Order and change in art: towards an active inference account of aesthetic experience

Hello and welcome. It is April 26th, 2024, and we're in Active Inference Art Stream 001.1, starting a new art-related series, very appropriately, with some great art discussions and presentations. This is going to be Order and Change in Art, with Giacoppo Frascaroli presenting, and also with Sander van der Krooyz and Axel Constant here for discussion. So, thank you all for joining. Looking forward to the presentation and discussion. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, everyone, for being here. It's great to be able to present to such a knowledgeable audience of Active Inference Aficionados. And the work that we'll be presenting today is a work that Sander van der Krooyz, Carl Fristone and myself did a few months ago. And it is a work on a topic which I would say is rather neglected or marginal so far in the Active Inference literature. But as I will try to show, it is a topic that is very promising. It has a lot of interesting implications. And indeed, in recent years has been gathering a lot of attention. So let's jump straight into the topic. And our starting point is the remarkable convergence of interest and results that has been emerging in the last few years between scholars interested in mind and brain from a predictive processing or Active Inference perspective, and scholars interested in studying the arts and aesthetics from a variety of perspectives, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, but also increasingly the history of arts and artistic practice as well. So this convergence of interests and results is fostering an ambitious research program that is proving beneficial for both sides. Because on the one hand, predictive processing and active inferences are increasingly seen as frameworks that can illuminate important aspects of our aesthetic experiences. While on the other hand, the arts and aesthetics seen from these predictive processing or active inference perspectives are increasingly seen as potential windows into important aspects of our mental functioning. So the talk will be exploring these two directions of research. And most of what I will say is taken from these two papers. One that Sander van de Kruijs, Carl Frister and myself wrote, and that gives the title to this presentation, and the other that I brought together with Sander Helmut Leder and Elvira Brattico. And the talk papers can be found in this recently published theme issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, which is devoted entirely to these intersections between predictive processing and active inference on the one hand, and the arts and aesthetics on the other hand. So if you want a sort of overview of the state of the art on the topic, I definitely recommend checking out this theme issue. The plan for the talk will be pretty straightforward. As I said, we will be exploring these two main directions of current research. The first pertains to the ways in which we can illuminate aspects of aesthetic experience using the active inference. And in this context, we will be seeing what we mean by aesthetic experience. We'll be introducing the notion of sense making and epistemic arcs from this active inference perspective. And we will be talking about how these notions can clarify certain aspects of our engagement with the arts and our aesthetic experiences. In the second part of the talk, we will be talking about ways in which, on the other hand, our mental functioning can be illuminated by the arts and aesthetics considered from this active inference or predictive processing perspective. And we will be examining a sort of analogy between what artists do and what cognitive scientists do when they study the mind. And we will be clarifying how an examination of the arts and aesthetics can throw light on, among other things, the dynamics of inference, the dynamics of affect and certain aspects of well-being of psychopathology. And in the end, I will be presenting some conclusions in some directions for future research as well. So…