Pattern breaking: a complex systems approach to psychedelic medicine.

Recent research has demonstrated the potential of psychedelic therapy for mental health care. However, the psychological experience underlying its therapeutic effects remains poorly understood. This paper proposes a framework that suggests psychedelics act as destabilizers, both psychologically and neurophysiologically.

Resurrecting Gaia: harnessing the Free Energy Principle to preserve life as we know it.

This paper applies the Free Energy Principle (FEP) to propose that the lack of action in response to the global ecological crisis should be considered a maladaptive symptom of human activity that we refer to as . The paper is organised into four parts: the characterisation of the natural world under the Gaia Hypothesis, the employment of the FEP as a description of the behavior of self-organising systems, the application of the FEP to Gaia to understand coupling dynamics between living systems and purportedly non-living planetary processes, and the offering of positive interventions for addressing the current state of ecological crisis under this framework. For the latter, we emphasize the importance of perturbing stuck states for healthy development, and the necessary appreciation of life existing as nested systems at multiple levels in a hierarchy.

Enactive artificial intelligence: subverting gender norms in human-robot interaction.

Introduction: This paper presents Enactive Artificial Intelligence (eAI) as a gender-inclusive approach to AI, emphasizing the need to address social marginalization resulting from unrepresentative AI design.

Methods: The study employs a multidisciplinary framework to explore the intersectionality of gender and technoscience, focusing on the subversion of gender norms within Robot-Human Interaction in AI.

Results: The results reveal the development of four ethical vectors, namely explainability, fairness, transparency, and auditability, as essential components for adopting an inclusive stance and promoting gender-inclusive AI.

Breaking boundaries: The Bayesian Brain Hypothesis for perception and prediction.

This special issue aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of the Bayesian Brain Hypothesis and its standing across neuroscience, cognitive science and the philosophy of cognitive science. By gathering cutting-edge research from leading experts, this issue seeks to showcase the latest advancements in our understanding of the Bayesian brain, as well as its potential implications for future research in perception, cognition, and motor control. A special focus to achieve this aim is adopted in this special issue, as it seeks to explore the relation between two seemingly incompatible frameworks for the understanding of cognitive structure and function: the Bayesian Brain Hypothesis and the Modularity Theory of the Mind.

Free-energy pragmatics: Markov blankets don't prescribe objective ontology, and that's okay.

We target the ontological and epistemological ramifications of the proposed distinction between Friston and Pearl blankets. We emphasize the need for empirical testing next to computational modeling. A peculiar aspect of the free energy principle (FEP) is its purported support of radically opposed ontologies of the mind.

Enactive-Dynamic Social Cognition and Active Inference.

This aim of this paper is two-fold: it critically analyses and rejects accounts blending active inference as theory of mind and enactivism; and it advances an enactivist-dynamic understanding of social cognition that is compatible with active inference. While some social cognition theories seemingly take an enactive perspective on social cognition, they explain it as the attribution of mental states to other people, by assuming representational structures, in line with the classic Theory of Mind (ToM). Holding both enactivism and ToM, we argue, entails contradiction and confusion due to two ToM assumptions widely known to be rejected by enactivism: that (1) social cognition reduces to mental representation and (2) social cognition is a hardwired contentful 'toolkit' or 'starter pack' that fuels the model-like theorising supposed in (1).

On the Importance of Being Flexible: Dynamic Brain Networks and Their Potential Functional Significances.

In this theoretical review, we begin by discussing brains and minds from a dynamical systems perspective, and then go on to describe methods for characterizing the flexibility of dynamic networks. We discuss how varying degrees and kinds of flexibility may be adaptive (or maladaptive) in different contexts, specifically focusing on measures related to either more disjoint or cohesive dynamics. While disjointed flexibility may be useful for assessing neural entropy, cohesive flexibility may potentially serve as a proxy for self-organized criticality as a fundamental property enabling adaptive behavior in complex systems.

