Beyond the Desert Landscape

Abstract To what extent is predictive processing enactivist? This overview of predictive processing and active inference offers an account of embodied exchange with the world that associates neuronal processing with inferring the causes of our sensations. Crucially, one of the most important causes of the sensorium is our own behaviour, which—perhaps counterintuitively—has to be inferred. The agenda—in active inference—is to link formal (mathematical) descriptions of dynamical systems to a description of active perception in terms of beliefs and goals. In short, it tries to understand why and how we gather evidence for our own existence. There are several approaches to this sort of formulation. This chapter compares and contrasts a Helmholtzian or Kantian (bottom-up) approach—via perception—with the sort of (top-down) approaches offered by the statistical physics of self-organisation in sentient systems.