The 5Ps of Perceptual Consciousness and Predictive Processing

Ryoji Sato

Perceptual consciousness has been a central issue in philosophical and scientific consciousness research, but there has been surprisingly little interdisciplinary interaction between these areas. On the one hand, there are many contemporary philosophical topics that have scientific bearings but not been informed by science very much. On the other hand, there are powerful scientific theories of perception whose implications are still to be fully integrated with philosophical perspectives. My thesis is an attempt to bridge the gap. Specifically, I use a scientific theory in cognitive science, predictive processing theory, to elucidate various aspects of perceptual consciousness that has both philosophical and scientific bearing. Predictive processing is an emerging theory in cognitive science and expected to be a “grand theory” of the entire brain. Although the fate of the theory is not determined and there are spaces in the theory to be filled, predictive processing approaches promises to apply to all aspects of perception. This implies that even subtle and “deep” aspects of perception should be explainable in such computational terms. Here, I identify 5 such subtle and deep aspects of perception (all incidentally beginning with ‘p’). All of these aspects are so subtle that it is far from clear how the predictive processing approach would account for them, however. I call this the ‘5P challenge’ to predictive processing. The 5P includes: presence, present, particularity, poverty, persons. I therefore explore these five aspects of perception in their own right and propose resolutions to several key debates. For each of them, I then demonstrate how, if I am right in my analysis of these aspects of perception, the predictive processing view will apply. The result is that the predictive processing approaches show promise as a unifying account of even deep and subtle aspects of perception. This, in turn, buttresses the validity of my analysis. My philosophical analysis and predictive processing account constitutes a mutually supporting account that solves some philosophical puzzles. In this talk, I will talk more on the problem of poverty in detail.