Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

Minimizing prediction error through action is called “active inference”—

The second defining feature is the feeling that I could have done otherwise.

Without conditional predictions of this kind, there would be no way for the brain to know which action, among countless possible actions, would be most likely to reduce sensory prediction errors.

But neither oil drops nor rocks actively maintain their boundaries,

“Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system.”

are geared toward finding out what’s there, and the relevant actions are those, like rotations, that are predicted to reveal more about the hidden causes of the sensory signals.

We are not cognitive computers, we are feeling machines.

The information conveyed by the sensor array as a whole is not more than that conveyed by all the sensors, all the photodiodes, independently.

What we might call the “soul” in this view is the perceptual expression of a deep continuity between mind and life.