1132691

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PST0010.1177/27538699221132691Possibility Studies & SocietyGallagher

POSSIBILITY
STUDIES
Inaugural Issues: Possibility Studies, Past, Present and Future - Enacting Chance & SOCIETY
Possibility Studies & Society

Surprise! Why enactivism and 1­–10

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The case of improvisation DOI: 10.1177/27538699221132691

https://doi.org/10.1177/27538699221132691
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Shaun Gallagher
University of Memphis, USA
University of Wollongong, Australia

Abstract
Can we explain how the various factors of knowledge, skill, habit, environmental constraints and affordances
interact or integrate in improvisational performance? In attempting to explain how this integration takes
place, I’ll consider two possible approaches: predictive processing (PP) and enactivism. I’ll argue that PP,
which, on a neuroscientific view, conceives of the mind as set up to avoid surprise, will not be able to
explain improvisation if it remains true to its own principles. In contrast, I’ll argue, enactivism, as a form of
embodied cognition that takes the explanatory unit to be the brain-body environment, can offer a better
explanation of improvisation. I’ll also argue that the notion of habit is central to this account.

Keywords
Enactive cognition, habit, improvisation, performance, predictive processing

In the case of jazz and dance improvisation there is
a skill-informed selective uncertainty, that is, you
need to know a lot about your craft, about different
traditions within your genre, and have skilled
know-how, but you don’t know what you are going
to do or where the music or movement will take
you. In improvisation one aims for surprise (self-
surprise), using techniques that allow you to
achieve novelty (such as the breaking of habits or
the avoidance of usual affordances). But also, part
of what allows for the possibility of surprise is
chance, the source of which may be the environ-
ment or other performers.
Can we explain how these various factors—
knowledge, skill, habit, environmental factors, and
affordances—interact? I’ve argued that the model
of a meshed architecture (Christensen et al., 2016;
Gallagher 2021) provides a good starting point. It
provides a way to map out the cognitive, motor-
control, environmental, social, cultural, and nor-
mative factors that need to be integrated in
performance. The further question, however, is
precisely how this integration takes place. In this
paper I’ll consider two possible approaches to
answering this question: predictive processing (PP)
and enactivism. I’ll argue that PP, which conceives
of the mind as set up to avoid surprise, will not be
able to explain improvisation if it remains true to
its own principles. In contrast, I’ll argue, enactiv-
ism can offer a good explanation of improvisation.
Predictive processing
(a rough and simple guide)
Predictive processing continues a long tradition,
going back to Helmholtz (1867), of understanding
perception as an inferential process. It models this
Corresponding author:
Shaun Gallagher, Department of Philosophy, University of
Memphis, Clement Hall 327, Memphis, TN 38152, USA.
Email: s.gallagher@memphis.edu
2 Possibility Studies & Society 00(0)
process in terms of prediction error minimization
(PEM), which begins with the assumption that the
brain has no access to the external world. By means
of perceptual inference, neuronal processes repre-
sent that world by forming probabilistic hypothe-
ses about the world based on an internal Bayesian
(statistical), hierarchical, generative model that it
constructs informed by prior knowledge (priors).
The prediction structure can be quite complex,
involving a nested cascade of precision-weighted
predictive processes in the brain. If the predictions
don’t match sensory input, the brain revises its
model and corrects its inferences in order to mini-
mize prediction errors (conflicts between sensory
input and the internal model).
The human brain, PP here suggests, commands a rich,
integrated model of the worldly sources of sensory
inputs, and uses that long-term model to generate
on-the-spot predictions about the probable shape and
character of current inputs. The rich, integrated
(generative) model takes a highly distributed form,
spread across multiple neural areas that may
communicate in complex context-varying manners.
(Clark, 2018, p. 522).
The aim is to reduce surprisal, that is, the unex-
pected variation from the general statistical pat-
terns that are expected to hold in a situation.
Surprisal is a subpersonal version of surprise.
The idea that the organism (or brain) has no
direct access to the world is usually explained in
terms of a mathematical formalism called a Markov
blanket—which defines the boundary of the cogni-
tive system. Where do you draw that boundary?
According to one well-known neurocentric
account, the boundary does not extend beyond the
brain (Hohwy, 2013); on another account (Clark,
2016), the Markov blanket may extend to include
the body and parts of the environment. Accordingly,
one point of debate within the PP approach con-
cerns whether the boundary should be understood
as cutting the cognitive system off from the world,
or as allowing for a coupling or interaction of sys-
tem and world?
