NETN_A_00175
Abstract: At the inception of human brain mapping, two principles of functional anatomy underwrote most conceptions—and analyses—of distributed brain responses: namely, functional segregation and integration. There are currently two main approaches to characterizing functional integration. The first is a mechanistic modeling of connectomics in terms of directed effective connectivity that mediates neuronal message passing and dynamics on neuronal circuits. The second phenomenological approach usually characterizes undirected functional connectivity (i.e., measurable correlations), in terms of intrinsic brain networks, self-organized criticality, dynamical instability, and so on. This paper describes a treatment of effective connectivity that speaks to the emergence of intrinsic brain networks and critical dynamics. It is predicated on the notion of Markov blankets that play a fundamental role in the self-organization of far from equilibrium systems. Using the apparatus of the renormalization group, we show that much of the phenomenology found in network neuroscience is an emergent property of a particular partition of neuronal states, over progressively coarser scales. As such, it offers a way of linking dynamics on directed graphs to the phenomenology of intrinsic brain networks.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 03-05-2023
Abstract: Radically enactive accounts of perceiving directly and diametrically oppose their representationalist rivals. This is true even of the most radical predictive processing theories of perception which embrace some enactivist assumptions yet retain some commitment to representationalism. Which framework should we prefer? This chapter seeks to make headway on this question by focusing on the special explanatory challenge that a certain class of perceptual illusions poses to predictive processing theories of perception. The perceptual illusions in question, of which the Müller-Lyer is the paradigm, reveal that what we see can systematically fail to update in light of what we know. We review and reject two prominent PP attempts to address this challenge – one conservative, one radical. We find both kinds of PP proposal wanting, for different reasons. In the end, we propose an alternative, simpler radical enactive, RE, explanation of the full pattern of effects of perceptual illusions: it is that our basic modes of perceiving take the form of contentless, non-inferential habits that are distinct from, and come before and below, our capacities for contentful perceptual judgement. We give reasons for thinking that this RE proposal can adequately and elegantly account for the full set of empirical findings about our patterns of response to perceptual illusions of the sort under scrutiny in this chapter.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 15-04-2023
Abstract: This paper defends that from macroscale human computation, it does not follow that microscale processes involve ontological properties of macroscale computation. Section 1 critically assesses and rejects computational realism, i.e. that computational models have an independent reality. Section 2 expounds that even on a deflated computational realism of mind-machine metaphor shaping scientific progress, other metaphors, that preserve the complexity properties of an open system, are preferable. Section 3, drawing from radical enactivism, builds theory characterising computation, including computational modelling, as a sophisticated human activity that requires enculturated full agency and skilled training. Computational modelling depends upon enactive cultural practices allowing for developing and employing erse kinds of computational language games to understand neurobiological systems. Section 4, then, employs one kind: complex systems theory is a suited modelling formalism for systems neurobiology and its emerging enactive cultural human practices such as computation, and specifically, scientific computational modelling as means of understanding micro-scale neurobiological systems.
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 02-06-2020
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 06-2021
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 15-01-2023
Abstract: We offer a framework for the design and use of Ambient Smart Environments (ASEs) for preventive mental health care support. Drawing from Complex Systems Theory (CST) and ‘E’ Cognitive Science (ECS), we claim that ASEs have the potential to act in a preventive capacity in support of good mental health, i.e. supporting dynamics that avoid so-called “struck states” (which are, according to CST, thought generally to underpin forms of psychopathology). Here, we frame our discussion with what has recently been termed the “mind-technology problem”. We define and characterise ASE systems, present some ex les, and briefly survey some existing theoretical work. After introducing the essential CST terminology, the paper goes on to apply CST to explain developmental adaptation to continuously changing (smart) environments. Understanding the ASE’s navigation in terms of a dynamic geometry between attracting and repelling points (or local minima/local maxima), allows us to develop neurotechnology that can augment clinical interventions by predicting upcoming shifts for good symptomatic outcomes, i.e. when a preventive intervention (i.e. destabilisation) should take place. We further offer clear directions for the development and design of such neurotechnology.
