Audius

The body is an epistemic system — constantly updating its model of the world through sensation, perception, action, and recursion. It is both highly situated and fundamentally inferential. Grief, in this framework, is not merely an emotion but a collapse of that model: the moment when prediction fails, when the world the body knew can no longer be assumed. What I call embodied epistemic inference draws on contemporary cognitive science, predictive processing, active inference, and affective neuroscience, where Bayesian updating provides the mechanism through which prediction errors are integrated. These fields redefine cognition as a dynamic inference process distributed across body, environment, and experience. Two adjacent traditions treat grief as model-collapse from opposite sides: bereavement theory — the assumptive world (Parkes), shattered assumptions (Janoff-Bulman), meaning reconstruction (Neimeyer) — locates rebuilding in cognitive, verbal meaning-making; the phenomenology of grief (Køster, Ratcliffe, Fuchs) foregrounds the embodied dimension. Closest to my framing, Araya (2023) models grief as the disconfirmation-and-updating of the narrative self-model, explicitly joining predictive processing to phenomenology — yet keeps narrative at the center, and remains a theoretical account. Embodied epistemic inference departs on two axes: it concerns a world-model rebuilt non-semantically, beneath narrative, with the body as the active inferential agent; and it does not theorize this process but enacts it — staging rebuilding as a reconfigurable artistic system. In my artistic practice — through "Cognitive Fictions" — sound, movement, invented language, sculptural structures, spatial composition, and text function as the enaction of the mechanisms of inference — modular systems that can be shifted, collapsed, reorganized, and transformed. Like a living environment, each element remains reconfigurable, allowing grief to become perceptible and navigable rather than fixed or resolved. The enactor is situated within the system itself, inhabiting its multiple layers and dimensions in resonance with principles of second order cybernetics. Cognitive Fictions here is distinct from its literary-critical usage (Tabbi, 2002), where the term describes novels that simulate cognition; in my practice the fictions are enacted, embodied world-models. The approach explores how humans learn, infer, and reorganize meaning in the aftermath of loss. It is also informed by Zhuangzi's cosmology of continuous transformation, in which grief isn't to be resolved but a direct encounter with the same process that moves all things between form and formlessness. Through an artistic lens, my work seeks the emergence of the space between systemic logic and lived, somatic experience. It is a practice of continuously re-writing world models through situated sonic inference, embodied belief updating, and spatial enactment — wandering through loss, rebuilding knowing from within the collapse. (First formulated May 10th 2025; Last updated: July 11th 2026) Published as: Embodied Epistemic Inference and Cognitive Fictions: Frameworks for Grief as Artistic Research (2026). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21533801