According to Jakob Hohwy, there is a strict
closure.
PEM should make us resist conceptions of [a mind-
world] relation on which the mind is in some
fundamental way open or porous to the world, or on
which it is in some strong sense embodied, extended
or enactive. Instead, PEM reveals the mind to be
inferentially secluded from the world, it seems to be
more neurocentrically skull-bound than embodied or
extended, and action itself is more an inferential
process on sensory input than an enactive coupling
with the environment. (Hohwy, 2016, p. 259)
Although Andy Clark endorses a more liberal
embodied perspective, he also maintains the idea
that the brain is in some sense isolated from the
world.
[The brain] must discover information about the
likely causes of impinging signals without any form
of direct access to their source. . .. [A]ll that it
“knows,” in any direct sense, are the ways its own
states (e.g., spike trains) flow and alter. In that
(restricted) sense, all the system has direct access to
is its own states. The world itself is thus off-limits.  .  .
(Clark, 2013, p. 183)
The brain’s task is to take “patterns of neural acti-
vation and, on that basis alone, infer properties of
the stimulus” (Clark, 2016). Still, Clark allows for
a more extended concept of the cognitive system,
namely by emphasizing active inference. In con-
trast to perceptual inference, active inference
involves holding its world-model steady, but
engaging in bodily movement or action in a way
that changes the world, thereby changing sensory
input to gain a match with the model. This is an
alternative way of reducing prediction error.
[Active] “inference,” as it functions in the [PP] story,
is not compelled to deliver internal states that bear
richly reconstructive contents. It is not there to
construct an inner realm able to stand in for the full
richness of the external world. Instead, it may deliver
efficient, low-cost strategies whose unfolding and
success depend delicately and continuously upon the
structure and ongoing contributions of the external
realm itself as exploited by various forms of action
and intervention. (Clark, 2016, p. 191).
Active inference is often framed in terms of the
“free energy principle,” which is an alternative and
more general way of describing PEM. I will return
to this point, but I note here that this moves PP
closer to the enactive starting point, which involves
Gallagher 3
a self-generating (autopoietic) system that couples
with the environment for purposes of sense
making.
Can PP explain improvisation?
Clearly, prediction is important for improvisa-
tion—to improvise and deal with uncertainty, a
performer must project ahead in time to anticipate
a variety of things. Performers need to anticipate
under pressing time constraints, what comes next,
including the actions of others with whom they are
dancing or playing music. It seems clear that PP
could be an approach that helps to explain improvi-
sation. For example, according to Clark (2016):
“[t]o deal rapidly and fluently with an uncertain
and noisy world, brains like ours have become
masters of prediction – surfing the waves’ noisy
and ambiguous sensory stimulation by, in effect,
trying to stay just ahead of them” (p. xiv).
Schaefer (2015) offers just such a PP account of
musical processing. As an individual responds to
music, she applies a mental model (prior knowl-
edge), “an internal representation of a percept or
action, as it is built up through experience and sta-
tistical learning” (2014), in order to predict the
incoming flows of sensory information. Michael
and Wolf (2015) apply this account to the example
of coordination required for ending a song during
an improvised performance. How do several musi-
cians decide when and how to end a song without
agreeing on it in advance? “In the context of music,
two jazz performers might both prefer, having just
finished what appeared to be the final verse of a
jazz standard, to start up again for a surprising
additional repetition of the chorus – but only if the
other does so as well” (2014). They suggest that the
musicians’ priors include a set of stock endings that
are common across a performance community;
these operate as constraints on prediction, and this,
together with embodied and gestural cues can help
navigate the end of a performance, and limit sur-
prise (for the performers).
Ryan (2020), however, points out that this can-
not explain novelty in improvisation (also see
Froese & Ikegami, 2013). Novelty and surprise are
not coextensive concepts, yet both are important
features of improvisation. As such, if PP is to help
our understanding of how improvisation functions,
it will need to include an account of novelty. But
here’s the problem.
1. According to PP, an organism’s main aim is
to maintain its organization (i.e., stay alive),
and the means by which an organism real-
izes this aim is through prediction-error
minimization, which is equivalent to mini-
mizing surprise/surprisal as much as
possible.
