ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes a treatment of conscious experience based on a variational (free energy) principle for sentient systems and its corollary, active inference. Active inference is a theory that explains how sentient creatures are able to act adaptively and appropriately in their shared ecological niche—and how they change the niche to fit their expectations. In particular, we consider three recent bodies of work in the variational tradition and examine their implications for the study of conscious experience. We argue that these bodies of work provide the foundation for an active inference theory of conscious experience. This theory, hierarchical or deep neurophenomenology, extends the notion of (neural) hermeneutics to systems beyond the brain, crucially including the shared ecological niche. By emphasizing the importance of taking hierarchical spatial scales into consideration, deep hermeneutics is compatible with, but does not entail, the thesis of extended consciousness. Moreover, by focusing on multiple temporal scales, the theory provides the conceptual resources for understanding the puzzling features of time consciousness.
