Where There is Life There is Mind: In Support of a Strong Life-Mind Continuity Thesis

Kirchhoff, Michael D.; Froese, Tom

doi:10.3390/e19040169

Cited by 79 publications

(71 citation statements)

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“…Continuity of mind and life (Thompson, 2007; Kirchhoff and Froese, 2017) does not imply that mind and life are co-extensive. But other philosophers are more inclusive, since they also consider the behavior of plants as falling within the realm of cognition.…”

Section: Self-organization and Basic Biological Intentionalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Does Separating Intentionality From Mental Representation Imply Radical Enactivism?

Schlicht

2018

Front. Psychol.

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Traditionally, intentionality is regarded as that feature of all and only mental states – paradigmatically beliefs and desires – in virtue of which they are directed at or are about something. The problem of intentionality is to explain how it fits into the natural order given the intuition that no physical entity can be intentionally directed in this sense. The basic assumption of this paper, proposed by enactivists, is that failure to naturalize intentionality and mental representation is partly due to the fact that most participants in the debate take intentionality and mental representation to be equivalent. In contrast, it is proposed to treat intentionality as a feature of whole embodied agents (paradigmatically organisms) who can be directed at objects and states of affairs in various ways, while representation should be regarded as a feature of mental states (and their respective vehicles or underlying mechanisms). The present paper develops and motivates the distinction, applies it to Metzinger’s project of naturalizing phenomenal representation, and demonstrates the range of theoretical options with respect to a delineation of cognition given the enactive proposal. It is taken as problematic that enactivism takes the realm of cognition to be identical to the realm of biology. Instead, a constraint on a theory of intentionality and representation is that it should delineate the subject matter of cognitive science and distinguish it from other sciences, also to leave room for the possibility of artificial intelligence. One important implication of the present proposal is that there can be creatures which can be intentionally directed without having the capacity to represent. That is, their intentionality is restricted to being able to be directed at existent things. Only creatures in possession of the right kind of neurocognitive architecture can produce and sustain representations in order to be directed at non-existent things. It is sketched how this approach conceives of intentionality as a developmental and layered concept, allowing for a hierarchical model of varieties of intentionality, ranging from the basic pursuit of local environmental goals to thoughts about fictional objects.

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Section: Self-organization and Basic Biological Intentionalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hutto and Myin (2013, p. 33) emphasize their “strong affinities with Autopoietic Enactivism,” while Noë (2009, p. 42) explicitly states that “mind is life.” Moreover, see Froese and Di Paolo (2011) and Kirchhoff and Froese (2017) who defend the mind-life continuity thesis as one of the main pillars of Enactivism.…”

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confidence: 99%

Does Separating Intentionality From Mental Representation Imply Radical Enactivism?

Schlicht

2018

Front. Psychol.

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“…The foundations of this theory come from a mathematically complex principle-the so-called "free energy principle" (FEP), which can be applied to every biological system that resists a tendency to disorder (Friston 2009(Friston , 2010(Friston , 2013Kirchhoff and Froese 2017). 1 Friston has proposed that everything that can change in the brain will change so as to maintain the adaptive fit of the agent to its dynamically changing environment.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

2017

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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...

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“…The contribution by Michael D. Kirchhoff, 'Autopoiesis, free energy and the lifemind continuity thesis,' targets a strong form of the life-mind continuity thesis (see also Kirchhoff and Froese 2017). It does so by providing a critical comparison of the theory of autopoiesis (developed in biology and enactivist theories of mind) and the free energy principle (with roots in thermodynamics and statistical physics).…”

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confidence: 99%

Predictive brains and embodied, enactive cognition: an introduction to the special issue

Kirchhoff

2017

Synthese

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Where There is Life There is Mind: In Support of a Strong Life-Mind Continuity Thesis

Cited by 79 publications

References 50 publications

Does Separating Intentionality From Mental Representation Imply Radical Enactivism?

Does Separating Intentionality From Mental Representation Imply Radical Enactivism?

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

Predictive brains and embodied, enactive cognition: an introduction to the special issue

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