Purpose: Constructivism postulates that the perceived reality is a complex construct formed during development. Depending on the particular school, these inner constructs take on different forms and structures and affect cognition in different ways. The purpose of this article is to address the questions of how and, even more importantly, why we form such inner constructs. Approach: This article proposes that brain development is controlled by an inherent anticipatory drive, which biases learning towards the formation of forward predictive structures and (...) inverse goal-oriented control structures. This drive, in combination with increasingly complex environmental interactions during cognitive development, enforces the structuring of our conscious self, which is embedded in a constructed inner reality. Essentially, the following questions are addressed: Which basic mechanisms lead us to the construction of inner realities? How are these emergent inner realities structured? How is the self represented within the inner realities? And consequently, which cognitive structures constitute the media for conscious thought and selfconsciousness? Findings: Due to the anticipatory drive, representations in the brain shape themselves predominantly purposefully or intentionally. Taking a developmental, evolutionary perspective, we show how the brain is forced to develop progressively complex and abstract representations of the self embedded in the constructed inner realities. These self representations can evoke different stages of self-consciousness. Implications: The anticipatory drive shapes brain structures and cognition during the development of progressively more complex, competent, and flexible goal-oriented bodyenvironment interactions. Self-consciousness develops because increasingly abstract, individualizing self representations are necessary to realize these progressively more challenging environmental interactions. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “A Computational Constructivist Model as an Anticipatory Learning Mechanism for Coupled Agent–Environment Systems” by Filipo Studzinski Perotto. Upshot: The schema system presented in the target article suffers from problems that had been acknowledged more than ten years ago. The main point is that our world is neither deterministic nor symbolic. Sensory as well as motor noise is ubiquitous in our environment. Symbols do not exist a priori but need to be grounded within our continuous (...) world. In conclusion, I suggest that research on schema-learning systems should tackle small but real-world, continuous, and noisy problem domains. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the target article “Who Conceives of Society?” by Ernst von Glasersfeld. First paragraph: Cognitive psychology, neurobiology, and cognitive systems research provide diverse clues as to how we are able to incrementally construct representations of the perceived environment and how we consequently understand other individuals and society. The construction of an individual’s reality starts with the capability to control one’s own body and to be able to predict the usual sensory effects caused by body movements. To be (...) able to infer the potential intentions of others, mirror neurons project one’s own behavioral codes onto perceived patterns that are caused by others. Equipped with representations of many other individuals, personal social realities are constructed. In this commentary, I focus on these points for the construction of social reality and the consequent existence of society as a whole. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Exploration of the Functional Properties of Interaction: Computer Models and Pointers for Theory” by Etienne B. Roesch, Matthew Spencer, Slawomir J. Nasuto, Thomas Tanay & J. Mark Bishop. Upshot: Although the authors investigate a form of distributed swarm intelligence and solve some problems with it – including sorting and summing – the major goal, which is constructing cognition, cannot be achieved by this approach alone. I propose that anticipatory mechanisms have the potential to construct (...) cognition and may very well be combined with swarm intelligence principles. (shrink)