Embodied Action-Oriented Emotions

In this post I will try to lay out my own account of what emotions are in a nutshell. The claim that emotions are embodied, roughly speaking, is that emotions involve bodily reactions and that these bodily reactions realize, or constitute, a kind of intelligent behavior, or interaction, with the …

Setting the Stage: What Are Emotions and Why Are They So Hard to Explain?

Many thanks to John who invited me to blog about my book Embodied Emotions this week. The book explores emotions as embodied, action-oriented representations, providing a non-cognitivist theory of emotions that aims to account for their normative dimensions within a naturalist framework. I will come back to what that all …

The Dark Side of the Predictive Mind

I’m an optimist by nature, and so Surfing Uncertainty mostly explores the positives, laying out the surprising reach and potential of the ‘predictive brain picture’ and celebrating its near-perfect interlock with work on the embodied, extended, and enactive mind. But there’s no doubt that the picture still has plenty of …

Conservative versus Radical Predictive Processing

Thanks to John Schwenkler for the invitation to guest-blog this week about my new book Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford University Press NY, 2016). In the previous post, I spoke about the emerging view of the perceiving brain as a prediction machine. Brains like that are …

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