Many people see predictive processing , one of today’s central approaches in neuroscience, as fitting within a broadly Humean framework. Hume’s basic picture is that the mind acquires habits of expectation from repeated experience. When A is regularly followed by B, we come to anticipate B when A appears. The expectation is not rationally grounded in any necessary connection in the world; it is a psychological disposition produced by experience.
Predictive processing looks like a sophisticated version of this. The brain continuously extracts statistical regularities, it generates expectations based on past experience, it updates those expectations when prediction errors occur and knowledge becomes adaptive expectation rather than access to intrinsic essences or necessary truths.
Hume denies that we directly perceive causality. We perceive sequences and correlations, then form expectations. Predictive processing similarly treats perception as probabilistic inference under uncertainty. The organism learns patterns and regularities rather than directly apprehending necessary structures.
There are philosophical alternatives to the Humean foundation of predictive processing. Thinkers like Evan Thompson, Hanne De Jaegher, and Shaun Gallagher have tried to reinterpret predictive processing in a more enactive direction. Influenced by philosophical movements like pragmatism, hermeneutics and phenomenology, they keep Friston’s mathematics, but reject representationalist readings. They understand prediction as embodied skillful engagement with the world. That move moves predictive processing closer to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.
I always try to understand you, but never know if I do well enough to know how much I agree. We are the universe becoming aware, and becoming able to understand itself. I can’t help but wonder if the universe will one day be one giant mind. Or if that’s possible.
I don’t get the impression that this is the point of your approach. I get the impression that you are saying we are already there. Reminiscent of the Brahman/Atman relationship, perhaps.
I suggest that “consciousness” is best understood to indicate the “presence” of the world itself from the “bodily point of view” of the “conscious” organism.
I don’t believe in the ghost story of the “physical” that is fundamentally concealed from experience. Experience is not “inside consciousness stuff.” Experience is world-from-organism’s-POV.
This approach is not idealism ( tho it may be understood that way ) but rather ontoperspectivism. There is only the shared world, but only from POV.
“The self exists independently of physical reality, and the observer is fundamental.”
They said what appeared to be a complete isolation of a particular individual did not take into account to how tightly we were married to our life, happening for a brief time, before the lights went out.
So, that leads to trying to see the soul as something owned by nobody. One version:
Probably it is better not to say that the soul pities, or learns, or thinks, but to say rather that the soul is the instrument whereby man does these things; that is to say, that the movement does not take place in the soul, but sometimes penetrates to it, and sometimes starts from it.
—Aristotle, De Anima, 408 b, translated by W.S. Hett
I basically agree with this quasi-Hegelian idea. I’d frame this in terms of a larger and more self-referential vocabulary.
In your language, I might say that consciousness is the “being” or the “presence” of the universe. This “being” of the world is not a stuff in the world. The “being” of the world is the “being here” of various kinds of things.
A “conscious” human organism as organism is “meat in nature.” But that organism as “consciousness” is the presence of the world from the point of view of that “meat.”
What obscures this is a tendency to understand “being” to point toward as a special kind of stuff that the world is made of. A so-called “physical” object is invented that is placed “behind” the manifest and genuinely physical object that is “there in its quality.”
“Qualia” tries awkwardly to point at this “thereness of quality.” But it’s still stuck in “substance metaphysics.” Instead of investigating the structure of genuine qualitative objects — which is also the issue of consciousness — it loses itself ideological “names” for “being as sacred stuff.” I say “sacred stuff” because this stuff functions as “truthmaker” for ideological claims on authority. I bring up this ideological distortion to encourage a more sober and direct investigation of what we already mean by saying that our moms are “conscious.”
My mom is “conscious” because the furniture is also there for her. The furniture is “physical” because it is “there as quality” for anyone around. To me this isn’t the whole story but the sketch of a strategy for spelling out the mundane but weirdly elusive structure of our basic situation. Instead of starting with “objective reality” ( as if we know what that means ), we might try something assumed by science in the first place — public objects.
I was trying to explore how what we experience as realify might plausibly emerge from components or multiple drafts.
If there isn’t an internal editor something needs to stabilise a single account of reality.
The architecture of prediction evaluation and reward may provide this because it is claimed that it is rewards in the form of dopamine that strengthen neural connection. So the theory goes.
However if there are other plausible mechanism then I am open to them.
An illusion requires a subject to be deceived. If the self is entirely an illusion generated by distributed processes, what is experiencing the illusion?
If each commissioner already generates a “self,” then how does this explain the self; It has just multiplied it into a committee of homunculi. Add to that, if they generate complete accounts, who or what binds these accounts into a singular conscious experience? If we reject a “central editor,” how do multiple complete accounts compete or compliment without a common neural shared arena to compete or compliment in?
I prefer answers rather than questions because we are still at the stage of looking for answers. But yours are good questions so I will do my best to answer them.
I dont know. In fairness to me, I haven’t claimed that there os an illusion. Dan Dennett does in his book Consciousness but that was published in 1991. I think that it has been slightly overtaken. I have suggested that the first person is constructed by self organising biological processes.
Commissioners generate an account of reality. They are not homunculli anymore than a film studio is
I set out a descriptiion of an integrative process which concluded that “networks of neurons stabilise around coherent patterns of activity” and the “account that becomes most stable is experienced as the present moment”
We are the universe becoming aware, and becoming able to understand itself. I can’t help but wonder if the universe will one day be one giant mind. Or if that’s possible.