What Might Interoceptive Inference Reveal about Consciousness?

Nikolova, Niia; Waade, Peter Thestrup; Friston, Karl J.; Allen, Micah

doi:10.1007/s13164-021-00580-3

Cited by 25 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 138 publications

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“…This setup would equip the agent with the ability to recognize what it desired and deploy the appropriate empirical priors as part of that recognition process. This is just one example of several recent attempts to capture conscious, personal-level processes in active inference, many of which similarly emphasize hierarchical inference, the necessity of cognitive action (e.g., selective attention through control of sensory precision), as well as interoceptive/emotional factors (e.g., see Clark et al, 2019;Limanowski & Friston, 2018;Nikolova et al, 2021;Smith et al, 2019a;Vilas et al, 2021). As stated above, our arguments in this paper do not address the sufficient conditions for a generative model to support personal-level processes.…”

Section: Summary Of Main Argumentmentioning

confidence: 97%

Active inference models do not contradict folk psychology

2022

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Active inference offers a unified theory of perception, learning, and decision-making at computational and neural levels of description. In this article, we address the worry that active inference may be in tension with the belief–desire–intention (BDI) model within folk psychology because it does not include terms for desires (or other conative constructs) at the mathematical level of description. To resolve this concern, we first provide a brief review of the historical progression from predictive coding to active inference, enabling us to distinguish between active inference formulations of motor control (which need not have desires under folk psychology) and active inference formulations of decision processes (which do have desires within folk psychology). We then show that, despite a superficial tension when viewed at the mathematical level of description, the active inference formalism contains terms that are readily identifiable as encoding both the objects of desire and the strength of desire at the psychological level of description. We demonstrate this with simple simulations of an active inference agent motivated to leave a dark room for different reasons. Despite their consistency, we further show how active inference may increase the granularity of folk-psychological descriptions by highlighting distinctions between drives to seek information versus reward—and how it may also offer more precise, quantitative folk-psychological predictions. Finally, we consider how the implicitly conative components of active inference may have partial analogues (i.e., “as if” desires) in other systems describable by the broader free energy principle to which it conforms.

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Section: Summary Of Main Argumentmentioning

confidence: 97%

Active inference models do not contradict folk psychology

2022

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“…2013 ), which is variously characterized as a ‘common currency’ scalar signal ( Montague and Berns 2002 ; Chib et al. 2009 ; Levy and Glimcher 2012 ), as distance in a multi-dimensional quality space ( O’Doherty 2014 ; Juechems and Summerfield 2019 ; Hayden and Niv 2021 ) or as ‘whatever maximizes the evidence for the agent’s model of a survivable world’ ( Nikolova et al. 2021 ) in the predictive processing literature.…”

Section: The Intrinsic Value Of Subjective Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

Consciousness matters: phenomenal experience has functional value

Cleeremans

Tallon‐Baudry

2022

Neuroscience of Consciousness

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‘Why would we do anything at all if the doing was not doing something to us?’ In other words: What is consciousness good for? Here, reversing classical views, according to many of which subjective experience is a mere epiphenomenon that affords no functional advantage, we propose that subject-level experience—‘What it feels like’—is endowed with intrinsic value, and it is precisely the value agents associate with their experiences that explains why they do certain things and avoid others. Because experiences have value and guide behaviour, consciousness has a function. Under this hypothesis of ‘phenomenal worthiness’, we argue that it is only in virtue of the fact that conscious agents ‘experience’ things and ‘care’ about those experiences that they are ‘motivated’ to act in certain ways and that they ‘prefer’ some states of affairs vs. others. Overviewing how the concept of value has been approached in decision-making, emotion research and consciousness research, we argue that phenomenal consciousness has intrinsic value and conclude that if this is indeed the case, then it must have a function. Phenomenal experience might act as a mental currency of sorts, which not only endows conscious mental states with intrinsic value but also makes it possible for conscious agents to compare vastly different experiences in a common subject-centred space—a feature that readily explains the fact that consciousness is ‘unified’. The phenomenal worthiness hypothesis, in turn, makes the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness more tractable, since it can then be reduced to a problem about function.

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“…comparing interoceptive mechanisms and visceral inputs [71,72], allowing the former to be constantly updated in relation to the state of the body [73].…”

Section: The Exoskeleton With the Body: Interaction Between Different...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Homeostatic stability requires a balance between internal feedback and environmental context. This facilitates the identification of correct interoceptive signals and allostatic interoceptive signals [ 71 , 72 ]. The integrity of the system is maintained by comparing interoceptive mechanisms and visceral inputs [ 71 , 72 ], allowing the former to be constantly updated in relation to the state of the body [ 73 ].…”

Section: The Exoskeleton With the Body: Interaction Between Different...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Exoskeletons for Mobility after Spinal Cord Injury: A Personalized Embodied Approach

Forte

Leemhuis

Favieri

et al. 2022

JPM

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Endowed with inherent flexibility, wearable robotic technologies are powerful devices that are known to extend bodily functionality to assist people with spinal cord injuries (SCIs). However, rather than considering the specific psychological and other physiological needs of their users, these devices are specifically designed to compensate for motor impairment. This could partially explain why they still cannot be adopted as an everyday solution, as only a small number of patients use lower-limb exoskeletons. It remains uncertain how these devices can be appropriately embedded in mental representations of the body. From this perspective, we aimed to highlight the homeostatic role of autonomic and interoceptive signals and their possible integration in a personalized experience of exoskeleton overground walking. To ensure personalized user-centered robotic technologies, optimal robotic devices should be designed and adjusted according to the patient’s condition. We discuss how embodied approaches could emerge as a means of overcoming the hesitancy toward wearable robots.

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What Might Interoceptive Inference Reveal about Consciousness?

Cited by 25 publications

References 138 publications

Active inference models do not contradict folk psychology

Active inference models do not contradict folk psychology

Consciousness matters: phenomenal experience has functional value

Exoskeletons for Mobility after Spinal Cord Injury: A Personalized Embodied Approach

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