Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - XSPECT (Expecting Ourselves: Embodied Prediction and the Construction of Conscious Experience)

Teaser

X-SPECT is a 4-year ERC-funded project that commenced January 2017. The full project title is “Expecting Ourselves: Embodied Prediction and the Construction of Conscious Experience”. Conscious experience is one of the greatest unsolved scientific mysteries. How can mere...

Summary

X-SPECT is a 4-year ERC-funded project that commenced January 2017.

The full project title is “Expecting Ourselves: Embodied Prediction and the Construction of Conscious Experience”.

Conscious experience is one of the greatest unsolved scientific mysteries. How can mere matter (the stuff of brains, bodies, and worlds) give rise to the spectacular sensory experiences of a summer sunrise or a winter\'s day? What kind of systemic organization explains our capacity to experience a world of sights, sounds, feelings of love, experiences of colour, hopes, fears, moods? How is it that we are aware of ourselves at all, as living beings with goals, projects, plans, and identities?

Our project aims to shed new light on these old but unsolved puzzles. This project has great scientific and philosophical significance. To understand consciousness is to understand ourselves. But progress here matters in many other ways too. Our work explores new ways to think about atypical forms of human experience such as autism, schizophrenia, placebo effects, and many more. This may lead to new ways to understand and manage psychosis, pain and addiction.

At the heart of our project lies the emerging image of the brain as a prediction machine. According to such accounts, brains like ours are constantly seeking to predict their own streams of sensory input. These predictions, based in rich bodies of prior knowledge and expectation, are every bit as important as the sensory signals themselves. It is this double character that provides leverage for understanding pain, placebo effects, and (more generally) the nature of conscious experience itself.

The brain’s predictions prepare us to deal rapidly and efficiently with the stream of signals coming from the world. If the sensory signal is as expected, we will see and hear the things that we have already started to prepare to see and hear, or launch behaviours that we have already started to plan. But if all is not as expected, then a distinctive signal results: a so-called ‘prediction-error’ signal. These signals, calculated in every area and at every level of neuronal processing, highlight what the prediction regime got wrong, and allow the brain to try again armed with information concerning current errors. Brains like this are forever trying to guess the shape and evolution of the current sensory signal, using stored knowledge about the world.

Human experience, this suggests, always involves a delicate combination of what the brain (on the basis of what we know) \'expects\' and what the current waves of sensory evidence suggest. This fits well with daily experience. We easily see and hear that which we know well, even when conditions are noisy and bad – for example, when someone speaks our name in a noisy party, or when we hear a familiar song played on a bad radio receiver. In such cases, the brain uses stored knowledge to drive rich predictions about the sensory array: predictions that that help separate the signal from the noise, adding to, and subtracting from, the sensory flux so as to reveal (when all goes well) what really matters in the wider world.

By seeing experience as a construct that merges prediction and sensory evidence, we begin to see 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 – individuals with different histories and interests. The world revealed to the predictive brain is thus a world already permeated with embodied human mattering.

THREE SUB-PROJECTS

Our project is itself split into three sub-projects, each of which applies this vision to different aspects of the puzzle of conscious experience. Along the way, we are using use new experimental probes to bring philosophical work on the nature, structure, and origins of conscious experience into close

Work performed

\"Website:
http://www.x-spect.org/

Twitter:
https://twitter.com/_xspect

Twitter: @_XSPECT

Facebook: facebook.com/xspectconsciousness

British Academy Blog:
http://www.britac.ac.uk/blog/expecting-ourselves-embodied-prediction-and-construction-conscious-experience

Neuroethics Blog

http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2017/12/neuroethics-predictive-brain-and.html

PUBLICATIONS

Some of our publications are listed below. Versions of many of these are available from the Edinburgh Research Explorer:

https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/


Miller, M., & Clark, A. (2017). Happily Entangled: Prediction, Emotion, and the Embodied Mind Synthese, vol. 195, no. 6, pp. 2559–2575.

Clark, A (2017) Predictions, precision, and agentive attention. Consciousness and Cognition 56:115-119. doi: 10.1016/j.concog.2017.06.013. Epub 2017 Jul 8.

