Unity is intrinsic to being both an experiencing and an embodied subject. Computational accounts of consciousness, being observer-relative, cannot account for this unity. The thermodynamics of life can, but, contra Seth's suggestion, the free energy principle fails to capture the distinctive metabolic interdependencies by virtue of which a living system constitutes itself as a unified...
To some, purposiveness is the core of the enactive approach. Others, however, view the notion of purposes as a pre-scientific crutch – one that will eventually be replaced by mathematical analyses of the kind of dynamical systems that we are. Yet advances in cognitive neuroscience have not vanquished the problem of purpose, only driven it underground. Rather than explicitly confronting this...
The Predictive Processing (PP) framework casts the brain as a probabilistic prediction engine that continually generates predictions of the causal structure of the world in order to construct for itself, from the top down, incoming sensory signals. Conceiving of the brain in this way has yielded incredible explanatory power, offering what many believe to be our first glimpse at a unified theory...