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The seductive allure of cargo cult computationalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2022

Micah Allen*
Affiliation:
Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus, Denmark Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Aarhus University, 8000 Aarhus, Denmark micah@cfin.au.dk https://www.the-ecg.org/ Cambridge Psychiatry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 8AH, UK

Abstract

Bruineberg and colleagues report a striking confusion, in which the formal Bayesian notion of a “Markov blanket” has been frequently misunderstood and misapplied to phenomena of mind and life. I argue that misappropriation of formal concepts is pervasive in the “predictive processing” literature, and echo Richard Feynman in suggesting how we might resist the allure of cargo cult computationalism.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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