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Predictive processing, perceiving and imagining: Is to perceive to imagine, or something close to it?

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Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between perceiving and imagining on the basis of predictive processing models in neuroscience. Contrary to the received view in philosophy of mind, which holds that perceiving and imagining are essentially distinct, these models depict perceiving and imagining as deeply unified and overlapping. It is argued that there are two mutually exclusive implications of taking perception and imagination to be fundamentally unified. The view defended is what I dub the ecological–enactive view given that it does not succumb to internalism about the mind-world relation, and allows one to keep a version of the received view in play.

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Notes

  1. Commenting on the general idea of unity and continuity, Seth states: “More generally, the key role of top-down predictive or generative models [predictive processing] in perception points to a strong continuity not only with imagery but also with associative recall, dreaming, and other self-generated perceptual or quasi-perceptual states” (2014, p. 101).

  2. See Colombo and Wright (2016) for an excellent critical discussion of PP and its ambitions of being a grand unifying theory.

  3. In fact, it is the familiar frame problem in artificial intelligence. It is not my intention to develop this issue in detail—a task for another occasion. Rather, I make use of the issue here to further motivate the ecological–enactive view.

  4. Orlandi’s proposal is to ground PP in Natural Scene Statistics (NSS). She explains: “One of the fundamental ideas of NSS is to use statistical tools to study not what goes on inside the head, but rather what goes on outside—for example, what are the likely environmental causes of retinal images. NSS is interested both in what is more likely present in the environment or, more tractably, in how probable a given cause is, and in the relationship between what is in the world and the stimulus it produces” (2014, p. 63).

  5. Further support for this view comes from the idea that organisms embed the regularities of their embedding niche into their anatomy. Friston and Stephan (2007) puts this in the following way: “the environment unfolds in a thermodynamically structured and lawful way and biological systems embed these laws into their anatomy” (2007, p. 422).

  6. The claim that perception and action are constitutively intertwined is controversial in light of the causal-constitutive distinction, and the alleged causal-constitutive fallacy, in the recent discussions over the extent of mind. However important, I shall not discuss this fallacy here given that it would take us to far astray (see Kirchhoff (2015a, c) for a discussion of the causal-constitutive fallacy in the context of the extended mind debate and the free energy principle).

  7. See also Chemero (2009), Clark (2008), Gibson (1979), Menary (2007), and Thompson (2007).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project “Minds in Skilled Performance” (DP170102987), a John Templeton Foundation Grant “Probabilitizing Consciousness: Implications and New Directions”, by a Mind, Brain and Cognitive Evolution fellowship at Ruhr University Bochum, and by a John Templeton Foundation Academic Cross-Training Fellowship (ID #60708). The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation. Thanks to Julian Kiverstein, Jelle Bruineberg, Erik Rietveld, Micah Allen and Jon Opie for comments on a previous version of this paper. Thanks also to the audience members of the Acting Ahead of Actuality conference at the University of Dubrovnik, Croatia, 17-18 June 2016, and to the audience members of the Imagination and Representation workshop at Flinders University, Adelaide, 28 September 2015, for valuable suggestions for improvement. And finally thanks to an anonymous reviewer.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia

    Michael D. Kirchhoff

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Kirchhoff, M.D. Predictive processing, perceiving and imagining: Is to perceive to imagine, or something close to it?. Philos Stud 175, 751–767 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0891-8

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