Wow Karl, you just explained material worth 10 books in such a compelling, comprehensive, and cogent way. Thanks a ton. I was looking for something like this as a researcher in problem solving and situated cognition.
Pankaj Singh Yeah that was one of the best if not the best Ive seen. Had to pause and/or go back a lot, but not because of a lack of clarity.. because of density of concepts. If a casual chat can ever be classified as a masterpiece then that one is nominated.
I would love to know more what you mean by this. I have been considering a lot lately what it means to have our sense of self overlap with, or shared by, the external/environmental Other, as if our self can be extended to the natural and material worlds around us
4:35 philosophy from people like Gibson in 4:39 the 20th century who suggested that the 4:43 the way that we perceive things is only 4:46 in the service of how we can act upon 4:51 them so something that can be seen is 4:55 only seen in virtue of how it can be 5:01 manipulated so I see an apple what I 5:03 actually see is the opportunities 5:06 afforded by that Apple for grasping for 5:10 acting upon so every perceptual 5:13 capability is grounded in a fundamental 5:17 way by the opportunities for action that 5:21 that percept affords so we only see 5:24 through the eyes of our muscles in terms 5:26 of what it means for our behavior and he 5:29 called that affordance
Even with secretion, there is movement. It is internal and silent so we perceive secretion as a lack of motion. So embodiment drives all our actions including secretion.
Hi Josh, I agree (think you meant to write silent, not salient?) yet I think what he is referring to is motion that interacts with the external world and so infiorms it , and in return , informs US.
This reminds me strongly of the Mahasatipitthanna sutra A sentence that has stayed with me "There is body only". I guess that would fall under the category of radical inactivism. I would like to see Dr. Friston read and comment on that sutra. It's online of course. What is a thought and how is it triggered. Personally I think a thought is hearing about something the body already knows.
Standard models of cognition posit information manipulation leads to consciousness, but whereas information isn't a non-abstract fundamental of nature, momentum is (yes, really, momentum is not emergent/abstract). Without momentum, i.e. moving, could we be conscious? I bet: no.
Would this explain the function of hand/body movements during conversation? What we call 'body language'. I've always been fascinated by these: why do we even have them? Do these movements serve the speaker only, or are they clues used by listeners too?
In terms of homo sapiens, it's undoubtedly ancient and a carryover from our homo predecessors. Just learning that another's hand motion appears to be taking the form of a non-aggressive action ("oh looks like they're just going to scratch an itch"... contextually) would be valuable. And vice versa. Of course, we (presumably) developed plenty of rudimentary sign "language" way before ever establishing a large repertoire of sounds to represent an action. Adoption of particular spoken sounds equating to a environmental thing or action, in conjunction with existing in ever larger social settings, just put even more pressure (value) on the importance of hand gestures.
What are the implications of these theories regarding free will? What he says around 4:15 makes me think that consciousness is, at least in part, more just an awareness of instinctual and environmental processes happening within and around it than it is the "driver" of those processes.
11:39 get into the vast domain of systems 11:44 neuroscience and psychology known as 11:47 action observation and be getting the 11:49 things like mirror neuron systems and 11:51 how they inform our understanding about 11:53 self modeling relative to other modeling 11:56 we get into the whole world of clearly 11:59 of mind how I understand you and all of 12:03 this has come from acknowledging that 12:05 one of the most important things that I 12:07 have to perceive is my own action my 12:11 bodied action so it has I think unified 12:17 many different and possibly 12:19 inappropriately disparate fields that 12:22 were studying just say visual perception
The universe is an infinitely recursive meta-möbius, but the project of knowledge is to simplify, so don't open your inquiry to additional information unless you're stuck.
"Your action upon the world becomes the worlds way of perceiving you". I don't understand this. Earlier he mentioned the importance of action for perception, but the world takes no action.
One very simplistic way of viewing this is considering a person who steals from people…that is their action upon the world…in turn, the world will perceive them as a thief.
