Descripción del proyecto
Descifrar el misterio de la experiencia consciente
¿Cómo evoca la materia las experiencias sensoriales? ¿Por qué somos conscientes de nosotros mismos como individuos con objetivos, planes y sueños? El equipo del proyecto XSPECT, financiado por el Consejo Europeo de Investigación, pretende esclarecer la naturaleza, el alcance y los mecanismos de la experiencia consciente. Para ello, se examinarán tres campos de investigación distintos de manera paralela: en el primero se analizarán las relaciones entre predicción, acción motora y experiencia; en el segundo se abordará la función de la predicción interoceptiva en la construcción de la experiencia, y, por último, en el tercero se examinarán los modos en que un conjunto diverso de autopredicciones de nivel superior mediadas socialmente refuerzan las formas más reflexivas de la experiencia consciente.
Objetivo
This project (short name, XSPECT) aims to harness the emerging science of the predictive brain to deliver new insights into the nature, scope, mechanisms and (most importantly) the very possibility of conscious experience. The project thus explores and extends the vision of the brain as an inner engine continuously striving to predict the incoming sensory barrage. The key innovation is to consider this increasingly popular vision in the special context of embodied agents able to predict many of their own evolving states and responses – agents able to ‘expect themselves’. These crucial self-expectations span the interoceptive (targeting the internal sensory flows signaling our own physiological states, such as hunger, arousal, itch, and muscular and visceral sensations) and the exteroceptive (targeting the world, and our own behaviors as they might unfold over multiple scales of space and time). XSPECT explores the idea that such interacting states of complex, layered self-prediction hold the key to understanding much that is puzzling about conscious experience.
The project is divided into three simultaneously active sub-projects. The first sub-project concerns relations between prediction, motor action, and experience. The second sub-project targets the role of interoceptive prediction in the construction of experience. The third sub-project considers ways in which more reflective forms of conscious experience (involving agency, selfhood, and the introspection of own experiential states) are further enriched by a spiraling array of socially mediated higher-level self-predictions.
XSPECT will combine integrative philosophical argument, collaborative experimentation, and leading edge interdisciplinary research and discussion, leveraging two very successful but under-communicating research programs (‘embodied cognition’ and ‘the predictive brain’) to offer new perspectives on the puzzle of conscious experience.
Ámbito científico
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Régimen de financiación
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantInstitución de acogida
BN1 9RH Brighton
Reino Unido