Researcher at a glance
- Affiliation: Cognition & Philosophy Laboratory, Department of Philosophy, Monash University, Melbourne
- Orientation: Philosophy of the predictive mind; the free-energy principle read as a theory of mind and perception; ‘self-evidencing’; the epistemology of the Bayesian brain
Key contributions
- Author of The Predictive Mind (2013), the philosophical statement of predictive processing this wiki names alongside Clark and Friston as a founder of the framework it runs on.
- Introduced ‘self-evidencing’ — the idea that a self-organising system acts and perceives so as to gather evidence for its own model of the world — which reframes free-energy minimisation as inference about one’s own existence (Hohwy 2016).
- Developed the account of perception as hypothesis testing under precision-weighted prediction error, and of attention as the optimisation of expected precision — directly behind the 2019 rivalry/fading treatment.
Key papers
- Parr et al. (2019) — Parr, Corcoran, Friston & Hohwy (2019), Neuroscience of Consciousness — perceptual awareness as active inference.
- Hohwy, J. (2013). The Predictive Mind. Oxford University Press.
- Hohwy, J. (2016). The self-evidencing brain. Noûs, 50, 259–285.
Connections
- Debates: inferential?
- Related researchers: Karl J. Friston, Thomas Parr, Anil K. Seth
The philosopher of the predictive-processing framework — named on the Predictive coding page from the first ingest as one of its founders (with Clark and Friston), and read first-hand at last through Parr et al. (2019). The Predictive Mind (2013) is the book-length argument that a single idea — the brain as a hierarchical Bayesian model minimising prediction error — can carry perception, attention, agency and the sense of a unified self.
Self-evidencing
His most portable contribution to this wiki is self-evidencing (Hohwy 2016): the claim that minimising free energy just is gathering evidence for one’s own generative model — “the self-evidencing brain.” It supplies the motivational floor under Active inference: an agent acts to make its sensations conform to the model that predicts its continued existence. This is the philosophical version of the “agents stay alive by predicting the states that keep them alive” slogan the wiki’s computational sources use, and it is why the 2019 paper can treat a fading or flipping percept as an agent failing, or succeeding, to evidence its hypotheses about a scene.
His relevance here is the framework, not the organ
Hohwy is a philosopher of mind, not an interoception researcher; he reaches this wiki because the interoceptive-inference programme (Seth, Barrett) is a special case of the predictive-processing picture he articulates. His “distrusting the present” idea (with the volatility prior that lets uncertainty accumulate) is the exact assumption that drives Troxler fading in Parr et al. Thin page: one paper in raw/.