Active inference offers a unified theory of perception, learning, and decision-making at computational and neural levels of description. In this article, we address the worry that active inference may be in tension with the belief–desire–intention model within folk psychology because it does not include terms for desires at the mathematical level of description. To resolve this concern, we first provide a brief review of the historical progression from predictive coding to active inference, enabling us to distinguish between active inference formulations (...) of motor control and active inference formulations of decision processes. We then show that, despite a superficial tension when viewed at the mathematical level of description, the active inference formalism contains terms that are readily identifiable as encoding both the objects of desire and the strength of desire at the psychological level of description. We demonstrate this with simple simulations of an active inference agent motivated to leave a dark room for different reasons. Despite their consistency, we further show how active inference may increase the granularity of folk-psychological descriptions by highlighting distinctions between drives to seek information versus reward—and how it may also offer more precise, quantitative folk-psychological predictions. Finally, we consider how the implicitly conative components of active inference may have partial analogues in other systems describable by the broader free energy principle to which it conforms. (shrink)

The mainstream science of consciousness offers a few predominate views of how the brain gives rise to awareness. Chief among these are the Higher-Order Thought Theory, Global Neuronal Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, and hybrids thereof. In parallel, rapid development in predictive processing approaches have begun to outline concrete mechanisms by which interoceptive inference shapes selfhood, affect, and exteroceptive perception. Here, we consider these new approaches in terms of what they might offer our empirical, phenomenological, and philosophical understanding of consciousness (...) and its neurobiological roots. (shrink)