2. Novelty is something that by definition
increases surprise, moving outside the
standard statistical regularities faced by an
organism.
3. Accordingly, an organism will do its best to
stay away from novelty as much as
possible.
Philipp Schwartenbek and colleagues phrase the
question in the right way.
If our main objective is to minimize surprise over the
states and outcomes we encounter, how can this
explain complex human behavior such as novelty
seeking, exploration, and, furthermore, higher level
aspirations such as art, music, poetry, or humor?
(Schwartenbeck et al., 2013, p. np)
Improvisation seems a counterexample to the prin-
ciple that organisms avoid surprise: people actively
seek out and enjoy novelty. They often find it
pleasurable. One possible response to this objec-
tion is that surprise (at the personal level) is not the
same as surprisal (at the subpersonal level) (Clark,
2018). Indeed, surprise may actually come about
because of a tension between the system’s predic-
tions meant to limit surprisal, and the surprising
event. Moreover, we might actually predict affec-
tive surprise in specific environments.
According to Schwartenbeck et al. (2013), to the
extent that our behavior involves active inference, “the
agent’s generative model includes hidden (future)
states and actions that the agent might perform (and
their consequences). This implies that the agent has to
represent itself in future states performing specific
4 Possibility Studies & Society 00(0)
actions. In other words, it necessarily implies a model
with a sense of agency”. Schwartenbeck et al., apply
this explanation to economic decision making. The
representing of itself in future states means that the
agent infers a “policy” (an action selection rule that
entails a sequence of actions) that minimizes surprise
about future outcomes. Such policies are defined by
fixed goal states.
These goal priors are fixed and do not depend on
sensory input: they represent a belief concerning
states the agent will end up in. Desired goal states
will be accorded a high probability (log-likelihood)
of being encountered, resulting in a low surprise
when this state is indeed visited. Undesirable states,
by contrast, will be assigned with a low prior
probability and therefore become highly
surprising. . .. In the framework of active inference,
therefore, agents do not try to maximize reward but
minimize surprise (about future states).
Improvisational performance, however, as we’ll
see below, sometimes involves a sense of distrib-
uted agency, and does not necessarily involve a
definite fixed goal state. If this account of active
inference can deal with economic decision making
where alternative actions are clearly delineated, it’s
not clear that it can capture the type of uncertainty
involved in improvisation.
Referencing Schwartenbeck et al., Clark (2018)
addresses the problem directly. Indeed, he agrees
that this kind of solution does not reach the type of
improvisational behavior we are concerned with.
These prediction-error-minimizing agents exhibit at
most a modest and instrumentally-motivated
tendency towards play, exploration, and the search
for novel experiences. These prediction error mini­
mizing agents remain locked, it seems, into an
information-theoretic journey whose guiding prin­
ciple is in some way unacceptably conservative. It is
a journey which, if successful, will be marked only
by the attainment of expected goals and meta-goals.
(p. 528).
He suggests that information-theoretic imperatives
don’t sufficiently address the problem.
In this respect Clark cites the work of Barrett
and Bar (2009), and the important role of
affectivity. This response again, I think, pushes PP
toward a more enactive-embodied view to the
extent that it involves affectivity. Barrett and Bar
help to clarify a more embodied PP, which, they
argue, is consistent with views on active inference.
Their affective prediction hypothesis suggests that
“responses signaling an object’s salience, relevance
or value do not occur as a separate step after the
object is identified. Instead, affective responses
support vision from the very moment that visual
stimulation begins” (2009). Along with the earliest
visual processing, a train of muscular and hormo-
nal changes occur throughout the body, generating
“interoceptive sensations” from organs, muscles,
and joints associated with prior experience, which
integrates with current exteroceptive sensory infor-
mation. The organism as a whole (or at least in spe-
cific aspects that include its morphology, its
affectivity, its skill level) is included as an impor-
tant part of the priors. Friston (2013) suggests, in
this regard, that rather than having a model, the
organism is the generative model. “We must here
understand ‘model’ in the most inclusive sense, as
combining interpretive dispositions, morphology,
and neural architecture, and as implying a highly
tuned ‘fit’ between the active, embodied organism
and the embedded environment” (Friston et al.,
2012, p. 6). In perception, then, bodily affective
changes are integrated with sensorimotor process-
ing so that before we fully recognize an object, an
affordance, or another person for what it or he or
she is, our bodies are already configured into over-
all peripheral and autonomic patterns shaped by
prior associations, responding and contributing to
shaping subsequent actions.
