Commentary: Brain, Mind, World: Predictive Coding, Neo-Kantianism, and Transcendental Idealism

Commentary: Brain, Mind, World: Predictive Coding, Neo-Kantianism, and Transcendental Idealism

Zahavi claims that the predictive processing (PP) approach supports a radical neurorepresentationalism, “according to which the content of our conscious experiences is a neural construct, a brain-generated simulation” (Zahavi, 2017, p. 1). He claims that this is because, on the one hand, spontaneous human cognition becomes equated with the model of cognition developed by sciences, and on the ot...

Internal Realism: Transcendental Idealism?

Idealism and the Mind-Body Problem∗

When I was in graduate school, I recall hearing “One starts as a materialist, then one becomes a dualist, then a panpsychist, and one ends up as an idealist”.1 I don’t know where this comes from, but I think the idea was something like this. First, one starts impressed by the successes of science, endorsing materialism about everything and so about the mind. Second, one is moved by problem of c...

Reassessing Neo-Kantianism. Another Look at Hermann Cohen’s Kant Interpretation

Cognitive Penetration and Predictive Coding: A Commentary on Lupyan

The main aim of Lupyan’s paper (this volume) is to claim that perception is cognitively penetrated and that this is consistent with the idea of perception as predictive coding. In these remarks I will focus on what Lupyan says about whether perception is cognitively penetrated, and set aside his remarks about epistemology. I have argued (2012) that perception can be cognitively penetrated and s...