Is interoception feed-forward or predictive?
The theoretical fault line introduced by Seth (2013). Everyone in this debate agrees emotion and selfhood are grounded in the body; they disagree on the direction of processing.
Seth’s argument
Interoception “has remained generally understood along feed-forward lines, similar to classical evidence-accumulation theories of exteroception.” Seth argues this is a mistake given cross-talk between levels of viscerosensory representation and top-down influences down to brainstem/spinal centres. Recasting interoception as predictive-coding yields interoceptive-inference and active-inference (autonomic reflexes as fulfilled predictions).
What’s actually contested
Seth is explicit that Damasio, Craig, and Critchley “emphasize a continuous, dynamic, but largely bottom-up interoceptive representational hierarchy… None identify emotional states with top-down inference of the causes of interoceptive signals.” So the disagreement is not about whether the body matters, but whether:
- feelings are read out from an ascending representation (Craig/Damasio), or
- feelings are generated by descending predictions, with ascending signals serving as prediction errors (Seth).
Craig’s actual position (now anchored in primary sources)
With Craig 2002 and Craig 2009 ingested, the “feed-forward” pole can be stated more precisely than Seth’s secondhand characterization. Craig’s architecture is an ascending integration/re-representation hierarchy: primary interoception (posterior insula) → mid-insula integration → AIC meta-representation, with a comparator/buffer at the apex (the global-emotional-moment). Crucially, Craig 2009 is not purely bottom-up: he states the AIC represents “predictions of future feelings” and frames anxiety/functional somatic disorders as “distorted interoceptive predictions.” So the genuine disagreement is narrower and sharper than “bottom-up vs top-down”:
- Craig: predictions/comparison happen at the top of an ascending hierarchy that reads out integrated afferent signals.
- Seth: prediction is the architecture itself — descending generative models predict interoceptive input, and ascending signals are prediction errors (predictive-coding).
Both invoke a “comparator” in the AIC; they differ on whether the interoceptive representation is generated top-down (Seth) or integrated bottom-up and then compared (Craig).
Connection to the classic theories
This is the modern recurrence of the James–Lange question. James’s “perception of bodily change IS the emotion” is ambiguous between a feed-forward read-out and a predictive-inference reading; Seth claims the predictive reading, and positions cognitive-appraisal (Schachter–Singer) as a special case of top-down prediction. Whether the reframing is a genuine empirical advance or a re-description awaiting decisive evidence keeps this open — Seth concedes there is “not yet any direct confirmatory evidence.”