The feeling of grip: novelty, error dynamics, and the predictive brain

Abstract

According to the free energy principle biological agents resist a tendency to disorder in their interactions with a dynamically changing environment by keeping themselves in sensory and physiological states that are expected given their embodiment and the niche they inhabit (Friston in Nat Rev Neurosci 11(2):127-138, 2010. doi:10.1038/nrn2787). Why would a biological agent that aims at minimising uncertainty in its encounters with the world ever be motivated to seek out novelty? Novelty for such an agent would arrive in the form of sensory and physiological states that are unexpected. Such an agent ought therefore to avoid novel and surprising interactions with the world one might think. Yet humans and many other animals find play and other forms of novelty-seeking and exploration hugely rewarding. How can this be understood in frameworks for studying the mind that emphasise prediction error minMany thanks to Andy Clark for excellent feedback and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper, and to Jelle Bruineberg for helping us to understand the recent literature in cognitive neuroscience on epistemic value. We are extremely grateful for detailed reviews we received from two anonymous reviewers that helped us to significantly improve and sharpen our arguments. Erik Rietveld would like to acknowledge the research funding awarded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) 123Synthese imisation? This problem has been taken up in recent research concerned with epistemic action-actions an agent engages in to reduce uncertainty. However that work leaves two questions unanswered, which it is the aim of our paper to address. First, no account has been given yet of why it should feel good to the agent to engage the world playfully and with curiosity. Second an appeal is made to precision-estimation to explain epistemic action, yet it remains unclear how precision-weighting works in action more generally, or active inference. We argue that an answer to both questions may lie in the bodily states of an agent that track the rate at which free energy is being reduced. The recent literature on the predictive brain has connected the valence of emotional experiences to the rate of change in the reduction of prediction error (Joffily and Coricelli in PLoS Comput Biol 9(6):e1003094, 2013. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003094; Van de Cruys, in Metzinger and Wiese (eds) Philosophy and predictive processing, vol 24, MIND Group, Frankfurt am Main, 2017. doi:10.15502/9783958573253). In this literature valenced emotional experiences are hypothesised to be identical with changes in the rate at which prediction error is reduced. Experiences are negatively valenced when overall prediction error increases and are positively valenced when the sum of prediction errors decrease. We offer an ecological-enactive interpretation of the concept of valence and its connection to rate of change of prediction error. We show how rate of change should be understood in terms of embodied states of affordance-related action read...

Free-energy minimization in joint agent-environment systems: A niche construction perspective

“…Furthermore, this means that an agent selects those policies that it expects will make it keep minimizing free-energy in the future. This requires us to define an additional quantity, expected free-energy G , to ensure the agent acts so as to minimize the expected surprisal under a particular policy (i.e., pursue uncertainty-resolving, information-seeking policies that exploit epistemic affordances (Kiverstein et al., 2017) in their econiche). Above, we have defined the free-energy as: $F=E_{Qtrue(\tilde{s},\pi ,\theta true)}[\ln Q\left(\tilde{s},\pi ,\theta \right)-\ln P\left(\tilde{o},\tilde{s},\pi ,\theta \right)]$…”

Choosing a Markov blanket

“…We certainly do not mean to dispute the key idea behind the free-energy principle that a complex adaptive system must minimize free energy if it is to preserve its organization for a prolonged period of time in a dynamic environment. In contrast, we think living beings are sensitive to the rise and fall in free energy over time (Kiverstein et al 2019). It is on the basis of this sensitivity that affordances stand out from the landscape as relevant.…”

“Social physiology” for psychiatric semiology: How TTOM can initiate an interactive turn for computational psychiatry?

“…The relationship between culture and creativity in the framework of TTOM needs further development, to be sure, and Vickhoff gives some clues about how to address this. He mentions recent work on synchrony in human action, which is beginning to reveal the mechanisms of micro-coordination of action in real time and its consequences for feelings of emotional attunement and social affiliation (Kiverstein et al 2019;Parkinson 2019;Tschacher & Haken 2007;Van de Cruys & Wagemans 2011;Van de Cruys et al 2017). Vickhoff notes, as well, that the reduction of uncertainty can be pleasurable (Vuust et al 2018).…”