Julian Kiverstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 421372 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Julian Kiverstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Julian |
| FAMILY NAME | Kiverstein |
| SIGNATURE | KIVERSTEIN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3428-8367 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 229 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 20 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
A causal pluralist theory of the interaction of substance, set and setting in psychedelic experience
Psychedelic research has shown that the effects of serotonergic substances, such as psilocybin and LSD, are strongly influenced by the interaction of substance, set, and setting. Mystical-type experiences, often induced by psychedelics, are not solely driven by pharmacological mechanisms but emerge from a dynamic interplay between the psychological state (set), external environment (setting), and the neurochemical effects of the drug. We defend a…
Desire and Motivation in Predictive Processing
The predictive processing theory refers to a family of theories that take the brain and body of an organism to implement a hierarchically organized predictive model of its environment that works in the service of prediction-error minimization. Several philosophers have wondered how belief-like states of prediction account for the conative role desire plays in motivating a person to act. A compelling response to this challenge has begun to take sh…
The Literalist Fallacy and the Free Energy Principle
A Rich Landscape of Affordances
.
The Sociomaterial Theory of Affordances
Relational theories understand affordances as cutting across dualities of knower and known, inner and outer, subject and object, and animal and environment. Anthony Chemero has for instance proposed to understand affordances as relations between the abilities animals embody and situations in the world. In work with Erik Rietveld, I have defined affordances in relation to the abilities available in a form of life—the relatively stable and regular …
An Embodied Predictive Processing Theory of Pain Experience
This paper aims to provide a theoretical framework for explaining the subjective character of pain experience in terms of what we will call ‘embodied predictive processing’. The predictive processing (PP) theory is a family of views that take perception, action, emotion and cognition to all work together in the service of prediction error minimisation. In this paper we propose an embodied perspective on the PP theory we call the ‘embodied predict…
The Predictive Dynamics of Happiness and Well-Being
We offer an account of mental health and well-being using the predictive processing framework (PPF). According to this framework, the difference between mental health and psychopathology can be located in the goodness of the predictive model as a regulator of action. What is crucial for avoiding the rigid patterns of thinking, feeling and acting associated with psychopathology is the regulation of action based on the valence of affective states. …
Scaling-up skilled intentionality to linguistic thought
Cognition has traditionally been understood in terms of internal mental representations, and computational operations carried out on internal mental representations. Radical approaches propose to reconceive cognition in terms of agent-environment dynamics. An outstanding challenge for such a philosophical project is how to scale-up from perception and action to cases of what is typically called ‘higher-order’ cognition such as linguistic thought,…
How to determine the boundaries of the mind
Direct perception in context
Radical empiricists at the turn of the twentieth century described organisms as experiencing the relations they maintain with their surroundings prior to any analytic separation from their environment. They notably avoided separating perception of the material environment from social life. This perspective on perceptual experience was to prove the inspiration for Gibson’s ecological approach to perceptual psychology. Gibson provided a theory of h…
Metastable attunement and real-life skilled behavior
In everyday situations, and particularly in some sport and working contexts, humans face an inherently unpredictable and uncertain environment. All sorts of unpredictable and unexpected things happen but typically people are able to skillfully adapt. In this paper, we address two key questions in cognitive science. First, how is an agent able to bring its previously learned skill to bear on a novel situation? Second, how can an agent be both sens…
The field and landscape of affordances
The smooth integration of the natural sciences with everyday lived experience is an important ambition of radical embodied cognitive science. In this paper we start from Koffka’s recommendation in his Principles of Gestalt Psychology that to realize this ambition psychology should be a “science of molar behaviour”. Molar behavior refers to the purposeful behaviour of the whole organism directed at an environment that is meaningfully structured fo…
Language without representation