Tooley, M. D., Carmel, D., Chapman, A., & Grimshaw, G. M. (2017). Dissociating the physiological components of unconscious emotional responses. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 3(1).

Wilkinson, S., Dodgson, G., and Meares, K. (2017) Predictive Processing and the Varieties of Psychological Trauma. Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 8, 1840, pp. 1-11.

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 (2018) A Nice Surprise? Predictive Processing and the Active Pursuit of Novelty. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Volume 17, Issue 3, pp 521–534

Linson A, Clark A, Ramamoorthy S & Friston K (2018) The Active Inference Approach to Ecological Perception: General Information Dynamics for Natural and Artifical Embodied Cognition, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 5, Art. No.: 21.

Rabagliati, H., Robertson, A., & Carmel, D. (2018). The importance of awareness for understanding language. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(2), 190.

Denham, S. L., Farkas, D., van Ee, R., Taranu, M., Kocsis, Z., Wimmer, M., Carmel, D., & Winkler, I. (2018). Similar but separate systems underlie perceptual bistability in vision and audition. Scientific Reports (Nature Publisher Group), 8, 1-10.

Michel, M., Beck, D., Block, N., Blumenfeld, H., Brown, R., Carmel, D., et al. (in press). Opportunities and Challenges for a Maturing Science of Consciousness. Nature Human Behavior.

Clark, A., Wilkinson, S., Nave, K. and Deane, G. (in press) “Getting Warmer: Interoception, Inference and Feeling” in Emotions and Reasons (Candiotto ed.) Palgrave Macmillan.

Clark, A. (In Press). Beyond Desire? Agency, Choice, and the Predictive Mind. Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Clark, A., Friston, K., and Wilkinson, S. (forthcoming) \"\"Bayesing Qualia. Consciousness as inference, not raw datum\"\" Journal of Consciousness Studies

Clark, A (ms) Consciousness as Generative Entanglement (conditionally accepted for Journal of Philosophy)


TALKS AND OTHER EVENTS – A Small Sampling

Year One (2017)

February 2, 2017, Talk by Andy Clark “Only Predict? Conscious Experience and the Scope and Limits of Predictive Processing” Invited talk presented to History and Philosophy of Science Seminar Series, University of Cambridge.

February 24, Talk by Andy Clark “The Generation Game: Prediction, Action, and the Construction of Conscious Experience” Invited talk to Cognitive Neuroscience/Department of Psychology, University of York.

March 21, Talk by Andy Clark “Busting Out: Two Takes on the Predictive Brain” Invited talk to the Amsterdam Brain and Cognition (ABC) group, University of Amsterdam, NL.

March 22, Talk by Andy Clark “The Generation Game: Predictive Processing and the Construction of Conscious Experience” Invited talk to the CONNEX seminar series at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

April 21, Talk by Andy Clark “The Generation Game: Predictive Processing and the Construction of Conscious Experience” Invited talk to the Center for Mind and Brain, Uni\"

Final results

Some sources of unexpected progress include: In Sept 2017 Andy Clark was an invited speaker at a workshop on Memory and Imagination in Humans and Machines, at Jesus College, Cambridge, hosted by DeepMind and the Science & Human Dimension Project (September 21-22) This has opened the door to an ongoing dialogue between our project and the Google DeepMind group. Clark visited the DeepMind group in London in late October 2017 to deliver a talk, and Marta Garnelo represented DeepMind at the first project workshop in Edinburgh on November 10. Clark continues a dialogue (meeting about once every month) with Matt Jones, head of Google Research and Machine Learning, UK.

Another unexpected development has been the close ties that are emerging between our project and work in computational psychiatry. Professor Clark spoke on this at the 2018 meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (Krakow, Poland, June 2018). This featured prominently in his public presentation, to a general public adult audience of over 400, at the New Scientist Live event at the ExCel Centre, London, September 22, 2018. The topic is also covered briefly in his popular Neuroethics Blog post from 2018:

http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2017/12/neuroethics-predictive-brain-and.html

Website & more info

More info: http://www.x-spect.org/.