Over the last fifteen years, an ambitious explanatory framework has been proposed to unify
explanations across biology and cognitive science. Active inference, whose most famous …

Can we explain how the various factors of knowledge, skill, habit, environmental constraints
and affordances interact or integrate in improvisational performance? In attempting to …

Does the assumption of a weak form of computational functionalism, according to which the
right form of neural computation is sufficient for consciousness, entail that a digital …

Might future developments in artificial intelligence (AI) lead to the creation of artificial
consciousness? Some believe that large language models and other AI systems will at best …

We propose a pluralist account of content for predictive processing systems. Our pluralism
combines Millikan's teleosemantics with existing structural resemblance accounts. The …

The environmental complexity hypothesis suggests that cognition evolves to allow animals
to negotiate a complex and changing environment. By contrast, signal detection theory …

The Free Energy Principle (FEP) and Integrated Information Theory (IIT) are two ambitious
theoretical approaches. The first aims to make a formal framework for describing self …

This Element provides a comprehensive introduction to contemporary theories of mental
content. After clarifying central concepts and identifying the questions that dominate the …

e use of evolutionary explanations to account for proximate phenomena has been labeled
by various authors as an explanatory error, the so-called phylogeny fallacy. In this paper …