Explaining Manifest Structures
摘要
ordinary objects are experienced to endure over space and time, to not be collocated with each other, to be composed of proper parts, and to survive the loss of some of their parts. These qualities are on the one hand difficult to reconcile for theorists of perception and on the other hand pose a variety of problems when considered in isolation. Relying on the theoretical framework of predictive processing, it is argued that we can use the category of robust predictive processes to conceptualise qualities such as persistence and compositionality in a unified manner. Traditional problems concerning the structural properties of ordinary objects, such as the question of when two objects compose, can then be reformulated using this new category and answered in straightforward manner. What follows is an idealistic process ontology where robust predictive processes shape the objects surrounding us.