Hypergrip
on the field of affordances (Rietveld, 2013).
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So rare to see this addressed. I never liked the notion of “goal” / “desire” / “want” in cognitive sciences. Minimization of prediction error makes far more sense to me.
“In Friston’s full Free Energy story, one does not need to appeal to desires, goals and rewards in order to explain behavior, but one can replace them with prediction and anticipation; utility functions are replaced by the minimization of prediction error.
We think this scenario is rather appealing because unlike almost all work in cognitive neuroscience it does not presuppose the presence of a “goal” or “desire” of which it is completely unclear how it was selected out of the many possible “goals” or “desires.” “
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I really thoroughly enjoyed the paper. Just finished reading. 14 pages but it was like eating dessert and I savored slowly. I only had one disagreement with them and I’m glad for it, as I hate when I’m 100% in agreement with something.
Now I’m going to look through the 214 citations of it to see what jumps out at me and look at it.
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This is what I strongly disagreed with:
“Moreover, the phenomena of flexible switching and Hypergrip on the field of affordances on the horizon touch upon one of the most important open questions in cognitive science, the frame problem (Wheeler, 2008; Rietveld, 2012b). Skilled intentionality treats context as just more affordances—a landscape of affordances available in an ecological niche—and avoids the frame problem by starting from the phenomenon of maintaining grip on multiple affordances simultaneously.”
Context is “just more affordances” sounds like a pipe-dream: How can someone context switch with ease simply by treating it as more affordances?
BUT then the next section shows a set of graphs describing a simplified view of several mood disorders.
“In extreme cases of OCD, the patient’s field of affordances is narrowed down to just the immediate solicitation of what has to be done here and now without the possibility of flexibly switching to a new readiness for other behaviors “
and there it is. My inflexibility to fast context switching. It’s not that their theory is necessarily wrong in that area: It’s that I never had the experience of fast context switching. So, it really is a good theory.
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Imagine a lifelong issue easily explained by a blocky graph and a few words? But there it is.
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well, mostly what i’m combatant against is the “you have no control” / “control is all illusion” theories .So, some control is a big deal.
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Ah ha! “4E Cognition”.
It has a family name.
“4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) is a relatively young and thriving field of interdisciplinary research. It assumes that cognition is shaped and structured by dynamic interactions between the brain, body, and both the physical and social environments.”
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-4e-cognition-9780198735410?cc=us&lang=en&
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