Projects per year
Abstract
The emerging neurocomputational vision of humans as embodied, ecologically embedded, social agents—who shape and are shaped by their environment—offers a golden opportunity to revisit and revise ideas about the physical and information-theoretic underpinnings of life, mind, and consciousness itself. In particular, the active inference framework (AIF) makes it possible to bridge connections from computational neuroscience and robotics/AI to ecological psychology and phenomenology, revealing common underpinnings and overcoming key limitations. AIF opposes the mechanistic to the reductive, while staying fully grounded in a naturalistic and information-theoretic foundation, using the principle of free energy minimization. The latter provides a theoretical basis for a unified treatment of particles, organisms, and interactive machines, spanning from the inorganic to organic, non-life to life, and natural to artificial agents. We provide a brief introduction to AIF, then explore its implications for evolutionary theory, ecological psychology, embodied phenomenology, and robotics/AI research. We conclude the paper by considering implications for machine consciousness.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 21 |
Number of pages | 21 |
Journal | Frontiers in Robotics and AI |
Volume | 5 |
Early online date | 8 Mar 2018 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 8 Mar 2018 |
Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)
- free energy
- uncertainty
- self-organization
- embodiment
- evolution
- affordances
- skilled expertise
- frame problem
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'The Active Inference Approach to Ecological Perception: General Information Dynamics for Natural and Artificial Embodied Cognition'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
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XSPECT: Expecting Ourselves: Embodied Prediction and the Construction of Conscious Experience
Clark, A. & Podhortzer Carmel, D.
1/01/17 → 30/09/21
Project: Research