Embodied Cognition Karl Friston

it's caused quite a bit of excitement it's the notion that to fully understand how the brain works how cognitive processes operate you have to acknowledge the brain is embodied it lives in a body it uses a body and gets all its sensations through a body that carries sensory epithelial cells receipts sensory organs not only them but the way that we acquire that information the way that we sample our world the way that we are coupled tethered to the world depends upon a movement if you think about it there's very little that you can do apart from secretion without movement without your body you know speaking looking at different parts of the world perambulating moving around redeploying limbs nearly everything depends simply upon moving your body so the only way that the brain can talk to the environment is through its body and if you deny that and just look at the brain and some passive sensory filter that's in a privileged position of receiving all this rich interesting sensory information which it has to make sense of you're going to get a very false perspective on the game the brain is actually playing which is not just about filtering and making sense of sensory input it's actually actively going out there and sampling that input and using its body to do that under all the imperatives that having a body implies so embody cognition is just about acknowledging the importance of the body there are whole flavors very interesting flavors and ranges of commitment to that embodied context so usually discussed and under the rubric of in activism so a weak form of in activism is that our actions are important so for example active inference or in the Dumanis a vision active vision active sensing is adding to the complication of making sense of visual patterns of information in terms of what caused them you now also have to go and gather the information that resolves uncertainty about what caused them so you have to actively sample very salient parts of the visual world a practical problem that if you were devising robots that have to scan for dangerous operants at an airport for example you would need to solve you need to know where to go and sample information to resolve uncertainty about what is this person doing how is this person feeling what is this person going to do next so that's the active vision an active sensing aspect of a non-radical or most common sensical in activism but we can go right to the other end which is radical in activism and that end the philosophical position here is you can completely dispense Palmas with the brain you can certainly dispense with representational ism the way that I find it most easy to understand that philosophical stance is to go look at YouTube videos of beautifully engineered robots that are reminiscent of Victorian toys then just by falling gracefully reproduce some very animate very intentional sort of motion so the most famous example is the walking robot from the United States that is basically designed to fall downhill but it doesn't so gracefully looks as though it's walking so he just walks down a shallow ramp and yet there is not one control there's not one electrical component it is all in the body it's all in the carefully crafted articulation of the bodily parts so this would be the radical version of embodied there is not even cognition radical in activism that if the body is sufficiently tuned to the environment you don't even need cognition that everything is in in the coupling of the body to the environment in which it is immersed that philosophy is probably a bit radical for some but inherits a lot of I think much more compelling philosophy from people like Gibson in the 20th century who suggested that the the way that we perceive things is only in the service of how we can act upon them so something that can be seen is only seen in virtue of how it can be manipulated so I see an apple what I actually see is the opportunities afforded by that Apple for grasping for acting upon so every perceptual capability is grounded in a fundamental way by the opportunities for action that that percept affords so we only see through the eyes of our muscles in terms of what it means for our behavior and he called that affordance and elaborate in the notion of direct perception and that directness if you like short cuts or short circuits there's more elaborate representation list cognitive perspective that the radical people consider to be unnecessary to understand embodied cognition so different flavors typically one would also talk about other ways of embodying cognition extending cognition enacting cognition I talked about in body cognition sometimes also in a situated cognition that my cognitive processes depends upon the situation that I find my body in we've talked about in activism extending cognition is one of the in this instance 3yz be useful to mention so this is the notion largely championed by people like Andy Clark who in the latter half of the last century the 20th century was intrigued by the notion that much of our cognitive capacity actually resides outside our mind it actually lives in things like telephones so you may think you know the Terr phone number of your partner but in fact it may be the case you don't actually know you know where it is and you can do a speed redial or you can call it up with some sort of code or mnemonic from your mobile phone but it is your mobile phone that actually knows the actual number to dial so has your cognition somehow stopped when we come outside the mind and into your mobile phone or is that cognitive competence now extended into the physical world beyond in fact your body so it's a beautiful example I think of you know what we mean