Expecting Ourselves: Embodied Prediction and the Construction of Conscious Experience

Informations projet

XSPECT

N° de convention de subvention: 692739

DOI

10.3030/692739

Projet clôturé

Date de signature de la CE 29 Novembre 2016

Date de début 1 Janvier 2017

Date de fin 30 Septembre 2021

Financé au titre de

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Coût total

€ 1 391 134,00

Contribution de l’UE

€ 1 391 134,00

Coordonné par

THE UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - XSPECT (Expecting Ourselves: Embodied Prediction and the Construction of Conscious Experience)

Période du rapport: 2020-07-01 au 2021-09-30

Résumé du contexte et des objectifs généraux du projet

Conscious experience is one of the greatest unsolved scientific mysteries.
How can mere matter give rise to the spectacular sensory experiences of a summer sunrise or a winter's day?
How is it that we are aware of ourselves at all, as living beings with goals, projects, plans, and identities?
Our work aimed to shed new light on these questions.

At the heart of our project was the idea of the brain as a prediction machine constantly trying to anticipate its own streams of sensory input.
This fits well with daily experience. We easily see and hear that which we predict well, even when conditions are noisy and bad – for example, when we hear a familiar song played on a bad radio receiver.

By seeing experience as a construct that merges prediction and sensory evidence, we have begun to show how minds like ours reveal a world of human-relevant stuff.
For the patterns of sensory stimulation that we most strongly predict will be the patterns that matter most to us as both as humans (with distinctively human needs and capacities) and as individuals with different histories and interests.

Such work has great intrinsic scientific and philosophical significance. But progress here matters in many other ways too.
Our work revealed new ways to think about atypical forms of human experience such as autism and schizophrenia, cast new light on placebo effects and the effects of psychedelic drugs, and explored new
ways to understand and manage psychosis, pain, addiction, depression, and anxiety.

Along the way, we also developed some new experimental probes bringing philosophical work on the nature, structure, and origins of conscious experience into close and experimentally informed contact with neuroscientific conjectures concerning the predictive brain.

Our work was divided into three sub-projects.

Our first sub-project looked at the links between prediction, experience, and embodied action. We showed that conscious contents reflect predicted outcomes in ways closely bound up with the suite of actions the organism is preparing to perform.

The second sub-project examined the role of inward-looking (‘interoceptive’) predictions - unconscious predictions of our changing inner bodily states, such as heart rate and blood pressure.
We showed that much of the distinctive ‘feel’ of conscious experience may be due to the influence of such hidden predictions.

The third sub-project turned to more uniquely human forms of conscious experience - various kinds of reflective self-awareness.
We argued that these more advanced forms of experience arise when we 'expect ourselves' - when the neural prediction machinery is turned upon itself and we appear as elements in our own predictive world models.

To complete our picture we then took an important final step, showing how our unique abilities with language, culture, and future-directed self-modelling would lead to various kinds of ‘false puzzlement’ about our own conscious experience.

Overall, our work suggests a new and integrated account of the nature and origins of the conscious mind – one that places embodied action and neural prediction centre-stage.

Travail effectué depuis le début du projet jusqu’à la fin de la période considérée dans le rapport et principaux résultats atteints jusqu’à présent

Dissemination

During the lifetime of the project we have published 46 papers and currently have 10 further pieces accepted, conditionally accepted, or under review. We have produced one edited volume/special issue (Phenomenal Expectations), several popular press pieces, and a book, The Experience Machine (appearing with Pantheon Books, 2022)
We have also delivered 150 academic talks and public lectures around the world, and engaged in multiple forms of knowledge exchange and public dissemination, including blog posts, appearances at science festivals (such as New Scientist Live and the British Science Festival ) and at festivals of ideas (such as How The Light Gets In).

We organized three highly successful workshops and one international conference. Throughout, we have maintained a popular project website, issued a regular project newsletter, and maintained a strong social media presence on Twitter and Facebook.
The website (https://www.x-spect.org/) has had well over fifty thousand visitors to date. Our Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/xspectconsciousness/) has 190 likes, and over 200 followers from around the world.
Our Twitter feed @_XSPECT has nearly 1000 followers of whom 20% are in the USA, 30% in the UK, with the remaining 50% spread throughout Europe and the rest of the world.

A few of our flagship publications are listed below. For lots more information see the project website:
http://www.x-spect.org/


Miller, M., & Clark, A. (2017). Happily Entangled: Prediction, Emotion, and the Embodied Mind Synthese, vol. 195, no. 6, pp. 2559–2575.
Clark, A (2018) Beyond the ‘Bayesian Blur’: Probabilistic Brains and the Nature of Subjective Experience. Journal of Consciousness Studies Volume 25, Numbers 3-4, 2018, pp. 71-87(17)
Clark, A. (2019). Consciousness as generative entanglement. The Journal of Philosophy, 116(12), 645-662.
Clark, A., Friston, K., & Wilkinson, S. (2019). Bayesing Qualia: consciousness as inference, not raw datum. Journal of Consciousness Studies.
Clark, A. (2020). Beyond desire? Agency, choice, and the predictive mind. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 98(1), 1-15
Walsh, K. S., McGovern, D. P., Clark, A., & O'Connell, R. G. (2020). Evaluating the neurophysiological evidence for predictive processing as a model of perception. Annals of the new York Academy of Sciences, 1464(1), 242
Miller, M., Kiverstein, J., & Rietveld, E. (2020). Embodying addiction: a predictive processing account. Brain and cognition, 138, 105495
Deane, G. (2021). Consciousness in active inference: Deep self-models, other minds, and the challenge of psychedelic-induced ego-dissolution. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2021(2)


Popular Press - Miller, M., Nave, K., Deane, G. & Clark, A. (2020) The Value of Uncertainty. AEON Magazine,

Edited Collection - Miller, M., Schlicht, T. & Clark, A (forthcoming) Phenomenal Expectations: New Essays on Predictive Processing and Consciousness.

Book - Andy Clark, The Experience Machine (Pantheon, 2022).

Progrès au-delà de l’état des connaissances et impact potentiel prévu (y compris l’impact socio-économique et les conséquences sociétales plus larges du projet jusqu’à présent)

Our experimental work in sub-project 1 revealed unexpected opposing effects of neural prediction in foveal and peripheral vision. These are currently being written up for publication.

Sub-project 2 revealed exciting new ties with emerging work in computational psychiatry. Professor Clark spoke on this at the 2018 meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.
The topic is covered briefly in his popular Neuroethics Blog post, and appears in his forthcoming book, The Experience Machine (Pantheon, 2022)

As an unexpected spin-off from sub-project 3, we explored the many ways social media can warp our own predictive self-models.

PI Clark also opened up an ongoing dialogue between our project and the Google/ DeepMind group. Marta Garnelo represented DeepMind at the first project workshop.
Clark delivered talks at Google's London headquarters in October 2017 and again in January 2019, and in January 2022 will be presenting project-related work to Google Berlin.

Continuing themes from sub-project 3 (on culture and the predictive mind), PI Clark made contact with archeologists and vision scientists
working on the role of material culture in sculpting the human mind. This led to a successful joint grant proposal - ERC Synergy Grant XSCAPE (ERC-2020-SyG 951631).

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