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 2023
DOI: 10.1093/NC/NIAD017
Abstract: Recent research has demonstrated the potential of psychedelic therapy for mental health care. However, the psychological experience underlying its therapeutic effects remains poorly understood. This paper proposes a framework that suggests psychedelics act as destabilizers, both psychologically and neurophysiologically. Drawing on the ‘entropic brain’ hypothesis and the ‘RElaxed Beliefs Under pSychedelics’ model, this paper focuses on the richness of psychological experience. Through a complex systems theory perspective, we suggest that psychedelics destabilize fixed points or attractors, breaking reinforced patterns of thinking and behaving. Our approach explains how psychedelic-induced increases in brain entropy destabilize neurophysiological set points and lead to new conceptualizations of psychedelic psychotherapy. These insights have important implications for risk mitigation and treatment optimization in psychedelic medicine, both during the peak psychedelic experience and during the subacute period of potential recovery.
Publisher: Equinox Publishing
Date: 29-01-2020
DOI: 10.1558/JASR.39744
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2019
DOI: 10.1016/J.PLREV.2019.10.006
Abstract: One of the criteria to a strong principle in natural sciences is simplicity. This paper claims that the Free Energy Principle (FEP), by virtue of unifying particles with mind, is the simplest. Motivated by Hilbert's 24th problem of simplicity, the argument is made that the FEP takes a seemingly mathematical complex domain and reduces it to something simple. More specifically, it is attempted to show that every 'thing', from particles to mind, can be partitioned into systemic states by virtue of self-organising symmetry break, i.e. self-entropy in terms of the balance between risk and ambiguity to achieve epistemic gain. By virtue of its explanatory reach, the FEP becomes the simplest principle under quantum, statistical and classical mechanics conditions.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 13-01-2023
DOI: 10.1007/S11097-023-09885-3
Abstract: Substance addiction has been historically conceived and widely researched as a brain disease. There have been le criticisms of brain-centred approaches to addiction, and this paper aims to align with one such criticism by applying insights from phenomenology of psychiatry. More precisely, this work will apply Merleau-Ponty’s insightful distinction between the biological and lived body. In this light, the disease model emerges as an incomplete account of substance addiction because it captures only its biological aspects. When considering addiction as a brain disorder, it will be shown that research fails to account for the contextual, functional, and emotional aspects inherent to subjective health. It is concluded that, while the disease model is fundamental to our understanding of what happens in the brain, its brain-centred approach is cure-oriented . Instead, we suggest a care-orientated approach, which understands and treats the psychological feel as bodily experience situated in an environment, allowing for a more encompassing therapeutic perspective.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 07-2022
Abstract: This chapter takes inspiration from Wittgenstein’s thinking to formulate a non-reductive toolbox associated with generative modelling, specifically as applied in complex adaptive systems theory. It converges on a communal perspective on religion as multiscale active inference that contrasts starkly with common “straw person” perspectives on religion that aim to reduce it to “erroneous” metaphysical theorising motivated by spiritual experiences “generated by the brain”. In contrast, religious practices both enable and require the emergence of implicit (or “ineffable”) meanings that are experienced both in idually (i.e., one’s personal faith) and collectively (“the faith”), with only partial commensurability cast under Wittgenstein’s notions of ‘rule-following’ and ‘language games’. We show how the collective and perspectival aspects of religion in enculturation with morals, doctrines, rituals, and expressions can be formalised in terms of deep active inference in multi-agent systems. This approach describes how religions are incommensurable with the scientific method due to the epistemic separation between the different kinds of language games of religious and scientific practices. Touchpoints between these different kinds of language games tend to give rise to perpetual confusion and unproductive discussions. As a particularly impactful ex le, we discuss ethical considerations in policy-making, which demonstrates how our account can help shed light on complex societal challenges that have emerged at the touchpoints between religion and science.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 29-06-2023
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 17-03-2023
Abstract: This paper argues for a shift in focus in psychology towards dynamic processes. It first draws on Embodied and Enactive Cognitive Science to theoretically develop psychological phenomena as emergent from interactions between embodied experience and sociocultural context. The paper, then, employs Complex Systems Theory to explain the intricacies of psychological processes and shows how they influence neural dynamics. The proposed approach emphasises the interactional processes underlying psychological phenomena and bridges the gap between different levels of abstraction in cognitive science.