If the telephone example explains the idea of our extended cognition, consider the reverse where we (as the figurative telephones) are storing a model of the world in our minds and updating this model of the world through action… We are a tool for the world to perceive us.
but it 7:02 is your mobile phone that actually knows 7:03 the actual number to dial so has your 7:07 cognition somehow stopped when we come 7:09 outside the mind and into your mobile 7:11 phone or is that cognitive competence 7:14 now extended into the physical world 7:16 beyond in fact your body so it's a 7:19 beautiful example I think of you know 7:22 what we mean by cognition is it all in 7:25 the head or is it somehow 7:27 a partnership with the environment a 7:30 partnership with the world a partnership 7:31 of the city the physical situation that 7:35 we find ourselves in that we mediate and 7:39 coupled with through our through our 7:41 body and will our body allow us our 7:43 cognition to extend further than just 7:46 the the mental faculties and already 7:48 associated with us from my perspective I
Umi Rafael 2006 When your head is about to get hit, say by a tree, your consciousness will need to differentiate the various relative locations of body parts to make the inference meaningful.
12:55 you know purely theory of mind problems 12:58 is this actually a failure to understand 13:03 one's own internal body so there's a 13:05 whole field now of interceptive 13:09 inference that complements the 13:10 perceptual inference or synthesis that 13:13 i've been talking about which goes which 13:16 is now contextualized in terms of action 13:20 the same rules also apply to signals not 13:23 from the outside world through my eyes 13:25 and my ears but from my internal world 13:28 by heart rate my lychee my gut feelings 13:31 so the same rules apply to gut feelings 13:34 there are an important aspect of 13:37 embodied cognition and you can have 13:39 pathologies about inferences about your 13:42 emotional and gut responses then that 13:44 provides a really interesting model for 13:46 certain psychopathologies it could 13:48 explain why people with autism how 13:51 difficult is understanding their own 13:52 emotional responses or indeed avoiding 13:55 contact in order to obviate or second 14:00 navigate those sorts of failures
Enactivision. Spelled right? Doesn’t come up on web... Love the heidegger ref, but wonder if our ability to ‘enactively’ direct sensory testing of the world isn’t afforded by the representational model created in the mind.
But the point is that the representational model can only be preserved over any length of time by testing its predictions against feedback from the body as it interacts with the world.
there was a moment where i thought he was re-stating the obvious, then it returned to the stated premise of the tautology of body and environment and the idea re-presented itself as new. Pretty interesting.
The point was, I think, about the relationship and play between the self and the circumstance. The phone is an external entity, but in our minds we almost feel it as a part of ourselves.
I think it’s an interesting example, but I don’t think he explained it terribly well. I think the phone number is like Schrodinger‘s cat - at some point you won’t remember the number, but you will still remember where to find it - by clicking on the name. Does that make sense?
I think the cognitive analogy got a little lost by choosing something as obviously 'smart' as a modern phone. Andy Clark & David J. Chalmers' examples in The Extended Mind maybe get at it better: 'Thus consider the use of pen and paper to perform long multiplication, the use of physical re-arrangements of letter tiles to prompt word recall in Scrabble, the use of instruments such as the nautical slide rule, and the general paraphernalia of language, books, diagrams, and culture.'
Perception of objects we can interact with are perceived as Heuristic representations of the range of possible actions we can participate in with the object.
To study physiology with a clear conscience, one must insist on the fact that the sense-organs are not phenomena in the sense of the idealistic philosophy; as such they certainly could not be causes! Sensualism, therefore, at least as regulative hypothesis, if not as heuristic principle. What? And others say even that the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body, as a part of this external world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be the work of our organs! It seems to me that this is a complete REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM, if the conception CAUSA SUI is something fundamentally absurd. Consequently, the external world is NOT the work of our organs-? Nietzsche
The way he sees this in the way that he can act upon them. You science people should talk to artists. We live this and it’s upsetting to listen to this as if it’s brand new. For AI it seems like a way to program the population - which is partially happening - but dehumanizing.
Helmholtz, who was of great influence on Friston, was certain that should one wish to understand perception, artists would be the greatest source of instruction - 1800's Germany.
Doing/living is not explaining! We all live with stereotype/categories... We all use and maybe "live by metaphors"... We all experience emotions, consciousness... But are not all trying to understand and explain them!
