Abstract

Drawing from both enactivist and cognitivist perspectives on mind, I propose that explaining teleological phenomena may require reappraising both “Cartesian theaters” and mental homunculi in terms of embodied self-models (ESMs), understood as body maps with agentic properties, functioning as predictive-memory systems and cybernetic controllers. Quasi-homuncular ESMs are suggested to constitute a major organizing principle for neural architectures due to their initial and ongoing significance for solutions to inference problems in cognitive (and affective) development. Embodied experiences provide foundational lessons in learning curriculums in which agents explore increasingly challenging problem spaces, so answering an unresolved question in Bayesian cognitive science: what are biologically plausible mechanisms for equipping learners with sufficiently powerful inductive biases to adequately constrain inference spaces? Drawing on models from neurophysiology, psychology, and developmental robotics, I describe how embodiment provides fundamental sources of empirical priors (as reliably learnable posterior expectations). If ESMs play this kind of foundational role in cognitive development, then bidirectional linkages will be found between all sensory modalities and frontal-parietal control hierarchies, so infusing all senses with somatic-motoric properties, thereby structuring all perception by relevant affordances, so solving frame problems for embodied agents. Drawing upon the Free Energy Principle and Active Inference framework, I describe a particular mechanism for intentional action selection via consciously imagined (and explicitly represented) goal realization, where contrasts between desired and present states influence ongoing policy selection via predictive coding mechanisms and backward-chained imaginings (as self-realizing predictions). This embodied developmental legacy suggests a mechanism by which imaginings can be intentionally shaped by (internalized) partially-expressed motor acts, so providing means of agentic control for attention, working memory, imagination, and behavior. I further describe the nature(s) of mental causation and self-control, and also provide an account of readiness potentials in Libet paradigms wherein conscious intentions shape causal streams leading to enaction. Finally, I provide neurophenomenological handlings of prototypical qualia including pleasure, pain, and desire in terms of self-annihilating free energy gradients via quasi-synesthetic interoceptive active inference. In brief, this manuscript is intended to illustrate how radically embodied minds may create foundations for intelligence (as capacity for learning and inference), consciousness (as somatically-grounded self-world modeling), and will (as deployment of predictive models for enacting valued goals).

Highlights

  • Alternative explanations for Libet phenomena may be found in the Free Energy Principle and Active Inference (FEP-AI) framework [55], wherein brains are understood as cybernetic control systems that predictively model the world [59,60,61]

  • Have we lacked bridging principles and understanding of embodiment as the core of selfhood and experience, but scientific practice both implicitly and explicitly denigrated subjectivity after the decline of introspectionism and rise of behaviorism. Given this taboo on subjectivity—i.e., the very thing we would hope to explain with respect to consciousness—why should we have been surprised if we lacked satisfying understanding of the nature(s) of experience? some of the (Hard) problem may derive from frames in cognitive science that rendered all Cartesian framings of mental functioning taboo

  • If quasi-Cartesian intuitions were semi-faithful representations of the nature(s) of mind and brain, why should we be surprised if our scholarship—and its denigration of folk psychology [436]—failed to provide satisfying accounts of the nature(s) of our conscious agency?

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Summary

Introduction

Combining different levels of analysis can provide constraints over plausible hypotheses, so affording inferential synergy Another perspective is provided by “4-E” cognition [3,4,5], in which minds are conceptualized as inherently embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive. More traditional “cognitivists”, in contrast, tend to dismiss embodied cognition as a research program whose promise is limited by rejecting computational principles connecting brains and minds From this point of view, embodied cognitive science is sometimes dismissed as a collection of interesting mind-body correlations, but which may be conceptually shallow in lacking precise operationalization. The charges are as follows: 1. The mind-body problem: Separating bodies and minds as distinct orders of being

The homunculus fallacy
From Action to Attention and Back Again
Actions from Imaginings
A Taxonomy of Attending via Partially-Expressed Motor Commands
Imaginings from Attention
Phenomenal Binding via ESMs
Mental Causation
Readiness Potentials and the Willingness to Act
Qualia Explained?
Emotions and Feelings
Synesthetic Affects
Why Conscious Feelings?
Facing up to the Meta-Problem of Consciousness
Findings
Conclusions
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