Ecological psychology isn't just a psychology of perception and action but offers a post-cognitivist approach to psychology as a whole. In this paper we explore how the conceptual tools of ecological psychology might be put to work to account for linguistic deeds, the activities people can perform when they are competent speakers of a language. We pursue this question by starting from a suggestion Gibson made that language use and perception co-s…
The feeling of grip
According to the free energy principle biological agents resist a tendency to disorder in their interactions with a dynamically changing environment by keeping themselves in sensory and physiological states that are expected given their embodiment and the niche they inhabit (Friston in Nat Rev Neurosci 11(2):127–138, 2010. doi: 10.1038/nrn2787 ). Why would a biological agent that aims at minimising uncertainty in its encounters with the world eve…
Extended Cognition
The debates within 4E cognitive science surrounding extended cognition turn on competing ontological conceptions of cognitive processes. The embedded theory (henceforth EMT) and the family of extended theories of cognition (henceforth EXT) disagree about what it is for a state or process to count as cognitive. Advocates of EMT continue to interpret the concept of cognition along more or less traditional lines as being constituted by computational…
The Markov blankets of life
This work addresses the autonomous organization of biological systems. It does so by considering the boundaries of biological systems, from individual cells to Home sapiens , in terms of the presence of Markov blankets under the active inference scheme—a corollary of the free energy principle. A Markov blanket defines the boundaries of a system in a statistical sense. Here we consider how a collective of Markov blankets can self-assemble into a g…
The anticipating brain is not a scientist
In this paper, we argue for a theoretical separation of the free-energy principle from Helmholtzian accounts of the predictive brain. The free-energy principle is a theoretical framework capturing the imperative for biological self-organization in information-theoretic terms. The free-energy principle has typically been connected with a Bayesian theory of predictive coding, and the latter is often taken to support a Helmholtzian theory of percept…
Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Social Mind
Empathy and the responsiveness to social affordances
A Rich Landscape of Affordances
How broad is the class of affordances we can perceive? Affordances (CitationGibson, 1979/1986) are possibilities for action provided to an animal by the environment-by the substances, surfaces, objects, and other living creatures that surround it. A widespread assumption has been that affordances primarily relate to motor action-to locomotion and manual behaviors such as reaching and grasping. We propose an account of affordances according to whi…
Heidegger and Cognitive Science
Consciousness and the feeling body
In How the Mind Uses the Brain Ralph Ellis and Natika Newton develop a novel embodied, enactive theory of consciousness, according to which consciousness has its basis in neural systems that prepare the system to perform actions of emotional significance to the organism. Consciousness emerges out of self-organising processes which function in such a way as to contribute to, and maintain, the organism’s overall wellbeing. I’ll begin this review by…
A Rich Landscape of Affordances
How broad is the class of affordances we can perceive? Affordances (CitationGibson, 1979/1986) are possibilities for action provided to an animal by the environment-by the substances, surfaces, objects, and other living creatures that surround it. A widespread assumption has been that affordances primarily relate to motor action-to locomotion and manual behaviors such as reaching and grasping. We propose an account of affordances according to whi…
The anticipating brain is not a scientist
In this paper, we argue for a theoretical separation of the free-energy principle from Helmholtzian accounts of the predictive brain. The free-energy principle is a theoretical framework capturing the imperative for biological self-organization in information-theoretic terms. The free-energy principle has typically been connected with a Bayesian theory of predictive coding, and the latter is often taken to support a Helmholtzian theory of percept…
The feeling of grip
According to the free energy principle biological agents resist a tendency to disorder in their interactions with a dynamically changing environment by keeping themselves in sensory and physiological states that are expected given their embodiment and the niche they inhabit (Friston in Nat Rev Neurosci 11(2):127–138, 2010. doi: 10.1038/nrn2787 ). Why would a biological agent that aims at minimising uncertainty in its encounters with the world eve…
The field and landscape of affordances
The smooth integration of the natural sciences with everyday lived experience is an important ambition of radical embodied cognitive science. In this paper we start from Koffka’s recommendation in his Principles of Gestalt Psychology that to realize this ambition psychology should be a “science of molar behaviour”. Molar behavior refers to the purposeful behaviour of the whole organism directed at an environment that is meaningfully structured fo…
