Philosophy of Mind and Psychology Reading Group --The Predictive Mind chapter 8

Alex Kiefer

Welcome to the Philosophy of Mind and Psychology Reading Group hosted by the Philosophy@Birmingham blog. This month, Alex Kiefer (CUNY), introduces chapter 8 of Jakob Hohwy's The Predictive Mind (OUP, 2013).


Chapter 8 - Surprise and Misrepresentation
Presented by Alex Kiefer

Chapter 8 of The Predictive Mind explores longstanding and unresolved debates about the nature of mental representation and representational content from the point of view of the Prediction Error Minimization framework. The chapter is concerned primarily with perceptual representation, in keeping with the emphasis on perception throughout the book.

Jakob offers novel perspectives on a wide range of topics in the theory of content and the philosophy of mind more generally. In this post I'll focus on the two topics that I take to be most crucial for characterizing the account of representational content that best fits with the PEM framework: misrepresentation and causal VS descriptive theories of content. The positions sketched in the chapter with respect to these topics can be summarized in the following two claims:

Misrepresentation: Misrepresentation is perceptual inference that minimizes short-term prediction error while undermining long-term prediction error minimization.

Causal VS descriptive theories: Cognitive systems that minimize prediction error represent the world by maintaining causally guided descriptions (modes of presentation) of states of affairs in the world.

In what follows I'll discuss these claims and Jakob's arguments for them in more detail, then consider challenges for each position as well as connections between the two topics.

Philosophy of Mind and Psychology Reading Group -- The Predictive Mind chapter 7

Kengo Miyazono

Welcome to the Philosophy of Mind and Psychology Reading Group hosted by the Philosophy@Birmingham blog. This month, Kengo Miyazono, post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Birmingham, introduces chapter 7 of Jakob Hohwy's The Predictive Mind (OUP, 2013).


Chapter 7 - Precarious Prediction
Presented by Kengo Miyazono

In chapter seven, Hohwy describes the ways in which perceptual inference is tuned in order to represent the world correctly and the ways in which it goes wrong.

The chapter discusses many different issues, but the central idea is that maintaining the "balance between trusting the sensory input and consequently keeping on sampling the world, versus distrusting the sensory input and instead relying more on one's prior beliefs" (146) is crucial in the successful operation of perceptual inference. Maintaining it is not a trivial task. And, the failure of the maintenance might be responsible for pathological conditions such as delusions or autism.

In principle, the prediction errors that are expected to be precise are allowed to drive revisions of prior beliefs higher up the hierarchy, while the prediction errors that are expected to be imprecise are not allowed to do so. Ideally, we expect high precision in predictions errors and, hence, allow them to drive belief revisions when they are trustworthy and expect low precision in prediction errors and, hence, do not allow them to drive belief revisions when they are not.

But, the process can go wrong. A possibility is that some people expect sensory prediction errors to be much less precise than they actually are. Hohwy suggests that this is what is happening in people with delusions; "a persistent, exaggerated expectation for noise and uncertainty would lead to imprecise sensory prediction errors mediated by low gain on sensory input and heightened reliance on top-down priors.