[1]
According to Berrios & Luque (1995), the English translation of “le délire des negations”—a term first introduced by the French neurologist, Jules Cotard (1840–1889)—only conveys a part of what it means: “Délire is not a state of delirium or organic confusion (in French, délire aigu and confusion mentale) or a delusion (in French, idée or thème délirante)—it is more like a syndrome that may include symptoms from the intellectual, emotional, or volitional spheres” (p. 219). The original French concept of “délire” fits better with Gerrans’ account of the Cotard delusion, in which the Cotard delusion does not merely concern beliefs of denial, but also anomalous affective processing.
[2]
If the predictive coding framework and the role of memory for which I argued in section 3 is correct, one should expect to find an anomalous phenomenon in semantic dementia—not only with respect to one’s narrative consciousness, but also with respect to one’s perception.
[3]
It might be a contradiction in terms to claim that patients suffering from the Cotard delusion have mental autobiographies, since “auto” means “self, one's own” and “bio” means “life”. Here, it can merely be understood as a personal-level response to the system’s condition.
[4]
Tulving (2005) and Suddendorf & Corballis (2007) argue that episodic memory emerges later in the course of evolution and belongs uniquely to human beings. Even if there is evidence suggesting the existence of episodic-like memory—memory encoding “what”, “where”, and “when” information—in non-human creatures (e.g., Western scrub jays; Clayton 2003; Clayton & Dickinson 1998), Tulving (2005) argues that these phenomena can be explained merely by semantic memory. In a recent paper, Corballis (2013) changes the claim he makes in the earlier article (Suddendorf & Corballis 2007) and argues that mental time travel also exists in rats, and that the difference between this and human mental time travel is simply the degree of complexity.
[5]
Felipe De Brigard (2012) considers how the predictive coding framework can predict remembering. He modifies Anderson’s Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational model (Anderson & Schooler 2000); here the probability of a memory retrieval can be calculated based on how well memory retrieval will minimize prediction error given the cost of the retrieval and the current context. Here, however, I shall not consider the retrieval of individual memories; instead I focus on the role of the memory systems within the framework.
[6]
See Clark (2013a) for the problem of the acquisition of the very first prior knowledge.
[7]
This is related to the philosophical debate on whether one can gain new knowledge from imagination or a purely mental activity, as was famously denied by Sartre (1972) and Wittgenstein (1980) (for a general discussion, see Stock 2007). It is worth noting that if the predictive coding framework is correct, the concept of “knowledge” may be revised: Knowledge may depart from veridicality; instead, it is close to information that can provide successful predictions. Thus, under the predictive coding framework, the only kind of knowledge Sartre recognizes (as cited in Stock 2007, p. 176)—observational knowledge—is not substantially different from other kinds of knowledge, because the knowledge gained through perception cannot be conceptually distinguished from those that are not: Gaining knowledge at each level is all about optimizing the predictions of lower levels.
[8]
This is consistent with the evidence that memory influences perception (e.g., Summerfield et al. 2011).
[9]
In contrast to depersonalization, derealization refers to the “[e]xperiences of unreality of detachment with respect to surroundings” (American Psychiatric Association 2013, p. 302)—patients suffer from detachment from the simulated model of the environment.
[10]
The system of decontextualized supervision is distinct from the semantic memory system discussed in the last section: The latter provides objective elements for the construction of a contextualized autobiographical episode, while the former supervises autobiographical episodes by utilizing decontextualized reasoning.
[11]
“Precision” is also used to refer to the precision of inferences about hidden causal structures (e.g., in Friston et al. 2013). Here and in Hohwy (2013) it indicates the precision of incoming signals.