This means that perception or action, is more
than a nested cascade of predictions in the brain.
Indeed, it’s not clear how an affective, pleasurable
enjoyment of surprise or novelty fits with the nar-
row conception of PEM. Even if there may be pre-
diction errors involved if our action or expression
doesn’t go as planned, it’s not clear that there are
error criteria for pleasure or enjoyment. More gen-
erally, the improvisational process poses a chal-
lenge for a PP representationalist account since in
the process of improvisation we are not trying to
model the world as it is.
Gallagher 5
Although Clark (2018) tries to keep affectivity
purely within the brain (in terms of “interoceptive
predictive coding”—an interchange between corti-
cal and sub-cortical processes), ultimately, he
admits, “As your bodily states alter, the salience of
various worldly opportunities alters too.” In the
end he appeals to cultural constraints, “ecologi-
cally unique, self-engineered contexts of culture,
technology, and linguaform exchange”—all of this,
arguably, outside the brain and not entirely within
our control. Clark considers this idea that such cul-
tural constraints may actually constrain and limit
possibilities for improvisation and novelty.
The skilled pianist has learnt to reduce prediction error
with respect to complex melodies and motor repertoires,
and the skilled mathematician with respect to properties
and relations among numbers, theorems, and other
constructs. But the musical and mathematical traditions
within which they operate reflect the operation of
cultural forces such as practices of writing, reflecting,
disseminating, and peer review. (Clark, 2018)
Clark argues that it could go either way—environment
and cultural practices may provide limits, or may ena-
ble creativity. The question remains, how does it work
when it enables creativity? And then, almost as if on
cue: “These powerful effects are further explored in
work by ‘enactivists’ sympathetic to PP—for exam-
ple, Rietveld and Kiverstein (2014), Bruineberg et al.
(2018), Gallagher et al. (2013)” (Clark, 2018). That
seems exactly right; the focus on embodiment, affect,
and environmental coupling, actually pushes us (away
from PP) toward more enactive accounts.
Enactivism and dynamical
processes
Enactivism is an embodied (action-oriented, anti-
representationalist) approach to cognition. Gall­
agher (2017) has summarized enactive approaches
in seven principles.
1. Cognition is not simply a brain event. It
emerges from processes distributed across
brain–body–environment.
2. The world (meaning, intentionality) is not
pre-given or predefined, but is structured
by perception and action
3. Cognitive processes acquire meaning in
part by their role in the context of action,
rather than through a representational map-
ping or replicated internal model of the
world
4. Cognitive systems are ecologically embed-
ded, intersubjective, and socially situated
(vs. classic cognitive science, which tends
to be internalistic)
5. Dynamical systems theory can model the
dynamical coupling and coordination
across brain–body–environment
6. More complex cognitive functions are
grounded in sensorimotor coordination,
affective, and autonomic aspects of the full
body.
7. Complex cognitive functions, such as
reflective thinking or deliberation, are exer-
cises of skillful know-how.
How does an enactive approach explain improvisa-
tion? In contrast to PP, which specifies an impor-
tant role for top-down predictions within the
individual system, enactivism takes improvisation
to involve distributed control across brain, body,
and physical and social environment, something
closer to active inference, but where the individual
is one dynamically coupled component and not in
full control.
As Michael Kimmel puts it:
The phenomenological consequence of distribu­
tedness is ambiguous “ownership of the movement.”
Occasionally, dancers would report a, what we call,
“wasn’t me” moment: they sense that neither of the
dancers has initiated the movement. A dancer
explicitly described the experience as follows: “there
are ways and times that we aren’t separate agencies.
When we come together and the fact of togetherness
starts to drive what happens.” (Kimmel et al., 2018,
p. 24).
This same distributed control or distributed agency
where control or agency is an “emergent product of
agent environment coupling” (Kronsted, 2021) can
be found in some forms of improvisation (see also
Høffding, 2019; Schiavio et al., 2022; also van der
Schyff et al., 2018; Walton et al., 2018). Factors in
the improvisational setting involve not only the
6 Possibility Studies & Society 00(0)
performer as an agent with specific intentions, but
a meshed architecture of physical, social, cultural,
normative factors that operate in a dynamical, non-
linear fashion, in which an agent’s coupling or
attunement with the environment is modulated
both by sensorimotor schemes and a broad range of
environmental features. This may also involve
habitual behaviors, although habit should not be
understood to mean automatic response. Instead of
blind automatic repetition, habit is an open and
adaptive way in which an autonomous agent learns
to cope with familiar or unfamiliar situations.