The Literalist Fallacy and the Free Energy Principle
Scaling-up skilled intentionality to linguistic thought
Cognition has traditionally been understood in terms of internal mental representations, and computational operations carried out on internal mental representations. Radical approaches propose to reconceive cognition in terms of agent-environment dynamics. An outstanding challenge for such a philosophical project is how to scale-up from perception and action to cases of what is typically called ‘higher-order’ cognition such as linguistic thought,…
Metastable attunement and real-life skilled behavior
In everyday situations, and particularly in some sport and working contexts, humans face an inherently unpredictable and uncertain environment. All sorts of unpredictable and unexpected things happen but typically people are able to skillfully adapt. In this paper, we address two key questions in cognitive science. First, how is an agent able to bring its previously learned skill to bear on a novel situation? Second, how can an agent be both sens…
How to determine the boundaries of the mind
Language without representation
Ecological psychology isn't just a psychology of perception and action but offers a post-cognitivist approach to psychology as a whole. In this paper we explore how the conceptual tools of ecological psychology might be put to work to account for linguistic deeds, the activities people can perform when they are competent speakers of a language. We pursue this question by starting from a suggestion Gibson made that language use and perception co-s…
Direct perception in context
Radical empiricists at the turn of the twentieth century described organisms as experiencing the relations they maintain with their surroundings prior to any analytic separation from their environment. They notably avoided separating perception of the material environment from social life. This perspective on perceptual experience was to prove the inspiration for Gibson’s ecological approach to perceptual psychology. Gibson provided a theory of h…
Consciousness and the feeling body
In How the Mind Uses the Brain Ralph Ellis and Natika Newton develop a novel embodied, enactive theory of consciousness, according to which consciousness has its basis in neural systems that prepare the system to perform actions of emotional significance to the organism. Consciousness emerges out of self-organising processes which function in such a way as to contribute to, and maintain, the organism’s overall wellbeing. I’ll begin this review by…
Heidegger and Cognitive Science
A Rich Landscape of Affordances
How broad is the class of affordances we can perceive? Affordances (CitationGibson, 1979/1986) are possibilities for action provided to an animal by the environment-by the substances, surfaces, objects, and other living creatures that surround it. A widespread assumption has been that affordances primarily relate to motor action-to locomotion and manual behaviors such as reaching and grasping. We propose an account of affordances according to whi…
Empathy and the responsiveness to social affordances
Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the Social Mind
Extended Cognition
The debates within 4E cognitive science surrounding extended cognition turn on competing ontological conceptions of cognitive processes. The embedded theory (henceforth EMT) and the family of extended theories of cognition (henceforth EXT) disagree about what it is for a state or process to count as cognitive. Advocates of EMT continue to interpret the concept of cognition along more or less traditional lines as being constituted by computational…
The Markov blankets of life
This work addresses the autonomous organization of biological systems. It does so by considering the boundaries of biological systems, from individual cells to Home sapiens , in terms of the presence of Markov blankets under the active inference scheme—a corollary of the free energy principle. A Markov blanket defines the boundaries of a system in a statistical sense. Here we consider how a collective of Markov blankets can self-assemble into a g…
The anticipating brain is not a scientist
In this paper, we argue for a theoretical separation of the free-energy principle from Helmholtzian accounts of the predictive brain. The free-energy principle is a theoretical framework capturing the imperative for biological self-organization in information-theoretic terms. The free-energy principle has typically been connected with a Bayesian theory of predictive coding, and the latter is often taken to support a Helmholtzian theory of percept…
The feeling of grip
According to the free energy principle biological agents resist a tendency to disorder in their interactions with a dynamically changing environment by keeping themselves in sensory and physiological states that are expected given their embodiment and the niche they inhabit (Friston in Nat Rev Neurosci 11(2):127–138, 2010. doi: 10.1038/nrn2787 ). Why would a biological agent that aims at minimising uncertainty in its encounters with the world eve…
Scaling-up skilled intentionality to linguistic thought
