The Active Inference Approach to Ecological Perception: General Information Dynamics for Natural and Artificial Embodied Cognition
Frontiers in Robotics and AI March 8, 2018 A. Linson, A. Clark, S. Ramamoorthy et al. 94 citations
The active inference framework (AIF) offers a unified, naturalistic account of life, mind, and consciousness by grounding them in the principle of free energy minimization. It bridges computational neuroscience, robotics, ecological psychology, and phenomenology, treating particles, organisms, and artificial agents under a common information-theoretic foundation. The paper introduces AIF, then examines its implications for evolutionary theory, ecological psychology, embodied phenomenology, and robotics, concluding with considerations for machine consciousness.