Abstract
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.
Highlights
In the contemporary sciences of mind and brain, as well as in the areas of modern philosophy devoted to those sciences, the broad family of approaches labelled with the term “predictive processing” has gained considerable traction
A central point, is that—while the possibility of preference learning remains consistent with the idea that p(oτ ) always represents desired outcomes in the BDI framework—the proposed mechanisms of preference learning in decision active inference” (dAI) could come into tension with folk-psychological intuitions and allow empirical research to find evidence for one versus the other (that is, if the role of p(oτ ) in the dAI formalism is taken to be more than a convenient mathematical tool for specifying reward)
In this article we have addressed the concern that active inference models may be in tension with folk psychology because they do not explicitly include terms for desires at the mathematical level of description
Summary
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. Keywords Active inference · Folk psychology · Predictive processing · Bayesian beliefs · Desires
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