The problem of direct access in predictive processing models: a transcendental naturalist solution

Abstract

The paper attempts to show that Predictive Processing (PP), despite recent attempts by its proponents to ward off accusations that lead to skepticism (Clark, A. (2016). Surfing uncertainty: prediction, action and the embodied mind. Oxford University Press, Clark, A. (2019). Replies to critics: In search of the embodied, extended, enactive predictive (EEE-P) mind. In M. Colombo, E. Irvine, & M. Stapleton (Eds.), Andy Clark and his critics (pp. 266–302). Oxford University Press), is susceptible to undesirable skeptical consequences of a Kantian (rather than Cartesian) character. Specifically, I shall argue that Clark’s version of PP is susceptible to a particularly Kantian version of skepticism in which the external world directly revealed by PP generative models is a phenomenal one in the Kantian sense: A world perceived and conceived as external, but at the same time essentially ‘internal’ in its categorial form, where this ‘internality’ only diverges from Kant in that it is a consequence of evolution. It will be suggested that these skeptical consequences can be avoided by articulating a more nuanced notion of the boundary between mind and world in PP, namely, one that differentiates an ontological from an epistemological understanding of the boundary between mind (generative model) and world. Moreover, it will be argued that in order to avoid Kantian skepticism, we must construe the very distinction between the phenomenal world and the world as it is in itself in non-metaphysical, pragmatic terms, as a framework condition for epistemically coordinating empirical inquiry within an ever-changing and unpredictable world. As a bonus, this view seems capable of accommodating the insights of autopoietic enactivism without buying into the latter’s controversial ‘transcendental idealist’ organism-relative ontology.