I consider below the two seminal ideas of identity and worldview from a cognitive perspective. My starting point is the newly emerging view of the human mind as a prediction machine which operates on the basis of an embedded model of the world it experiences, This model it constantly seeks to improve, so as to minimise prediction errors and facilitate the pursuit of well-being and flourishing. An important aspect of the model for each person is their awareness of being a conscious subjective self who is experiencing “the world” as its object. Within this framework, our worldview is the cognitive perspective (lens) which our model gives rise to. An important part of any model of the world we build is of course our position or role in it. This representation of ourself in our own cognitive model of the world is our identity. Identity and worldview are in this way constructed as mutually reinforcing narratives, unlike the related concepts of the self and the world, which are typically, e.g. by Descartes, construed as existing objectively.
I go on to consider what light these ideas might shed on the currently problematic areas of identity politics and culture wars.
Cognition as Prediction
In his seminal work The Predictive Mind, Hohwy (2014) set out his view of the mind as a prediction machine, arguing that the strategy by which it makes sense of the world of experience is by minimising prediction error:
A new theory is taking hold in neuroscience. The theory is increasingly being used to interpret and drive experimental and theoretical studies, and it is finding its way into many other domains of research on the mind. It is the theory that the brain is a sophisticated hypothesis-testing mechanism, which is constantly involved in minimizing the error of its predictions of the sensory input it receives from the world. This mechanism is meant to explain perception and action and everything mental in between. It is an attractive theory because powerful theoretical arguments support it. It is also attractive because more and more empirical evidence is beginning to point in its favour. It has enormous unifying power and yet it can explain in detail too. (p. 1)
Since the time of his writing an avalanche of supporting evidence has flowed. The connection between perception and action is important in the theory. Not only do our perceptions drive actions, our actions can also facilitate improved perception. According to Clark (2016):
there are two ways in which biological agents can reduce prediction error. The first … involves finding the predictions that best accommodate the current sensory inputs. The second is by performing actions that make our predictions come true—for example, moving around and sampling the world so as to generate or discover the very perceptual patterns that we predict. (p. 121)
For this reason, the theory is frequently referred to as active inference.
To perform this predictive function, it is necessary that the mind has access to an internal model or map of the world of experience, which it maintains and extends in line with new cognitive inputs and other experiences. Cognitive science has in recent years furnished substantive evidence of how neural processes in the brain (and in the human body more generally) associated with cognition and decision-making work by formulating and testing hypotheses. Fundamentally we make sense of the world by making hypotheses and predictions about it, which we then test by acting on the basis of those predictions. As argued by Clark (2024) in the Preface to his recent Dennett Prize-winning book:
This is a profound change in our understanding of the mind that fundamentally alters how we should think about perception and the construction of human reality. For much of human history, scientists and philosophers saw perception as a process that worked mostly “from the outside in,” as light, sound, touch, and chemical odors activate receptors in eyes, ears, nose, and skin, progressively being refined into a richer picture of the wider world. Even well into the twenty-first century, leading models in both neuroscience and artificial intelligence retained core elements of that view.
The new science of predictive processing flips that traditional story on its head. Perception is now heavily shaped from the opposite direction, as predictions formed deep in the brain reach down to alter responses all the way down to areas closer to the skin, eyes, nose, and ears—the sensory organs that take in signals from the outside world. Incoming sensory signals help correct errors in prediction, but the predictions are in the driver’s seat now. This means that what we perceive today is deeply rooted in what we experienced yesterday, and all the days before that. Every aspect of our daily experience comes to us filtered by hidden webs of prediction—the brain’s best expectations rooted in our own past histories.
In this way we build up an internal model of the world within our mind/brain which makes sense of our experiences and facilitates our predictions about it. This model is then progressively updated in the light of new experiences, allowing us to hone our predictions.
This may come across as counter-intuitive to someone hearing it for the first time, because it is not obvious to us the degree to which we engage in prediction. For example, it might be countered that cognition is driven by curiosity rather than an appetite for enhanced predictive performance. Well, yes and no. Some people are curious by nature and others much less so. Those who possess the attribute of being curious will tend to see themselves as a person who asks questions and is open to learn. They will therefore predict their own behaviour along those lines. If they stop demonstrating curiosity they will not be satisfying this prediction about themselves, so they will face a choice: either start showing a bit more curiosity about the world or revise their view of themselves as a curious person, i.e. take action or change your inference to improve the accuracy of prediction.