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 13-08-2020
DOI: 10.3390/E22080889
Abstract: The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to assess whether the construct of neural representations plays an explanatory role under the variational free-energy principle and its corollary process theory, active inference and (2) if so, to assess which philosophical stance—in relation to the ontological and epistemological status of representations—is most appropriate. We focus on non-realist (deflationary and fictionalist-instrumentalist) approaches. We consider a deflationary account of mental representation, according to which the explanatorily relevant contents of neural representations are mathematical, rather than cognitive, and a fictionalist or instrumentalist account, according to which representations are scientifically useful fictions that serve explanatory (and other) aims. After reviewing the free-energy principle and active inference, we argue that the model of adaptive phenotypes under the free-energy principle can be used to furnish a formal semantics, enabling us to assign semantic content to specific phenotypic states (the internal states of a Markovian system that exists far from equilibrium). We propose a modified fictionalist account—an organism-centered fictionalism or instrumentalism. We argue that, under the free-energy principle, pursuing even a deflationary account of the content of neural representations licenses the appeal to the kind of semantic content involved in the ‘aboutness’ or intentionality of cognitive systems our position is thus coherent with, but rests on distinct assumptions from, the realist position. We argue that the free-energy principle thereby explains the aboutness or intentionality in living systems and hence their capacity to parse their sensory stream using an ontology or set of semantic factors.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 11-04-2023
Abstract: In the current digital era, Audiovisual online social interaction (AVOI) has become a pervasive form of human interaction. However, it fails to capture the complexity and depth of in-person social interactions. To address this limitation, this essay puts forward a conceptual framework for comprehending and enriching empathy in the virtual realm. Empathy is fundamentally tied to our physical and sensory experiences, and therefore, the paper critically examines and dismisses the Theory of Mind (ToM) model, which reduces empathy to mere mental constructs with inherent limitations. Drawing upon Embodied Cognitive Science (ECS), this paper offers a more comprehensive and realistic understanding of empathy. Furthermore, it demonstrates how ECS provides insights for creating welcoming and inclusive online spaces that foster empathy and understanding.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 30-05-2016
DOI: 10.1111/JEP.12560
Abstract: Several studies suggest that the disorders of the self include a disturbance of the most elementary component of self – the minimal self . Characterizing these disorders and understanding the mechanisms involved remain a challenge to medical epistemology and health care professionals. In the present work, I bring together concepts of different fields, such as neuroscience, epistemology and phenomenology. The main goal is to show that the second‐person perspective can be used to point out particular features of social cognition and its related psychopathology. Taking the hypothesis that the second‐person perspective is the congruence point between an objective process and the subjective experience, I will attempt to explain schizophrenia as a self‐related deficit, first in the light of the first‐person and the third‐person perspective and afterward, in the light of the poorly less understood second‐person perspective. On the one hand, the first‐person experience is correlated both with space and time. In fact, psychiatric patients report subjective experiences that can be understood within research on the bodily self, such as (1) spatially incongruent proprioception and (2) impaired sense of time as the basic mechanism that allows conscious experience. On the other hand, the second‐person approach has already begun to prove productive within social cognition research, pointing out the importance of experiencing and interacting with others as our primarily way well‐being. I will phenomenological analyse subjective and intersubjective experience in the disorders of the self and derive practical consequences to evidence‐based medicine.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 08-09-2021
DOI: 10.1177/00377686211032966
Abstract: The emergence of New Age spirituality in Western cultures during the 1960s and 1970s has been described as a rejection of traditional values, fuelled by disillusionment with the Christian church and a feeling of alienation in mainstream social and work environments. While New Age has been characterised as a ‘turning away’ from dominant cultural ideologies, there is comparatively less discussion about what New Age actors are ‘turning towards’ in their pursuit of subjective spirituality. Research from Australia demonstrates that in iduals were primarily searching for deeper meaning and looking for spiritual answers when they first engaged with New Age pursuits. In addition, social and intergenerational transmission are both important factors in the cultivation of New Age spirituality.
