Active inference and the primacy of the ‘I can’
Date issued
Authors
Editors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
License
Abstract
This paper deals with the question of agency and intentionality in the context of the free-energy principle. The free-energy principle is a system-theoretic framework for understanding living self-organizing systems and how they relate to their environments. I will first sketch the main philosophical positions in the literature: a rationalist Helmholtzian interpretation (Hohwy 2013; Clark 2013), a cybernetic interpretation (Seth 2015) and the enactive affordance-based interpretation (Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014; Bruineberg et al. forthcoming) and will then show how agency and intentionality are construed differently on these different philosophical interpretations. I will then argue that a purely Helmholtzian is limited, in that it can account only account for agency in the context of perceptual inference. The cybernetic account cannot give a full account of action, since purposiveness is accounted for only to the extent that it pertains to the control of homeostatic essential variables. I will then argue that the enactive affordance-based account attempts to provide broader account of purposive action without presupposing goals and intentions coming from outside of the theory. In the second part of the paper, I will discuss how each of these three interpretations conceives of the sense agency and intentionality in different ways.
Description
Keywords
Citation
Published in
Philosophy and predictive processing, Metzinger, Thomas, MIND Group, Frankfurt am Main, 2017, https://doi.org/10.15502/9783958573062