Active Inference, Psychology, and Philosophy:An Analytical and Cumulative Study
Loading...
Files
Date
relationships.isAuthorOf
Publisher
Philipps-Universität Marburg
item.page.supervisor-of-thesis
Abstract
Active inference is a prominent theory in contemporary cognitive science and
psychology. Its ambitious research program aims to give a unified account
of perception, action, cognition, learning, and decision-making. It is also
being increasingly applied beyond psychology to a variety of fields, including
artificial intelligence, robotics, and artificial life research.
This dissertation presents an analytical and critical study of active inference
from various theoretical, philosophical, and formal perspectives. The
central thesis is that active inference, as it is currently formulated, is inadequate
as a psychological theory in two crucial domains of experience—
perception and goal-oriented action. In the domain of high-level cognitive
experience, it is useful as a modeling framework to formalize our verbal theories,
albeit with some limiting conditions. The following three studies aim
to defend this thesis.
In the first study, I look at active inference’s theory of perception from
the bird’s eye view of an empirically adequate natural philosophy. Specifically,
I expound Whitehead’s natural philosophy based on his mathematical
physics work and draw its implications for perceptual psychology. Apart
from the merit of bridging the gap between the ‘world of science’ and the
‘world of perception,’ two results of this study are immediately relevant. The
first result concerns rejecting the ‘impoverished stimulus’ assumption for the
perception of colors and qualities. The second result concerns rejecting the
‘impoverished stimulus’ assumption for spatial perception. Taken together,
these results point to a need for a theory of direct perception of qualities and space-time in contrast to the inferential and indirect perception of active
inference.
In the second study, I look at active inference’s theory of goal-directed
action from the perspective of mathematics of dynamical systems theory.
The main result of this study was the inadequacy of active inference’s theory
of agency/goals, which grounds its theory of goal-directed action. The theory
of agency was found to be lacking because the fixed, pre-specified, ‘bounded
set of characteristic states’ necessitated in active inference agents do not
capture natural biological agents. The necessity of such fixedness is traced
to the employment of self-organizing dynamical systems in their formalism.
Owing to the inherent mathematical properties of all dynamical systems, the
state spaces are always fixed. In contrast, in real agents, there is a dynamic
growth and emergence of novel state spaces. Through these mathematical
properties, we argue for the inadequacy of goal-oriented action in the current
formulation.
In the third study, I employ active inference as a modeling tool to
formalize a psychological theory of expectations - ViolEx. Due to its close
connection with probability theory and Bayesian reasoning, we found active
inference useful as a modeling framework to formalize, implement, and
simulate many of the predictors of rational and irrational expectational beliefs.
This study illustrates the potential usefulness of active inference when
situated within the proper domain of experience: cognitive and probabilistic
reasoning, which presupposes the concepts/premises over which correct
reasoning is to be done.
Review
Metadata
Contributors
Supervisor:
Dates
Created: 2025Issued: 2025-11-26Updated: 2025-07-22
Faculty
Fachbereich Psychologie
Language
eng
Data types
DoctoralThesis
Keywords
ZieleWahrnehmung als InferenzProzessphilosophieTheorie dynamischer Systeme und Erwartungen.Active Inferencedirekte Wahrnehmungmechanistischer MaterialismusDynamical Systems TheoryWhiteheadAktive InferenzDirect Perceptionand Expectations.GoalsPsychologieMechanistic MaterialismPerceptionPsychologyWhiteheadWahrnehmungProcess PhilosophyPerception as Inference
DDC-Numbers
150
show more
Raghuveer, Dhanaraaj: Active Inference, Psychology, and Philosophy:An Analytical and Cumulative Study. : Philipps-Universität Marburg 2025-11-26. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17192/z2025.0063.
License
Except where otherwised noted, this item's license is described as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 - CC BY NC ND