What? Now. Predictive Coding and Enculturation

A Reply to Regina E. Fabry

Author

Richard Menary

richard.menary @ mq.edu.au

Macquarie University

Sydney, NSW, Australia

Commentator

Regina E. Fabry

fabry @ students.uni-mainz.de

Johannes Gutenberg-Universität

Mainz, Germany

Editors

Thomas Metzinger

metzinger @ uni-mainz.de

Johannes Gutenberg-Universität

Mainz, Germany

Jennifer M. Windt

jennifer.windt @ monash.edu

Monash University

Melbourne, Australia

Regina Fabry has proposed an intriguing marriage of enculturated cognition and predictive processing. I raise some questions for whether this marriage will work and warn against expecting too much from the predictive processing framework. Furthermore I argue that the predictive processes at a sub-personal level cannot be driving the innovations at a social level that lead to enculturated cognitive systems, like those explored in my target paper.

Keywords

Active inference | Cognitive integration | Enculturation | Learning driven plasticity | Mathematical cognition | Perceptual inference | Predictive processing | Reading