Abstract
There are various philosophical interpretations of the account of consciousness associated with the temporal depth of generative models under the Free Energy Principle. This paper strives to develop a new philosophical interpretation of the free energy account of consciousness along the lines of intentionalism.
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Notes
Please note that Crane’s (2015) analysis of ascribing mental states to persons draws on the model-based philosophy of science. This makes Crane’s approach consistent with the model-based analysis of FEP and its Markovian tools in recent literature (see Beni, 2021). The point that intentionalism is committed to the content of intentional acts, rather than their objects, provides further grounds to think that psychological realism is compatible with a model-based approach to FEP (for no commitments to external physical objects have been made by the strong intentionalist).
What is called impure intentionalism does not identify intentionality--which is about the directedness of the mental phenomena--with formal semantics--which is about truth conditions and truth values. However, I occasionally associate it with a semantic conception of the content of experience (not because of the connection with formal semantics, but because of a fruitful connection with the semantic view of theories in the philosophy of science (Crane, 2015).
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Beni, M.D. The intentional structure of generative models. Phenom Cogn Sci (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-023-09914-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-023-09914-1