Merleau-Ponty (2012), for example, argues that a
habit is developed when the body “acquires the
power of responding with a certain type of solution
to a certain form of situation” (p. 143). Habit
involves intelligent agentive response, where intel-
ligence is built into the movement. John Dewey
likewise distinguishes between intelligent and rou-
tine habit.
Repetition [i.e., automaticity] is in no sense the
essence of habit. . .. The essence of habit is an
acquired predisposition to ways or modes of
response. . .. Habit means special sensitiveness or
accessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standing
predilections and aversions, rather than bare
recurrence of specific acts. (Dewey, 1922, p. 42).
If habit were strictly automatic there would be no
possibility of doing something different. Habit
involves a heedful attitude; and only because it
does can one break habit in the improvisational set-
ting. Both habitual behavior and the breaking of
habit involve agentive intention. Improvisation can
happen when a performer resists the usual
affordance, or breaks her habitual move, gives up
control (although in a controlled fashion, so to
speak), and then lets other factors take over. This
breaking of habit (declining the usual affordances),
which happens in the immediacy of performance,
comes without a prediction of what happens next,
except the most general prediction or experienced
anticipation that something will happen (Kronsted
& Gallagher, 2021). The phenomenology of agency
attests to the idea that the improvisation is not com-
pletely under the performer’s control (Høffding,
2019). There is an experienced opening, or “gap”
(McDowall, 2018), when the agent resists the
solicitation of an affordance, or acts on the
affordance in a nonhabitual manner. What fills this
gap is not a surety of what happens next, but a let-
ting happen of whatever happens, a trust in the pro-
cess. How the improvisation unfolds is a product of
the whole system, which includes the performer’s
agentive intentions, rather than any one individual
component; the system changes its internal states
and, at the same time, by means of action, changes
the environment in ongoing dynamical feedback
loops (contra any strict Markov blanket).1
PP and/or enaction?
Isn’t it possible to integrate predictive processing
accounts and enactivism, as some have suggested?
(Gallagher & Allen, 2018; Kiverstein, 2020; Parr
et al., 2020; Ramstead et al., 2021; Wiese & Friston,
2021). Ramstead et al., addressing some of the ter-
minological and conceptual differences, suggest
that proponents of PP don’t really mean inference
when they say “inference,” or representation when
they say “representation.” This may be what Cicero
calls “alterations of terminology rather than of sub-
stance.” More substantial conceptual alterations
may also be in order, however. Gallagher and Allen
(2018) have argued that one has to give up neuro-
centric internalism and the concepts of inference,
internal model, and representation, and go with
enactivist processes of affordance, attunement, and
resonance. One might then ask, however, what is
left of PP?
Constant et al. (2020) propose a truce that would
introduce a division of labor. “[There] is a subtle,
yet crucial point, which becomes apparent when
considering the probability distributions involved
in various inference processes in the brain” (p. np).
Here they make the distinction between (1) the
brain predicting expected sensory neural activa-
tions matching the probability of the generative
model/belief—a purely internal process, and (2)
the prediction made about the (hidden) cause of
such activations. “Getting it right” (truth or success
conditions) in (1) “is about getting it right with
respect to one’s own beliefs; e.g., successfully
exploring the state space of one’s own model of the
world. . .. This means that under active inference,
there are two layers of success involved, one
Gallagher 7
defined over the model, and one defined over the
agent-world coupling.”
According to Constant et al., the first is repre-
sentational and fits well with PEM; the second is
dynamical and could be modeled on active infer-
ence or enactive processes. Specifically, they
argue, the second (non-representational) process is
sufficient for deontic actions—automatic behavior,
which for them includes habitual actions (such as
stopping at stop signs).
[Such actions] do not have success conditions qua
brain processes, but rather have success conditions
qua agent-world coupling processes. They are simple
observation-action loops; not rich and reconstructive
policy selection loops.... inferences about states of
the world – that admit a representationalist
interpretation – are now replaced by direct action,
without any intervening inference or representation
of the consequences of action.