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 21-01-2021
DOI: 10.3389/FNSYS.2021.688424
Abstract: In this theoretical review, we begin by discussing brains and minds from a dynamical systems perspective, and then go on to describe methods for characterizing the flexibility of dynamic networks. We discuss how varying degrees and kinds of flexibility may be adaptive (or maladaptive) in different contexts, specifically focusing on measures related to either more disjoint or cohesive dynamics. While disjointed flexibility may be useful for assessing neural entropy, cohesive flexibility may potentially serve as a proxy for self-organized criticality as a fundamental property enabling adaptive behavior in complex systems. Particular attention is given to recent studies in which flexibility methods have been used to investigate neurological and cognitive maturation, as well as the breakdown of conscious processing under varying levels of anesthesia. We further discuss how these findings and methods might be contextualized within the Free Energy Principle with respect to the fundamentals of brain organization and biological functioning more generally, and describe potential methodological advances from this paradigm. Finally, with relevance to computational psychiatry, we propose a research program for obtaining a better understanding of ways that dynamic networks may relate to different forms of psychological flexibility, which may be the single most important factor for ensuring human flourishing.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2017
DOI: 10.1016/J.PBIOMOLBIO.2017.09.004
Abstract: There are two fundamental models to understanding the phenomenon of natural life. One is the computational model, which is based on the symbolic thinking paradigm. The other is the biological organism model. The common difficulty attributed to these paradigms is that their reductive tools allow the phenomenological aspects of experience to remain hidden behind yes/no responses (behavioral tests), or brain 'pictures' (neuroimaging). Hence, one of the problems regards how to overcome methodological difficulties towards a non-reductive investigation of conscious experience. It is our aim in this paper to show how cooperation between Eastern and Western traditions may shed light for a non-reductive study of mind and life. This study focuses on the first-person experience associated with cognitive and mental events. We studied phenomenal data as a crucial fact for the domain of living beings, which, we expect, can provide the ground for a subsequent third-person study. The intervention with Jhana meditation, and its qualitative assessment, provided us with experiential profiles based upon subjects' evaluations of their own conscious experiences. The overall results should move towards an integrated or global perspective on mind where neither experience nor external mechanisms have the final word.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 02-05-2023
Abstract: In her insightful book, Susan Schneider explores how AI impacts human identity. Drawing from her argument, I argue that this intertwined relationship between AI and human identity goes both ways. AI is not a separate entity from humans but rather emerges from our cultural practices with profound social implications. I first reject realism about AI – the view of AI as independent from human social and cultural contexts and thereby morally neutral – on the basis that it is a deceptive means of deflecting ethical design responsibility. Realism about AI as a mind-independent object, as opposed to a productof human culture, will reinforce, as opposed to invert and challenge, existing biases on the basis of sociocultural segregation. The paper motivates, instead, realism about self-determination agencies as a means to understand the human roots on the basis of AI and how impacts agencies and shapes identities.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 03-07-2023
Abstract: This paper, drawing from complex systems theory (CST), advances a framework that proposes the implementation of Ambient Smart Environments (ASEs) for personalised cognitive styles. The paper begins by arguing that Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) can be described and understood as embodied misattunement with a neurotypical (sociocultural) environment. Personalising the environment is an opportunity for fitting a cognitive style, e.g. autistic interaction with the environment. High variability, noise, and rigidity can result in difficulties adapting to (neurotypical) environmental demands. This may result in rigid or repetitive behaviour, corresponding, in CST, to a “stuck state” or “local minimum”. Preventive intervention with ASE (by increasing free energy and moving out of the “stuck state” and into a new stable state) for autistic interaction with the environment can help develop patterns of flexible adjustment and attunement to the environment. ASE offers an opportunity for personalised therapeutic intervention for manipulating the environment to fit a cognitive style.