by cognition is it all in the head or is it somehow a partnership with the environment a partnership with the world a partnership of the city the physical situation that we find ourselves in that we mediate and coupled with through our through our body and will our body allow us our cognition to extend further than just the the mental faculties and already associated with us from my perspective I [Music] the revolution then activist revolution well I think almost revolution in the sense of revolving because I think every few decades people come to the realization you can't just look at the brain again as some glorified stimulus-response link some bank of filters that's presencing information you really have to think about the action perception cycle the circular causality induced by the notion that the environment is actually upon you and you are acting upon the environment and it's a dance a dialogue so that's certainly in the ascendancy in the past few years I personally think it's a very useful and exciting development particularly from the point of view of active inference that if you write follows from more generic formulations such as things like the free energy principle that actually talks about the exchange between the internal states of a system and the external states and makes very little conceptual distinction between the direction so just to close I will illustrate the sort of the parsimony and the beauty of the sorts of concepts you know you arrive up from a purely theoretical take on in body cognition if it's the case that the the key thing is in the exchange between you with your internal space and the environment with the external states across the thing that separates and separates us from our environment or the interim the external States across this boundary that has this sensations being in that direction actions being in that direction that structure mathematically can be completely transposed and nothing changes which means that your action upon the world becomes the world's way of perceiving you and the world acts upon you through your perception of the world there's a beautiful symmetry there Buddhist talks to this again circular causality of us causally embedded in a world through an embodiment of our brain and it's cognition embodied cognition is not just a philosophical nicety no it's certainly intriguing concept to consider and occupies a lot of neuro philosophical discussion but it has real practical and pragmatic implications so it means it matters when you do a visual stimulation study whether the subject was actively searching for something it gives a whole new meaning to the study of eye movements cyclic eye movements and how they contextualize visual evoked responses it gives a whole new meaning to the way we understand perceptual categorization in the brain in relation to our intention in relation to the affordance that certain stimuli provide for us it provides a direct on train or opens up lines of communication with the social neurosciences because in being embodied I have to have ideas and cognitive capabilities that model what I am physically capable of I have a forward model of generative model of my own motor plant my own body I can use that to make inferences about how you're using your body so if I see myself approach a glass of water with this sort of movement I know that usually that is a reflection of my desire or my intention to pick up the glass of water I can now use that knowledge that modeling of the world to understand your intentions when you reproduce exactly the same physical movements so we then get into the vast domain of systems neuroscience and psychology known as action observation and be getting the things like mirror neuron systems and how they inform our understanding about self modeling relative to other modeling we get into the whole world of clearly of mind how I understand you and all of this has come from acknowledging that one of the most important things that I have to perceive is my own action my bodied action so it has I think unified many different and possibly inappropriately disparate fields that were studying just say visual perception and just looking at motor control now everything L they contextualize each other providing a much more graceful and a better understanding of the computational principles entailed by being action perception together in forming experimental design and of course one might argue Alton and they understanding failures of embodied cognition so one might look at through neurological conditions or even things like autism that have once been ascribed to you know purely theory of mind problems is this actually a failure to understand one's own internal body so there's a whole field now of interceptive inference that complements the perceptual inference or synthesis that i've been talking about which goes which is now contextualized in terms of action the same rules also apply to signals not from the outside world through my eyes and my ears but from my internal world by heart rate my lychee my gut feelings so the same rules apply to gut feelings there are an important aspect of embodied cognition and you can have pathologies about inferences about your emotional and gut responses then that provides a really interesting model for certain psychopathologies it could explain why people with autism how difficult is understanding their own emotional responses or indeed avoiding contact in order to obviate or second navigate those sorts of failures

Channel: Serious Science

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Keywords: science, lecture, Serious Science

Id: HW0JnjgCO3o

Length: 14min 9sec (849 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 01 2018