ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the DEUTS argument may provide sufficient reasons for thinking that continuous sensorimotor engagement with the niche – engagement composed of dynamic loops breaking across brain, body, and world – are sometimes necessary for conscious experience. Predictive processing seems to be an obstacle that stands in the way of any argument from sensorimotor enactivism to the thesis of extended consciousness. Under predictive processing, organisms realise a generative model. Many researchers in the predictive processing camp take the function of generative models to be the generation of virtual or mock sensory input. The internal virtual models that explain offline episodes of conscious experience – in dreaming and imagining, say – also explain the character of online conscious experience in embodied activity in the world. The inferred fantasies view claims that our conscious experiences are the consequence of underlying (subpersonal) generative models and that generative models are formally equivalent to virtual reality models.