Publisher: Common Ground Research Networks
Date: 2019
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 07-04-2023
Abstract: This paper applies the Free Energy Principle (FEP) to propose that the lack of action in response to climate change should be considered a maladaptive symptom of human activity that we refer to as biophilia deficiency syndrome. The paper is organised into four parts: the characterisation of the natural world under the Gaia Hypothesis, the employment of the FEP as a description of the behaviour of self-organising systems, the application of the FEP to Gaia to understand coupling dynamics between living systems and purportedly non-living planetary processes, and the offering of positive interventions for addressing the current state of ecological crisis under this framework. For the latter, we emphasise the importance of perturbing stuck states for healthy development, and the necessary appreciation of life existing as nested systems at multiple levels in a hierarchy. We propose the development of human biophilia virtue in accordance with the FEP as a practical intervention for treating biophilia deficiency syndrome and helping to safeguard the balance of planetary processes and the integrity of living systems that depend on them, offering some ex les of what this might look like in practice. Overall, this paper provides novel insights into how to catalyse meaningful ecological change, proposing a deliberate and disruptive approach to addressing the dysfunctional relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2022
Publisher: Philosophy Documentation Center
Date: 2015
DOI: 10.5840/EPS201544211
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 14-02-2023
Abstract: This paper proposes a framework for comprehending the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as Augmented Cognition (AugCog). AugCog is viewed as an emergent bio-cultural process, reflecting AI's design, implementation, and usage. Section 1 establishes smart societies as a complex system. Section 2 defends that the development of AI is analogous to the biological process of niche construction. Section 3 defines AI as a socioculturally embodied expansion by which AI is shaped by and shapes human experience, resulting in various forms of AugCog. Section 4 highlights AugCog in mixed realities such as social media, neurotechnology, and smart environments, illustrating its emergence from multiscale and interdependent sociocultural perspectives. AugCog's perspective situates the human species in the state space of evolution, signifying our existence as a species and as embodied in iduals.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2015
DOI: 10.1016/J.PBIOMOLBIO.2015.06.014
Abstract: Kurt Gödel wrote (1964, p. 272), after he had read Husserl, that the notion of objectivity raises a question: "the question of the objective existence of the objects of mathematical intuition (which, incidentally, is an exact replica of the question of the objective existence of the outer world)". This "exact replica" brings to mind the close analogy Husserl saw between our intuition of essences in Wesensschau and of physical objects in perception. What is it like to experience a mathematical proving process? What is the ontological status of a mathematical proof? Can computer assisted provers output a proof? Taking a naturalized world account, I will assess the relationship between mathematics, the physical world and consciousness by introducing a significant conceptual distinction between proving and proof. I will propose that proving is a phenomenological conscious experience. This experience involves a combination of what Kurt Gödel called intuition, and what Husserl called intentionality. In contrast, proof is a function of that process - the mathematical phenomenon - that objectively self-presents a property in the world, and that results from a spatiotemporal unity being subject to the exact laws of nature. In this essay, I apply phenomenology to mathematical proving as a performance of consciousness, that is, a lived experience expressed and formalized in language, in which there is the possibility of formulating intersubjectively shareable meanings.
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 12-01-2022
DOI: 10.3389/FPSYG.2021.643276
Abstract: This paper proposes an account of neurocognitive activity without leveraging the notion of neural representation. Neural representation is a concept that results from assuming that the properties of the models used in computational cognitive neuroscience (e.g., information, representation, etc.) must literally exist the system being modelled (e.g., the brain). Computational models are important tools to test a theory about how the collected data (e.g., behavioural or neuroimaging) has been generated. While the usefulness of computational models is unquestionable, it does not follow that neurocognitive activity should literally entail the properties construed in the model (e.g., information, representation). While this is an assumption present in computationalist accounts, it is not held across the board in neuroscience. In the last section, the paper offers a dynamical account of neurocognitive activity with Dynamical Causal Modelling (DCM) that combines dynamical systems theory (DST) mathematical formalisms with the theoretical contextualisation provided by Embodied and Enactive Cognitive Science (EECS).
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 24-11-2022
DOI: 10.1007/S13164-021-00588-9
Abstract: A number of perceptual (exteroceptive and proprioceptive) illusions present problems for predictive processing accounts. In this chapter we’ll review explanations of the Müller-Lyer Illusion (MLI), the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) and the Alien Hand Illusion (AHI) based on the idea of Prediction Error Minimization (PEM), and show why they fail. In spite of the relatively open communicative processes which, on many accounts, are posited between hierarchical levels of the cognitive system in order to facilitate the minimization of prediction errors, perceptual illusions seemingly allow prediction errors to rule. Even if, at the top, we have reliable and secure knowledge that the lines in the MLI are equal, or that the rubber hand in the RHI is not our hand, the system seems unable to correct for sensory errors that form the illusion. We argue that the standard PEM explanation based on a short-circuiting principle doesn’t work. This is the idea that where there are general statistical regularities in the environment there is a kind of short circuiting such that relevant priors are relegated to lower-level processing so that information from higher levels is not exchanged (Ogilvie and Carruthers, Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7:721–742, 2016), or is not as precise as it should be (Hohwy, The Predictive Mind, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). Such solutions (without convincing explanation) violate the idea of open communication and/or they over-discount the reliable and secure knowledge that is in the system. We propose an alternative, 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) solution. We argue that PEM fails to take into account the ‘structural resistance’ introduced by material and cultural factors in the broader cognitive system.
