Discussion on Enactive Baysians
I would like to draw your attention to a blog post and discussion by Micah Allen which is a response to Gallagher et al.’s “The brain as part of an enactive system”. It is entitled “Enactive Bayesians?” and has received some attention in social networks. In my personal opinion, this is not so much due to the main conclusion of the author (“could enactive neuroscience be a newly clothed version of predictive coding?”) but more because it contains a rather poignant expression of the frustration of the empirical human neuroscientist, who struggles to implement enactive thought in an experimental framework. Allen’s demand for “a strong positive account of what we should replace [the current explanatory framework] with” points to an important gap or at least to an insufficiently clear agenda in most formulations of the enactive approach to date (that i am aware of).
Hi Marieke,
Thanks for the update. I’m not that keen on predictive coding, and I agree that we need a clearer agenda for enactive neuroscience.
But perhaps a new vision is starting to take shape, as evidenced by some of the papers in the upcoming Frontiers in Human Neuroscience special issue:
Towards a Neuroscience of Social Interaction