What Might Interoceptive Inference Reveal About Consciousness?
Preprint Embodied Computation Group 1 What might interoceptive inference reveal about consciousness? NIIA NIKOLOVAa,1,*,P ETER THESTRUP WAADEa,1,2,K ARL J. FRISTON3, AND MICAH ALLEN1,4,5 aEqual contribution *Corresponding author: niia@cfin.au.dk 1Center for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Aarhus University, Denmark 2Interacting Minds Center, Aarhus University, Denmark 3Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL, United Kingdom 4Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Denmark 5Cambridge Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom The mainstream science of consciousness offers a few predominate views of how the brain gives rise to awareness. Chief among these are the Higher Order Thought Theory, Global Neuronal Workspace The- ory, Integrated Information Theory, and hybrids thereof. In parallel, rapid development in predictive pro- cessing approaches have begun to outline concrete mechanisms by which interoceptive inference shapes selfhood, affect, and exteroceptive perception. Here, we consider these new approaches in terms of what they might offer our empirical, phenomenological, and philosophical understanding of consciousness and its neurobiological roots. INTRODUCTION thought? How might the body, or emotion, interact with these properties of consciousness? What is Consciousness? Answering these questions is no easy task. Certainly, most If you have ever been under general anaesthesia, you surely who study consciousness have heard the joke that there are as remember the experience of waking up. However, this awak- many theories of consciousness as there are consciousness theo- ening is different from the kind we do every morning, in that rists. Our goal here is not to provide a comprehensive predictive it is preceded by a complete lack of subjective experience, a processing or active inference theory of consciousness, of which dark nothingness, without even the awareness of time passing.
[Show full text]