Krzysztof Dolega

Ruhr University Bochum | RUB · Institut für Philosophie II

Recent developments in the predictive processing literature have led to the emergence of two opposing positions regarding the representational commitments of the framework (Hohwy 2013; Clark 2015; Gładziejewski 2016; Orlandi 2015). Proponents of the conservative approach to predictive processing claim that the explanatory power of the framework com...

Hobson and Friston (2014) outline a synthesis of Hobson's work on dreaming and consciousness with Friston's work on the free energy principle and predictive coding. Whilst we are sympathetic with their claims about the function of dreaming and its relationship to consciousness, we argue that their endorsement of the Cartesian theatre metaphor is ne...

Recently, a new paradigm has emerged in mind and brain sciences. Radical embodied neuroscience (REN) aims to respond to the problems of mapping particular cognitive functions to narrowly defined brain regions. Accordingly, the proponents of this approach call for research to move beyond heuristics of localization and decomposition (Bechtel and Rich...

The claim that the free energy principle is somehow related to Hamilton’s principle in statistical mechanics is ubiquitous throughout the subject literature. However, the exact nature of this relationship remains unclear. According to some sources, the free energy principle is merely similar to Hamilton’s principle of stationary action; others clai...

Several philosophers and psychologists have characterized belief in conspiracy theories as a product of irrational reasoning. Proponents of conspiracy theories apparently resist revising their beliefs given disconfirming evidence and tend to believe in more than one conspiracy, even when the relevant beliefs are mutually inconsistent. In this paper...

Statement of Removal We, the Editor and Publisher of Philosophical Psychology, have removed the following article: Nina Poth & Krzysztof Dolega (2022) Bayesian belief protection: A study of belief in conspiracy theories, Philosophical Psychology, DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2022.2149391 The above article has been removed as it is an earlier version of th...

The 35 commentaries cover a wide range of topics and take many different stances on the issues explored by the target article. We have organised our response to the commentaries around three central questions: Are Friston blankets just Pearl blankets? What ontological and metaphysical commitments are implied by the use of Friston blankets? What kin...

Despite the harmful impact of conspiracy theories on the public discourse, there is little agreement about their exact nature. Rather than define conspiracy theories as such, we focus on the notion of conspiracy belief. We analyse three recent proposals that identify belief in conspiracy theories as an effect of irrational reasoning. Although these...

The free energy principle, an influential framework in computational neuroscience and theoretical neurobiology, starts from the assumption that living systems ensure adaptive exchanges with their environment by minimizing the objective function of variational free energy. Following this premise, it claims to deliver a promising integration of the l...

The proposal that probabilistic inference and unconscious hypothesis testing are central to information processing in the brain has been steadily gaining ground in cognitive neuroscience and associated fields. One popular version of this proposal is the new theoretical framework of predictive processing or prediction error minimization (PEM), which...

The predictive processing framework has gained significant popularity across disciplines investigating the mind and brain. In this article we critically examine two of the recently made claims about the kind of headway that the framework can make in the neuroscientific and philosophical investigation of consciousness. Firstly, we argue that predict...

Mental representation is one of the core theoretical constructs within cognitive science and, together with the introduction of the computer as a model for the mind, is responsible for enabling the “cognitive turn” in psychology and associated fields. Conceiving of cognitive processes, such as perception, motor control, and reasoning, as processes...

[A heavily rewritten version of this paper has been published in BBS in 2021] Markov blankets have been used to settle disputes central to philosophy of mind and cognition. Their development from a technical concept in Bayesian inference to a central concept within the free-energy principle is analysed. We propose to distinguish between instrumenta...

Veissière et al. disrupt current debates over the nature of mindreading by bringing multiple positions under the umbrella of free-energy. However, it is not clear whether integrating the opposing sides under a common formal framework will yield new insights into how mindreading is achieved, rather than offering a mere redescription of the target ph...

Fiery Cushman argues that “[r]ationalization is designed not to accurately infer unconscious mental states, but to construct new ones; it is not a discovery, but a fiction”. While we agree in broad strokes with the characterization of rationalization as a ‘useful fiction’, we think that Cushman’s claim remains ambiguous in two crucial respects: (i)...

Fiery Cushman argues that “[r]ationalization is designed not to accurately infer unconscious mental states, but to construct new ones; it is not a discovery, but a fiction”. While we agree in broad strokes with the characterization of rationalization as a ‘useful fiction’, we think that Cushman’s claim remains ambiguous in two crucial respects: (i)...