Surprise! Why enactivism and predictive processing are parting ways: The case of improvisation

Abstract

Can we explain how the various factors of knowledge, skill, habit, environmental constraints and affordances interact or integrate in improvisational performance? In attempting to explain how this integration takes place, I’ll consider two possible approaches: predictive processing (PP) and enactivism. I’ll argue that PP, which, on a neuroscientific view, conceives of the mind as set up to avoid surprise, will not be able to explain improvisation if it remains true to its own principles. In contrast, I’ll argue, enactivism, as a form of embodied cognition that takes the explanatory unit to be the brain-body environment, can offer a better explanation of improvisation. I’ll also argue that the notion of habit is central to this account.

Human innovation and the creative agency of the world in the age of generative AI

“…Based on what has been discussed so far, future potentials serve as the loophole for the emergence of profound novelty: being grounded in the world and its becoming, they go beyond the limitations of the space of possible recombinations (of existing knowledge about actuals). They manifest the creative agency of the world by ''invading'' or irritating our cognitive system and its preformed structures, categories, or hypotheses as ''surprises'' (Clark, 2018;Gallagher, 2022;Constant et al, 2024), unexpected phenomena, ''accidents'' (Ross, 2023), etc. In the best case, these potentials can be integrated with the cognitive system's creative processes and transformed into actuals enacting the above discussed state of coupling and positive resonance.…”

Embodied and Enactive Approaches to Cognition

“…Likewise, as previously suggested, enactive processes are not well captured by the notion of deontic action, as characterized by Constant, Clark, and Friston (2021), that is, as unthinking or automatic, normatively guided action. Deontic action, as they understand it, clearly does not allow for innovation or improvisation (Gallagher 2022).…”

Informational Resilience in the Human Cognitive Ecology

“…Accordingly, living systems aim towards maintaining their homeostasis by means of entropy reduction. As Gallagher points out, this links to the fact that an “unbounded increase of entropy [is equal to] systemic death” [ 38 ] (p. 7). In the context of Friston’s work on predictive brains, the reduction in entropy entails that an organism minimizes its free energy in the form of its own prediction errors, thus aiming to eliminate the possibility of ‘surprises’.…”