Much more could be said here but, rather than looking to provide a more detailed exposition of the theory of active inference, I would like to focus here on the philosophical implications of some key aspects of the theory in relation to our perception of the world and our place in it. In particular, I want to consider how they inform our understanding of the way our worldview and our identity are shaped in our conscious awareness.
Worldview
Following adoption of the active inference paradigm, emphasis shifts from how things are in an objective sense to how they are perceived to be. So, what are the consequences of this for our understanding of our worldview and how it is shaped? If we put cognition at the centre of our analyses, we must restrict our interest to that which is known/experienced or believed to be known. On that basis the world of our experience should be characterised as existing not objectively but within the model of the world that we as observer are operating with. As such it potentially varies from person to person. Even if a belief about the world is shared among observers, it remains a belief, not a fact. Moreover, the idea that it is shared cannot be considered a “fact” either but is a belief we have that other people’s understanding aligns with ours.
We are led to conclude that our model of the world is composed of our views/beliefs about the world, in large part validated by our finding others in our peer group (or voices deemed authoritative) who appear to hold the same or similar views. In this way our subjective perceptions of the world beyond direct sensory experience are, pace Descartes, to a large degree mediated by consideration of the views and opinions of others. In other words, our subjectivity is constrained and limited objectively through the mechanism by which we construct our model of the world.
So, “worldview” should be construed not as an understanding of what the world of our perceptions is like, but rather as a characterisation of the lens provided by our internal model through which we are individually constrained to view and interpret the world of our experience. This lens predetermines what kind of sensory input is considered significant and in what way, interpreting it and incorporating it into our model (or not) accordingly. Not only that, but it also guides us to seek out sensory data which it deems significant and which validate our prior beliefs, rather than potentially conflicting evidence. As evinced by Barrett (2017):
Your brain is shaped by the realities of the world that you find yourself in, including the social world made by agreement among people. Your mind is a grand collaboration that you have no awareness of. Through construction, you perceive the world not in any objectively accurate sense but through the lens of your own needs, goals, and prior experience. (p.156)
Neuroscientist Karl Friston has pioneered a mathematical interpretation of the uncertainty minimisation implicit in the active inference paradigm in terms of what he terms the free energy principle. This theory is set out in detail by Parr et al. (2022). It is there argued that free energy, which is akin to entropy, is minimised in the process of optimising cognition and indeed other activities. This strategy is what allows living beings to survive and prosper. But for living beings such as humans with complex survival strategies, optimisation of cognition in the moment is only part of the strategy. Also important to consider is the expected reduction in free energy over extended time periods achieved by an individual pursuing alternative strategies or strategic choices in their life, possibly in collaboration with others. Living well according to this paradigm means choosing the strategies with the greatest expected free energy reduction, in other words the ones providing the predicted outcomes which are the best fit with what I perceive within my model to be optimal for my life.
There are many consequences of understanding worldview in this way, some of which I hope to go into in subsequent articles. However, what I would like to do next is to invert the lens and look through it in the other direction to see what the consequences of our reinterpretation of worldview can tell us about how we see and understand ourselves.
Identity
Turning our attention to how the concept of identity fits into our predictive mind schema, it might be thought that this can be equated in a Descartian manner with the observing self. But when we start to enquire what the content of that identity might be, we realise that this question can only be meaningfully addressed through the lens of cognition, as in our enquiry into worldview. As conscious selves, we have an awareness of sensory data from the world external to ourselves. But we are also aware of what is called interoceptive sensory input which apprises us of the internal state of our own body: whether we are cold, afraid or perplexed, etc. (We should also mention here proprioceptive data about the orientation of the body in relation to its environment, but the details of this are less important for our purposes here.) As we have seen, we also have awareness of the contents and structure of our internal model of the world and are able to use that to interpret and selectively seek out new cognitive input and to devise life strategies.
When we ask the question where the self is in all this, to the extent we are able to give a specific answer, it must be by locating our self within the internal model where our experiences, knowledge and understanding are marshalled. We understand ourselves as having certain thoughts and experiences and taking certain actions, all of which we roll up into a (hopefully) coherent narrative about who we are, where we have been and where we are going, all of which becomes part of our internal model.