Cognition has traditionally been understood in terms of internal mental representations, and computational operations carried out on internal mental representations. Radical approaches propose to reconceive cognition in terms of agent-environment dynamics. An outstanding challenge for such a philosophical project is how to scale-up from perception and action to cases of what is typically called ‘higher-order’ cognition such as linguistic thought,…
How to determine the boundaries of the mind
Direct perception in context
Radical empiricists at the turn of the twentieth century described organisms as experiencing the relations they maintain with their surroundings prior to any analytic separation from their environment. They notably avoided separating perception of the material environment from social life. This perspective on perceptual experience was to prove the inspiration for Gibson’s ecological approach to perceptual psychology. Gibson provided a theory of h…
Metastable attunement and real-life skilled behavior
In everyday situations, and particularly in some sport and working contexts, humans face an inherently unpredictable and uncertain environment. All sorts of unpredictable and unexpected things happen but typically people are able to skillfully adapt. In this paper, we address two key questions in cognitive science. First, how is an agent able to bring its previously learned skill to bear on a novel situation? Second, how can an agent be both sens…
The field and landscape of affordances
The smooth integration of the natural sciences with everyday lived experience is an important ambition of radical embodied cognitive science. In this paper we start from Koffka’s recommendation in his Principles of Gestalt Psychology that to realize this ambition psychology should be a “science of molar behaviour”. Molar behavior refers to the purposeful behaviour of the whole organism directed at an environment that is meaningfully structured fo…
Language without representation
Ecological psychology isn't just a psychology of perception and action but offers a post-cognitivist approach to psychology as a whole. In this paper we explore how the conceptual tools of ecological psychology might be put to work to account for linguistic deeds, the activities people can perform when they are competent speakers of a language. We pursue this question by starting from a suggestion Gibson made that language use and perception co-s…
An Embodied Predictive Processing Theory of Pain Experience
This paper aims to provide a theoretical framework for explaining the subjective character of pain experience in terms of what we will call ‘embodied predictive processing’. The predictive processing (PP) theory is a family of views that take perception, action, emotion and cognition to all work together in the service of prediction error minimisation. In this paper we propose an embodied perspective on the PP theory we call the ‘embodied predict…
The Predictive Dynamics of Happiness and Well-Being
We offer an account of mental health and well-being using the predictive processing framework (PPF). According to this framework, the difference between mental health and psychopathology can be located in the goodness of the predictive model as a regulator of action. What is crucial for avoiding the rigid patterns of thinking, feeling and acting associated with psychopathology is the regulation of action based on the valence of affective states. …
The Sociomaterial Theory of Affordances
Relational theories understand affordances as cutting across dualities of knower and known, inner and outer, subject and object, and animal and environment. Anthony Chemero has for instance proposed to understand affordances as relations between the abilities animals embody and situations in the world. In work with Erik Rietveld, I have defined affordances in relation to the abilities available in a form of life—the relatively stable and regular …
A Rich Landscape of Affordances
.
Desire and Motivation in Predictive Processing
The predictive processing theory refers to a family of theories that take the brain and body of an organism to implement a hierarchically organized predictive model of its environment that works in the service of prediction-error minimization. Several philosophers have wondered how belief-like states of prediction account for the conative role desire plays in motivating a person to act. A compelling response to this challenge has begun to take sh…
The Literalist Fallacy and the Free Energy Principle
A causal pluralist theory of the interaction of substance, set and setting in psychedelic experience
Psychedelic research has shown that the effects of serotonergic substances, such as psilocybin and LSD, are strongly influenced by the interaction of substance, set, and setting. Mystical-type experiences, often induced by psychedelics, are not solely driven by pharmacological mechanisms but emerge from a dynamic interplay between the psychological state (set), external environment (setting), and the neurochemical effects of the drug. We defend a…
Psychology (17 works) · Embodied and Extended Cognition (16 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Cognitive science (14 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Cognitive psychology (10 works) · Philosophy of science (7 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Affordance (6 works)