Axel Constant

Axel Constant

Axel is a PhD student in the Philosophy of Biomedicine at the University of Sydney under the supervision of Paul Griffiths and Peter Godfrey-Smith. He is a graduate trainee at the Culture Mind and Brain Program of the University McGill and was a visiting fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Neuroimaging of the University College London. He received an MSc in Cognitive Science from the University of Amsterdam and an MA in Philosophy from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. His published work is at the intersection of Evolutionary Biology, the Philosophy of Cognitive science and Psychiatry, and Evolutionary Cultural Anthropology. His current work aims at extending methods employed in Computational Psychiatry to theories and models employed in Cultural Psychiatry. His focus is on the theory of looping effects of human kinds and on Ecosocial models of psychiatric disorders such as applied to depression and autism.



Publications

Forthcoming

2023

2022

2021

Constant, A., Clark, A., & Friston, K. (2021). Representation Wars: Enacting an Armistice Through Active Inference. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.598733

2020

Constant, A., Ramstead, M., & Friston, K. (2020). What kind of explanation is the constructing and coasting strategy?: Comment on: "The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure" by Jordan E. Theriault, Liane Young, and Lisa Feldman Barrett. Physics of Life Reviews. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2020.06.003
Ramstead, M., Hesp, C., Tschantz, A., Smith, R., Constant, A., & Friston, K. (2020). Neural and phenotypic representation under the free-energy principle. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.11.024
Constant, A., Clark, A., Kirchhoff, M., & Friston, K. (2020). Extended active inference: Constructing predictive cognition beyond skulls. Mind & Language. https://doi.org/DOI: 10.1111/mila.12330
Vasil, J., Badcock, P., Constant, A., Friston, K., & Ramstead, M. (2020). A World Unto Itself: Human Communication as Active Inference. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00417
Hipólito, I., Ramstead, M., Constant, A., & Friston, K. (2020). Cognition coming about: Self-organisation and free-energy: Commentary on Wright, J.J. and Bourke, P.D. (2020) "The growth of cognition: Free energy minimization and the embryogenesis of cortical computation." https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2020.08.001

2019

Hesp, C., Ramstead, M., Constant, A., Kirchhoff, M., & Friston, K. (2019). A Multi-scale View of the Emergent Complexity of Life: A Free-Energy Proposal. In Evolution, Development and Complexity (Springer).
Constant, A., Ramstead, M., Veissière, S., & Friston, K. (2019). Regimes of Expectations: An Active Inference Model of Social Conformity and Human Decision Making. Front. Psychol. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00679
Ramstead*, M., Constant*, A., Badcock, P., & Friston, K. (2019). Variational ecology and the physics of sentient systems. Physics of Life Reviews. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2018.12.002
Badcock, P., Constant, A., & Ramstead, M. (2019). Tinkering with cognitive gadgets: Cultural evolutionary psychology meets active inference. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Ramstead, M., Kirchhoff, M., Constant, A., & Friston, K. (2019). Multiscale integration: beyond internalism and externalism. Synthese. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02115-x
Veissière, S., Constant, A., Ramstead, M., Friston, K., & Kirmayer, L. (2019). Thinking Through Other Minds: A Variational Approach to Cognition and Culture. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X19001213