There is a further step which is to locate our self in the world of other people who populate our model of the world. This seems an obvious thing and happens early on in our cognitive development as children. So, we don’t particularly distinguish the subjective self who is experiencing and engaging in cognition from the objective self which we model as another human being in our overall model of the world of our experience (worldview). Nonetheless, we shall respect that distinction and take the objective representation of ourselves as a person existing in the world as defining what we shall call our identity.
Although our identity, defined in this way, is potentially subsumed as a component part of our internal model, it is distinguished by the highly privileged role it plays within that model. Unlike the representation in our model of the external world and the other human beings who inhabit it, the details of which must be inferred from sensory data (including of a linguistic nature), we have direct (and private)access to the primary interoceptive data communicated to our brain from our body and are able (both consciously and subconsciously) to engage with our own internal model, including the narrative we have constructed of who we are, which narrative, as we have said, is embedded within our model. For more detail about interoceptive cognition, the reader is referred to Barrett (2017), in particular chapter 4 on The Origin of Feeling.
This distinction is what is often termed “lived experience”. Things that have happened to us in our life are primary data relating to our identity. Things that have been experienced by other people about which we have been informed we must seek to understand by inference, making use of our capacity for empathy. In this we imagine ourselves in their situation, constructing from our own experiences a synthetic representation of their experience. But we never can be quite certain of the accuracy of our inference of what the other is experiencing.
An interesting situation arises when people experience a particular event together. Then we are able to “compare notes” as it were with other people’s version of events. Hohwy (2014) has argued that this importantly can allow us to perform an additional level of validation of what we experienced and enhance our (joint) cognitive ability. The privileged access we have to our own conscious experience makes it independent of that of others, so rendering the cross-validation more reliable:
The key point is that there is a good chance that my report of my current conscious experience is independent of what others experience now, with respect specifically to the particular event in question. This is what is needed to reap the Bayesian benefits of interacting minds: that my estimate is independent of others’ estimates, conditional only on the state of affairs currently in question. (p. 253)
It should be mentioned here that much, indeed the greater part of, sensory cognitive data is processed unconsciously and does not as a result make its way explicitly into our internal model. In the case of our identity, it is therefore to be expected that there are unconscious aspects of this that we are not explicitly aware of. Since they are not therefore an explicit part of our internal model of ourselves, they are not included in what I define to be our “identity.”
But there remain further issues. While the idea of identity as I have defined it allows me to conceptualise my own identity with reference to my own internal model, it does not allow me to conceptualise other people’s identity (or vice versa), since I do not have access to their internal model. This leads us to make a distinction between our private identity and our public persona, which is that part of our identity which is manifest to other people through inter alia our words, behaviour and appearance. It is worth noting here that people typically do not have only one public persona, but multiple personae adapted to different contexts such as in the office, at home with family, or socialising with friends. The important feature of such public personae in the contexts in which we choose to project them is that they represent aspects of our private identity embedded within our internal model which we allow to be shared with others, enabling them to embed this concept of who we are in their internal model.
Consequently, there is a double ambiguity around public personae. First, as we have said, we may project different personae at different times in different contexts and to different groups. But secondly, there is no guarantee of any of our public personae being perceived and stored in the internal models of other people in the same way: what is stored as the perceived identity is a function not only of the personae we “project” to them from our private identity but also of their cognition. Thus, perceived identity must be seen as a form of negotiation where we may look to be perceived and interacted with in a certain way, but how we are actually perceived may be something different and may vary from group to group or even from person to person. Formal interactions may be controlled to a degree by decorum or the rules of polite society, but perception ultimately cannot, leaving perceived identity in an unavoidably ambiguous state.
Identity Politics
We were careful above to define what we mean by identity in a general sense based on an understanding of how human cognition works and results in the construction of personalised worldviews, and to avoid making appeal to any particular worldview in the process. However, it should be said that the idea of “identity” in the political realm has undoubtedly been weaponised in recent years to advance a range of partisan worldviews in what has come to be referred to as identity politics or more recently as culture wars. It is of interest to use our active inference model of human cognition as a lens through which to view the role identity plays in such culture war issues.
