Dreaming the Whole Cat: Generative Models, Predictive Processing, and the Enactivist Conception of Perceptual Experience

Does the material basis of conscious experience extend beyond the boundaries of the brain and central nervous system? In Clark 2009 I reviewed a number of ‘enactivist ’ arguments for such a view and found none of them compelling. Ward (2012) rejects my analysis on the grounds that the enactivist deploys an essentially world-involving concept of experience that transforms the argumenta-tive landscape in a way that makes the enactivist conclusion inescapable. I present an alternative (prediction-and-generative-model-based) account that neatly ac-commodates all the positive evidence that Ward cites on behalf of this enactivist conception, and that (I argue) makes richer and more satisfying contact with the full sweep of human experience. 1. Dialogues concerning experience and action In Clark 2009 I explore and reject a number of arguments meant — or so it seemed — to favour a ‘hypothesis of the extended conscious mind ’ (ECM). ECM, as I characterized it, was the claim that ‘the local material vehicles of some of our conscious experiences might include more than the whirrings and grindings of the brain/CNS’ (Clark 2009, p. 967). Despite strongly believing (see Clark 1997) that the best way to understand mind and cognition is by attending to complex webs of structure spanning brain, body, and world, and despite arguing (Clark and Chalmers 1998, Clark 2008, and elsewhere) that certain non-conscious cognitive states might be realized by mate-rial circuits that loop through brain, body, and aspects of surrounding ‘designer environments’, I thus rejected — on empirical grounds — the suggestion that the material vehicles of conscious experience actu-ally do loop outside the brain and central nervous system of the experiencing animal.