Internal outset
Authors:   , Boonstra Evert A. 
Published: February 2023

The present dissertation took the free-energy principle (FEP) as its starting point, from which we tried to draw both philosophical and empirical consequences.

Both chapter 2 and 3 departed from the idea that conscious perception depends on global amplification of sensory input, and that the basal ganglia (BG) and its irrigation by dopamine play a crucial role in gating information, conscious access, and the selection of a relevant internal model given available sensory data. The BG are thought to play this role due to their modulatory influence on thalamocortical connectivity. Because much of the evidence implicating the BG in these processes in humans is correlational, we explored two ways of manipulating BG activity experimentally.

Chapter 4 investigates the philosophical heritage implicitly touched on by the FEP, which provides an alternative philosophical and historical background for present-day research in cognitive neuroscience. Friston’s FEP has been received with great enthusiasm. With good reason: it not only makes the bold claim to a unifying theory of the brain, but it is presented as an a priori principle applicable to living systems in general. In this paper, we set out to show how the breadth of scope of Friston’s framework converges with the dialectics of Georg Hegel. Through an appeal to the work of Catherine Malabou, we aimed to demonstrate how Friston not only reinvigorates Hegelian dialectics from the perspective of neuroscience, but that the implicit alignment with Hegel necessitates a reading of the FEP from the perspective of Hegel’s speculative philosophy. It is this reading that moves beyond the discussion between cognitivism and enactivism surrounding Friston’s framework; beyond the question whether the organism is a secluded entity separated from its surroundings, or whether it is a dynamical system characterized by perpetual openness and mutual exchange. From a Hegelian perspective, it is the tension between both positions itself that is operative at the level of the organism; as a contradiction the organism sustains over the course of its life. Not only does the organism’s secluded existence depend on a perpetual relation with its surroundings, but the condition for there to be such a relation is the existence of a secluded entity. We intended to show how this contradiction – tension internalized – is at the center of Friston’s anticipatory organism; how it is this contradiction that grounds the perpetual process of free energy minimization.

Chapter 5 is the report of a study attempting to contrast the FEP’s perspective with that of traditional cognitive neuroscience. While the FEP casts the brain as an organism’s predictive model of how its world works and will continue to work in the future in which action is afforded a central place, research on the brain’s predictive capacities remains beholden to traditional research practices in which participants are passively shown stimuli without their active involvement (as we also did in Chapters 2 and 3). The current study is an investigation into ways in which self-generated predictions may differ from externally induced predictions. Participants completed a volatile spatial attention task under both conditions (externally/cue-induced, internally/action-induced) on different days. We used the Hierarchical Gaussian Filter, an approximate Bayesian inference model, to determine subject-specific parameters of belief-updating and inferred volatility. We found preliminary evidence in support of self-generated predictions incurring a larger reaction time cost when violated compared to predictions induced by sensory cue, which translated to participants’ increased sensitivity to changes in environmental volatility. Our results suggest that internally generated predictions may be afforded more weight, but these results are complicated by session order and duration effects, as well as a lack of statistical power.