These stable physiological states can be thought of as predictions of homeostatic systems. Footnote 1 Homeostasis refers to processes that maintain the internal physiological conditions of the body within relatively stable bounds despite undergoing continuous change. According to the EPP theory, pain is the outcome of unconscious inferential processes that are distributed across the homeostatic processes that make up the person’s body. In this paper we propose an embodied perspective on the PP theory we call the ‘embodied predictive processing (EPP) theory. 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 (Friston 2010 Hohwy 2013 Clark 2013 2015 Barrett 2017 Seth 2015, 2021).
Our paper proposes to use the predictive processing theory as an explanatory framework for making sense of the subjective nature of pain. Pain does not have an experience or subject-independent existence (Auvray et al. If it seems to someone that they are in pain, this is what it is for them to be in pain. What is present to the person in pain does not allow for an appearance-reality distinction. Pain is essentially subjective: there is no pain unless there is someone, a subject of experience, who is experiencing the pain. Our aim in what follows is to show how the EPP theory can meet this constraint. We take it to be a constraint on the adequacy of a scientific explanation of subjectivity of pain experience that it makes it intelligible how pain can simultaneously be a local sensing of the body, and, at the same time, a more global, all-encompassing attitude towards the environment. We set out to show how the EPP theory can make sense of how pain experience could be neurobiologically constituted. We go on to propose a view of the NEI ensemble as a multiscale nesting of Markov blankets that integrates the smallest scale of the cell to the largest scale of the embodied person in pain.
This system, which we refer to as the neural-endocrine-immune (NEI) system, maintains homeostasis through the process of prediction error minimisation. We will argue that these systems function in a coordinated and coherent manner as a single complex adaptive system to maintain homeostasis. The prediction error minimising system that generates pain experience comprises the immune system, the endocrine system, and the autonomic system in continuous causal interaction with pathways spread across the whole neural axis. The EPP theory proposes to explain pain in terms of processes distributed across the whole body. 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. 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’.
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