In the case of deontic actions what does the work is
“a kind of perceptually maintained motor-informa-
tional grip on the world: a low-cost perception-
action routine that retrieves the right information
just-in-time for use, and that is not in the business
of building up a rich inner simulacrum” (Clark,
2016, p. 11).
Although Constant et al. (2020) pitch this as a
kind of détente, it’s not clear how it moves beyond
older peace negotiations that involved splitting the
difference between higher-order representation-
hungry cognition (albeit now framed in PP terms)
and more basic perceptual-motor processes (e.g.,
Clark & Toribio, 1994), or how enactive, heedful
or intelligent habit fits this picture.
Another attempt at integrating PP and enactive
approaches is made by stepping back from some of
these details into a more basic and abstract frame-
work. For Karl Friston, the important thing is get-
ting the mathematics (in the statistical models)
right, rather than philosophical interpretations that
might range from internalist to embodied and enac-
tive versions. Furthermore, for Friston, predictive
models generalize to life itself explained in terms
of the free energy principle (FEP). According to
FEP, biological systems are defined by the ten-
dency to resist the second law of thermodynamics;
to do otherwise would entail an unbounded increase
of entropy, that is, systemic death. To maintain
homeostasis, and avoid entropy (which in thermo-
dynamic terms means too much free energy in the
system), then you should reduce free energy (which
means reducing prediction errors and surprisal).2
To survive, an organism needs to avoid surprise.
The claim is then that FEP aligns well with the con-
cept of autopoiesis, the emergent or self-organizing
persistence of an organism in virtue of its own
dynamical structure. On the enactivist view,
autopoiesis characterizes the continuous processes
of life and mind.
The strategy here, to put it simply, is that if FEP
and autopoiesis can be understood to be consistent,
then there is a good basis for integrating PP and
enactivism. This is the view of some enactive-
inclined authors who think we can mesh the basic
FEP version of predictive active inference models
with enactivist principles (e.g., Bruineberg et al.,
2018). They emphasize the embodied action that
the organism uses to control its own viability
conditions.
So within the free-energy framework, it is action that
does the work of actually minimizing surprisal.
Actions change an organism’s relation to the
environment, thereby changing the sensory states of
the organism. . .. (Bruineberg et al., 2018)
Action is not something happening in the brain,
and it’s not just providing new sensory input for
neural processing; it’s what the whole organism
does in its interactions with the environment, or
under a different description, what a person does in
the world, and this changes the world as much as it
changes the brain. On this view, the priors that
inform action are not assumptions or beliefs that
inform inferences; they’re embodied skills, pat-
terns of action-readiness, and affective dispositions
that mesh with an affordance space.
In contrast to these various attempts to integrate
PP and enactivist approaches, Di Paolo et al. (2022)
identify some deeper (technical and theoretical)
reasons why PP is not compatible with enaction. To
put this in its simplest terms, the technical part of
the argument involves contrasting autopoietic sys-
tems with FEP systems. In autopoietic systems
organization, as an invariable, is distinguished
from structure, as a changeable feature—a
8 Possibility Studies & Society 00(0)
distinction not maintained in the FEP-Markov
blanket discussion. So there is a confusion when
FEP systems are equated with autopoietic ones.
There is a similar confusion between autopoietic
operational closure (according to which the system
nonetheless remains open to the environment) and
the formalism of the Markov blanket (which sug-
gests statistical independence from the environ-
ment and structural boundaries). Perhaps more
relevant to the issue of improvisation, as I’ll try to
make clear, there is also a contrast between the
non-equilibrium steady-state features of FEP sys-
tems, and the historicity of (the importance of the
system’s history for) the enactive system. Di Paolo
et al. (2022) make this last point more generally in
terms of different conceptions of brain dynamics
(hierarchical comparators in PP, vs. dynamical
“history-dependence even in the most basic neuro-
scientific scenario of stimulus processing”). The
point about historicity, has implications for under-
standing development, plasticity, skill acquisition,
habit formation, and the ability to break habits—
which brings us back to our topic—improvisation
in performance.
