The Free Energy Principle (FEP) and Active Inference provide a unifying variational framework for modelling perception, action, learning, and self-organisation across biological systems. While highly successful at explaining how systems maintain organisation under uncertainty, these frameworks remain explicitly neutral with respect to a foundational question: why there is experience at all....
The Free Energy Principle (FEP) and active inference unify perception, action, and learning within a single variational framework, yet they remain silent on why there is phenomenal experience at all. Awareness-First Theory (AFT) proposes an ontological inversion: rather than deriving consciousness from non-experiential dynamics, it takes awareness as ontologically primitive—taken as the base...
The experiments reported extend the findings of our earlier paper, (Mack, Erol, & Clarke, 2015) and allow us to reject Bachmann and Aru's critique of our conclusion (2015) that IM requires attention. They suggested our manipulations, which diverted attention from a letter reporting task in a dual task procedure where the task-cue occurred after the array disappeared, might only have affected...