Cognition Without Neural Representation: Dynamics of a Complex System.

This paper proposes an account of neurocognitive activity without leveraging the notion of neural representation. Neural representation is a concept that results from assuming that the properties of the models used in computational cognitive neuroscience (e.g.

Embodied skillful performance: where the action is.

When someone masters a skill, their performance looks to us like second nature: it looks as if their actions are smoothly performed without explicit, knowledge-driven, online monitoring of their performance. Contemporary computational models in motor control theory, however, are : that is, they cast skillful performance as a knowledge-driven process. Optimal motor control theory (OMCT), as representative of such approaches, casts skillful performance as an instruction, instantiated in the brain, that needs to be executed-a motor command.

Parcels and particles: Markov blankets in the brain.

At the inception of human brain mapping, two principles of functional anatomy underwrote most conceptions-and analyses-of distributed brain responses: namely, functional and . There are currently two main approaches to characterizing functional integration. The first is a mechanistic modeling of connectomics in terms of directed connectivity that mediates neuronal message passing and dynamics on neuronal circuits.

Markov blankets in the brain.

Recent characterisations of self-organising systems depend upon the presence of a 'Markov blanket': a statistical boundary that mediates the interactions between the inside and outside of a system. We leverage this idea to provide an analysis of partitions in neuronal systems. This is applicable to brain architectures at multiple scales, enabling partitions into single neurons, brain regions, and brain-wide networks.

Is the Free-Energy Principle a Formal Theory of Semantics? From Variational Density Dynamics to Neural and Phenotypic Representations.

The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to assess whether the construct of neural representations plays an explanatory role under the variational free-energy principle and its corollary process theory, active inference; and (2) if so, to assess which philosophical stance-in relation to the ontological and epistemological status of representations-is most appropriate. We focus on non-realist (deflationary and fictionalist-instrumentalist) approaches. We consider a deflationary account of mental representation, according to which the explanatorily relevant contents of neural representations are mathematical, rather than cognitive, and a fictionalist or instrumentalist account, according to which representations are scientifically useful fictions that serve explanatory (and other) aims.

Cognition coming about: Self-organisation and free-energy: Commentary on Wright, J.J. and Bourke, P.D. (2020) "The growth of cognition: Free energy minimization and the embryogenesis of cortical computation".

Wright and Bourke's compelling article rightly points out that existing models of embryogenesis fail to explain the mechanisms and functional significance of the dynamic connections among neurons. We pursue their account of Dynamic Logic by appealing to the Markov blanket formalism that underwrites the Free Energy Principle. We submit that this allows one to model embryogenesis as self-organisation in a dynamical system that minimises free-energy.

A simple theory of every 'thing'.

One of the criteria to a strong principle in natural sciences is simplicity. This paper claims that the Free Energy Principle (FEP), by virtue of unifying particles with mind, is the simplest. Motivated by Hilbert's 24th problem of simplicity, the argument is made that the FEP takes a seemingly mathematical complex domain and reduces it to something simple.

Mind-life continuity: A qualitative study of conscious experience.

There are two fundamental models to understanding the phenomenon of natural life. One is the computational model, which is based on the symbolic thinking paradigm. The other is the biological organism model.

The phenomenology of the intersubjective impairment.

Several studies suggest that the disorders of the self include a disturbance of the most elementary component of self - the minimal self. Characterizing these disorders and understanding the mechanisms involved remain a challenge to medical epistemology and health care professionals. In the present work, I bring together concepts of different fields, such as neuroscience, epistemology and phenomenology.

Proof phenomenon as a function of the phenomenology of proving.

Kurt Gödel wrote (1964, p. 272), after he had read Husserl, that the notion of objectivity raises a question: "the question of the objective existence of the objects of mathematical intuition (which, incidentally, is an exact replica of the question of the objective existence of the outer world)". This "exact replica" brings to mind the close analogy Husserl saw between our intuition of essences in Wesensschau and of physical objects in perception.