Improvisation
One way to cash out in pragmatic terms, the theo-
retical incommensurability that Di Paulo et al.
point to, is to consider the example of improvisa-
tion. The contrast between PP/FEP models and
enactive approaches becomes very clear. Impro­
visation is the opposite of deontic action, as char-
acterized by Constant et al. (2020). Recall that
deontic actions are said to be automatic, habitual
actions, “simple observation-action loops; not rich
and reconstructive policy selection loops. . .. with-
out any intervening inference or representation of
the consequences of action.” They are good exam-
ples of nonequilibrium steady-states. As Constant,
Clark and Friston put it: “the back story to active
inference shows that this kind of dynamical behav-
ior is a necessary aspect of any self-organization to
nonequilibrium steady-state in any random dynam-
ical system that possesses a Markov blanket.”3 The
conception of habit, as a kind of automatic, repeti-
tive action, in this context is antithetical to enactive
conceptions of habit (see above). Again, habit,
understood in terms of heedful, agentive, intelli-
gent behavior, allows for the possibility of break-
ing habit in the improvisational setting.
On the enactive view, improvisation is thus not
equivalent to a deontic action modeled on an FEP
nonequilibrium steady-state.
[Thus], phenomena such as developmental spurts in
skill level signal changes in dynamical configurations
(novel constraints, emergent parameters, changing
variable sets). The variability entailed in changing
dynamical configurations has been postulated as the
origin of motor creativity (Orth et al., 2017), the very
idea of which is rendered problematic on the
assumption of non-equilibrium steady states [as in
FEP]. (Di Paolo et al., 2022)
Motor creativity—essential for improvisation in
jazz and dance—reflects the history and skill of the
agent. Performers, based on their well-trained
skills, and well-formed habits (which involve a
heedful flexibility rather than automaticity or
repetitiveness) are able to move beyond controlled
engagement to the point of not-knowing (embrac-
ing a kind of uncertainty or surprise) about what
precisely will happen—letting the system (brain-
body-environment) move in unpredictable, surpris-
ing ways—without a prediction of what happens
next. What happens next is that brain-body-envi-
ronment couple in a novel way—they join forces to
enact something unpredictable—they create corti-
cal patterns, and behaviors, and new affordances
that are unique to each event.
Enactivism explains the possibility of breaking
habits (declining usual affordances, resisting predic-
tions) across the various timescales of performance,
generating higher degrees of uncertainty about what
will happen. Such processes may differ from one
genre to another, and from one situation to another
(jazz vs. dance improvisation (see e.g., Kronsted &
Gallagher, 2021; Ryan, 2020; Ryan & Gallagher,
2020) or solo performance versus group performance
(see e.g., Schiavio et al., 2022; Van der Schyff &
Krueger, 2019). If the deeper principles of FEP fail to
account for such processes, the assumptions made by
PEM also seem unable to provide an account for how
the system pursues novelty, creativity.
For both theoretical and pragmatic reasons,
then, PP and enactive views offer different
Gallagher 9
explanations. We can cash out this difference by
looking specifically at how these accounts apply to
improvisation. To the extent that PP, following the
FEP, emphasizes steady-state equilibriums, the
automaticity implied in deontic actions, and the
minimization of uncertainty (novelty, surprise), it
is difficult to see how it can capture the dynamical
creative configurations (involving novel con-
straints, emergent parameters, changing variable
sets) which, according to enactivist accounts, are
characteristic of skilled performance and
improvisation.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest
with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial
support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article: Support for this research was provided by
the Australian Research Council (ARC) project, minds
in skilled performance, grant number: DP170102987;
and the Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy at the
University of Memphis.
ORCID iD
Shaun Gallagher https://orcid.org/0000-0002-
3147-9929
Notes
1. To be sure, even for Hohwy, the Markov blanket is
not always a strict boundary, and he seems to grant
to the enactive analysis the possibility of organism-
environment coupling, although he continues to
insist on a type of boundary-based decoupling. See
Hohwy (2016, p. 277).
2. Mann and Pain (2022) note that the FEP is some-
what obscure in its meaning. The term “energy” in
FEP “is not energy in the standard sense. Rather,
it is an information-theoretic term. . ..” They quote
Colombo and Wright (2018) who suggest: “FEP’s
epistemic status remains opaque, along with its
exact role in biological and neuroscientific theo-
rizing. Conspiring against its accessibility are the
varying formalisms and formulations of FEP, the
changing scope of application, reliance on unde-
fined terms and stipulative definitions, and the lack
of clarity in the logical structure of the reasoning
leading to FEP” (Colombo & Wright, 2018, p. 2).
3. Or as Friston puts it: “Any ergodic random dynami-
cal system that possesses a Markov blanket will
appear to actively maintain its structural and
dynamical integrity” (Friston, 2013, p. 2)
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