Although the idea of identity is these days weaponised by both the left and the right in culture wars, it is the (progressive) left who were undoubtedly the instigators of the politicisation of identity in their pursuit of “social justice” over at least three decades. This process has been documented and is referred to by Mounk (2023) as the identity synthesis:
The lure that attracts so many people to the identity synthesis is a desire to overcome persistent injustices and create a society of genuine equals. But the likely outcome of implementing this ideology is a society in which an unremitting emphasis on our differences pits rigid identity groups against each other in a zero-sum battle for resources and recognition—a society in which all of us are, whether we want to or not, forced to define ourselves by the groups into which we happen to be born. That’s what makes the identity synthesis a trap. (p. 15)
Notice how identity is portrayed as arising from membership of a group. There is some validity in this perspective insofar as shared cognitive perspectives (on anything) arise out of mutual validation occurring within a group. But such an understanding is seen in the light of our discussion of identity above to be too narrow. For one, identity is ultimately forged at an individual level: not everyone in the group will concur with any prescribed group identity.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels recognised such a problem amongst proletarian workers whom they deemed insufficiently imbued with a sense of the injustices of capitalism. The consequent failure to identify with the revolutionary anti-capitalist cause they termed false consciousness, and the same label is used these days for those who, for whatever reason, fail to conform sufficiently to a prescribed group identity.
Another important aspect of the way the concept of identity is used in identity politics is in the establishment of a victim hierarchy based on the idea that some groups are more privileged (and powerful) than others, resulting in members of the less privileged groups experiencing disadvantage, prejudice or even oppression. This idea is problematic when considered in the light of our understanding of how identity really works. The experience of being a victim is a lived experience derived from an individual having been mistreated. As such, it cannot be inherited vicariously through membership of a group for which victim status is claimed.
This is problematic in other ways too. If one wishes to assign victimhood to be part of the identity of members of a certain group, the question arises whether we are talking about private identity or public personae. If the former, we must recognise that, even if a person experiences disadvantage or prejudice, they may or may not choose to identify as a victim. In other words, at an individual level, a victim identity is not a necessary consequence of such experiences.
This is important for the consideration of victimhood as part of a public persona. Only a person who adopts a victim identity from their experiences will project that in their public persona. One cannot therefore associate victim identity with all members of a group. Also, a public persona is not a single thing, but typically one of many a person may adopt depending on context. Taken in the round, a person may have a weak or strong victim mentality. For example, a person may experience prejudice in respect of being a member of a minority religion. But they may at the same time be rich, famous and/or an important influencer in social or political affairs. Can they meaningfully assert victimhood in relation to others not in their identity group who enjoy none of these privileges in their lives? Unfortunately, such inconsistency is not infrequently observed in practice.
The other issue we identified around active inference was that the persona we choose to project in respect of one aspect of our identity may not be perceived in the same way or acknowledged at all by those with whom we interact. Indeed, such is to be expected between members of strongly heterogeneous groups, which is the context in which identity politics arise and culture wars are fought. This is most pronounced when military conflicts occur, since the members of the warring factions (and their sympathisers) tend to see themselves as the aggrieved party, and that perception forms a strong part of the identity which they seek to project but which is repudiated by members of the other faction.
In the highly contested area of trans identity, the main flashpoint is that some people have in their internal model come to identify trans women as women and others (probably the great majority in the UK) do not. Vilifying the latter group for acting based on the understanding they have reached through their lived experience may change their behaviour but is unlikely to quash their belief. An indication of this is the remarkable number of people who, before the ruling that the definition of a woman in the Equality Act (2010) did not include transgender women, took the opposite point of view in public and struggled to define what a woman was in their understanding, yet after the Supreme Court ruling reverted to the common-sense idea that a woman is a biologically female adult.
We are drawn to conclude that the incorporation into our internal model of the notion of a victim hierarchy as a tool for processing issues relating to identity is a choice which defines the lens through which we will see identity. To insist that everyone adopts such a lens is to invite resistance and to fuel conflict. To further vilify those who are unwilling to conform can only be expected to exacerbate the situation. Identity exists in the eye both of the beholder and of the beheld. There is no such thing as a “correct” or definitive view on the matter. Further, the notion of a victim hierarchy has to be recognised as problematic in itself, insofar as victimhood is necessarily interpreted for each individual through their subjective understanding of identities.
References
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Macmillan
Clark, A. (2016). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (1st ed.). Oxford University Press.
Clark, A. (2024). The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality. Penguin Books.
Hohwy, J. (2014). The Predictive Mind. Oxford University Press.
Mounk, Y. (2023). The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time. Penguin Books.
Parr, T., Pezzulo, G., & Friston, K. J. (2022). Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior (1st ed.). MIT Press.