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2018
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 05-2023
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2021
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 28-01-2021
DOI: 10.1007/S11229-020-02986-5
Abstract: When someone masters a skill, their performance looks to us like second nature: it looks as if their actions are smoothly performed without explicit, knowledge-driven, online monitoring of their performance. Contemporary computational models in motor control theory, however, are instructionist : that is, they cast skillful performance as a knowledge-driven process. Optimal motor control theory (OMCT), as representative par excellence of such approaches, casts skillful performance as an instruction, instantiated in the brain, that needs to be executed—a motor command. This paper aims to show the limitations of such instructionist approaches to skillful performance. We specifically address the question of whether the assumption of control-theoretic models is warranted. The first section of this paper examines the instructionist assumption, according to which skillful performance consists of the execution of theoretical instructions harnessed in motor representations. The second and third sections characterize the implementation of motor representations as motor commands, with a special focus on formulations from OMCT. The final sections of this paper examine predictive coding and active inference—behavioral modeling frameworks that descend, but are distinct, from OMCT—and argue that the instructionist, control-theoretic assumptions are ill-motivated in light of new developments in active inference.
Publisher: The Royal Society
Date: 21-01-2019
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 03-2021
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 04-10-2023
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 2022
DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X22000322
Abstract: We target the ontological and epistemological ramifications of the proposed distinction between Friston and Pearl blankets. We emphasize the need for empirical testing next to computational modeling. A peculiar aspect of the free energy principle (FEP) is its purported support of radically opposed ontologies of the mind. In our view, the objective ontological aspiration itself should be rejected for a pragmatic instrumentalist view.
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 08-06-2023
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 29-04-2022
DOI: 10.3389/FPSYG.2022.855074
Abstract: This aim of this paper is two-fold: it critically analyses and rejects accounts blending active inference as theory of mind and enactivism and it advances an enactivist-dynamic understanding of social cognition that is compatible with active inference. While some social cognition theories seemingly take an enactive perspective on social cognition, they explain it as the attribution of mental states to other people, by assuming representational structures, in line with the classic Theory of Mind (ToM). Holding both enactivism and ToM, we argue, entails contradiction and confusion due to two ToM assumptions widely known to be rejected by enactivism: that (1) social cognition reduces to mental representation and (2) social cognition is a hardwired contentful ‘toolkit’ or ‘starter pack’ that fuels the model-like theorising supposed in (1). The paper offers a positive alternative, one that avoids contradictions or confusion. After rejecting ToM-inspired theories of social cognition and clarifying the profile of social cognition under enactivism, that is without assumptions (1) and (2), the last section advances an enactivist-dynamic model of cognition as dynamic, real-time, fluid, contextual social action, where we use the formalisms of dynamical systems theory to explain the origins of socio-cognitive novelty in developmental change and active inference as a tool to demonstrate social understanding as generalised synchronisation.
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2018
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2018
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 13-07-2022
Abstract: Recent research has demonstrated the potential of psychedelic therapy for mental healthcare. However, the psychological experience underlying its therapeutic effects remain poorlyunderstood. This paper proposes a framework that suggests psychedelics act as destabilisers,both psychologically and neurophysiologically. Drawing on the "entropic brain" hypothesisand the "RElaxed Beliefs Under pSychedelics" (REBUS) model, this paper focuses onthe richness of psychological experience. Through a complex systems theory perspective,we suggest that psychedelics destabilize fixed points or attractors, breaking reinforced patternsof thinking and behaving. Our approach explains how psychedelic-induced increases inbrain entropy destabilize neurophysiological set-points and leads to new conceptualizationsof psychedelic psychotherapy. These insights have important implications for risk mitigationand treatment optimization in psychedelic medicine, both during the peak psychedelicexperience and during the sub-acute period of potential recovery
Location: Portugal
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Location: Portugal
Location: Portugal
No related grants have been discovered for Inês Hipólito.